Over the last week, baseball fans were treated to two matchups of some of the best young pitchers in baseball--Michael Wacha of the Cardinals and Tony Cingrani of the Reds. While I find Wacha fascinating, I'm even more engrossed by Cingrani because he seems to be succeeding where even the great Mariano Rivera failed. Last year, Tony Cingrani threw his fastball 81.5% of the time, more than any starter not named Bartolo Colon (85.5%). And yet he was a force for the Reds, posting a 10.32 K/9 in a little over 100 innings. Tony Cingrani is throwing one pitch over and over again, and not just getting away with it, but thriving.
My other favorite game of this season so far was the Rangers-Rays game on April 6th. Yu Darvish made his triumphant return from the DL and faced off against Alex Cobb, who pitched poorly in his first outing. It turned out to be a classic pitcher's duel--both worked seven innings and struck out 6. Darvish flashed all of his pitches, which got me thinking: Darvish and Cingrani are opposite extremes of a starting pitching spectrum. Starters are supposed to have minimum 2, typically 3 or 4, good pitches. Darvish has 7. Cingrani has 1. They were both top-flight pitchers last year, and this year has also started well. So how do they get similar results with such different approaches and tools?
Cingrani's fastball is more certainly his best weapon--11 runs above average according to BIS--but he also throws a slider, curveball, and changeup. In 2013, he threw about 7% sliders, 8% changeups, and 4% curves, but only the slider had a positive value. In fact, where his fastball had an above-average SwStk% of 11.7%, his slider's 15.5% is only league average. His curveball was below-average at 8.5%, and his changeup was pounded, netting only an abysmal 4% (against league average of 15%. It seems that someone in the Reds organization was looking at this data, as so far in this young season Cingrani has thrown 5% more sliders. The change in pitch selection can be seen in the chart below:
What makes major-league hitters miss a fastball that comes in at a pedestrian 91 mph? The answer is this movement chart (data from 2014)--his fastball has about 8-12 inches of vertical movement and 5-10 inches of horizontal. Combine that with a delivery that scouting reports universally call "deceptive," and you have a recipe for swings and misses.
With Yu Darvish, the story is entirely different. The chart below (data from 2013) shows the movements of his different pitches.
Darvish has a curveball, slider, cutter, split-finger fastball, and three different clusters of fastballs. BIS and Pitch f/x had trouble enough classifying Tony Cingrani's pitches--with the sheer number of Darvish offerings, all that can be said for sure is that all of his pitches apart from his fastball generate above-average whiff rates.
Darvish has a first-strike percentage right around the league average of 59%. But once he gets ahead in the count, he has an abundance of weapons to choose from. To get outs, Darvish goes with one of three choices as shown in the chart below (data from 2014): a high-inside fastball, a cutter that starts inside and darts out over the plate, or a slider low and away (note that most of his strikeouts are sliders low and away).
According to most measures, Darvish and Cingrani are complete opposites. The only way in which they resemble each other is strikeouts. Darvish had the most K's in baseball last year, and Cingrani's K-rate was his equal. Whenever either of these two electrifying pitchers takes the mound, get ready to see lots of batters making the long walk back to the dugout.
NOTE: All statistics accurate as of 04/12/14
By Sam Whitefield
AriBall.com
