Sarris: Which pitchers are showing better things this spring – and should we care?

Spring training numbers don’t matter, goes the conventional wisdom. These players are not Real trying, and usually teams don’t line up consistently with top class talent.

However, that cannot be entirely correct.

First, major league teams make decisions based on spring training — there are literally position battles going on at almost every club. Usually it’s for one of the last spots on the roster, but that means teams are actually looking at some numbers to make decisions.

Then there is real evidence that these numbers matter, that spring numbers are (somewhat!) predictive of regular season performance. After all, they are games for a month. There’s probably a signal there, as Dan Rosenheck of The Economist once discovered. Others have found that process metrics that stabilize quickly have a signal in them – things like strikeout rate and groundball rate can tell us something quickly about the season-to-season changes a player may undergo.

One way to try to squeeze as much signal out of the noise as possible is to focus on such process metrics. We have one here for pitchers: Stuff+ only looks at the physical properties of a pitch and stabilizes very quickly. For example, for four-seam fastballs, we get more signal than noise after throwing only 18 fastballs.

There are still extenuating circumstances. Starting pitchers who throw three innings are not the same as starting pitchers who throw six innings, that’s right.

But we do know that the translation from reliever to starting pitcher is in the order of five points from Stuff+. So if we just focus on starting pitchers who have thrown quite a few pitches for the machines this spring and increased their Stuff+ by more than five points, we should be able to find real change under the hood. Let’s create a leaderboard of the best climbers and highlight a few that stand out.

Number one is nice, but maybe there are a few pitchers lined up ahead of him for that rotation in Tampa. Still, given Taj Bradley’s long-term value, it’s great to see his Stuff+ lined up with minor league scouting reports. Connor Gray has made some progress, but looks like a New York low, especially if we have to deduct a few points from Stuff+ once he gets to 80 pitches per appearance. We could say the same about Matthew Liberatore, who will probably be needed in St. Louis. But once we subtract the reliever penalty, he falls below the 97 Stuff+ average to begin with.

Ryan Feltner may have better things to do once he’s up to speed, but the reality remains that he needs to get back in at least for now. (In related news, we’re considering Stuff+ to adjust the height.) Opening Day starter Mitch Keller got some love here a while ago, as did Kyle Bradish here. It looks good for those choices.

Here are the other starters that caught my attention the most. Feel free to go through the Spring Stuff+ numbers (and per-pitch numbers) along with the WBC numbers in the Google Doc here.

Rasmussen is already a Stuff+ darling and has even moved past where he was last year. Much of it has been spent refining its two sliders. Well, okay, one of them is a knife to the blade, but it’s really what’s called a “gyro” slider, a power slider with little movement.

“There’s only one slider on the PitchCom,” Rasmussen told me last week. “So we call it a cutter. It’s my old slider and we took some depth out of it so I can throw it harder.

It also doesn’t look like a cutter.

What this power slider does is give Rasmussen another roll that he can throw to get a called hit, just like he did here. A whopping 65 percent of the cutters he’s thrown this spring have been strikes, either by error, swing or call. Where the Sweeper has bigger platoon splits and can be harder to drive at times, this pitch is all power and command. A bit like a cutter?

Stuff+ is important, but efficiency is also important for a starter on the Rays, who averaged just over 80 throws per start last year.

“If you know you’ve got a pretty hard shell, you better throw it over the plate,” he laughed.

Rasmussen peaked in August and early September with about 90 pitches early on, and if he really keeps this three-breaking-ball approach, he may still be valuable in all formats despite his lack of depth in games. He still won 11 games last season and managed to make 18 decisions despite his lack of height.

“I don’t know why he doesn’t have better results,” an analyst once told me about Pivetta. “Our numbers love him.”

Well, this one too. And it used to be about his four-seam fastball – his other throws last year rated about average or worse by Stuff + – this spring his breaking balls both look good by this stat.

For its curve, it’s all about velo. He’s throwing it four mph harder this spring, and even if that drops a few check marks, that will be much harder than his 77 mph curveball last year. That extra zipper took some movement (about four or four inches of drop), but Stuff+ likes the change.

On the slider side, he just added drop to the field. Drop three inches. It now looks like this:

He didn’t control the field surprisingly well—six of 14 strikeouts pitched, with a single allowed—and that’s been part of the problem in the past. But maybe this is easier to control than his curveball. Less exercise is generally easier to recommend, at least.

The Red Sox need Pivetta, and his stuff looks set to take a step forward this spring. Could he finally post a sub-four ERA and lower the home run percentage by improving this side of the ledger? His venues remain below average, and they may not get any better, so this is the best way for him.

We already loved Luis Ortiz for his Stuff+, and now he’s pushing it to new heights. He already has the great fastball and the power curve slider, but this spring even his changeup is rated above average by Stuff+. And his slider has gone from good (119 Stuff+ last year) to elite (142 Stuff+ this spring) by adding another inch and a half of drop from his fastball (since his fastball also added a little carry). We’ll have to take a look.

88 mph and off the table. Annoying.

But can he push someone out of rotation? He threw 45 pitches last time with the Pirates and held serve with other long-stretched starters. But now he’s with the WBC, where he’s thrown another 23 pitches and has the third-highest Stuff+ in the tournament, but that won’t help his size. Roansy Contreras’ stuff is a bit off, but he needs to get a legit shot if there’s no injury. Rich Hill is still throwing curveballs here. Vince Velasquez has three at bats and should get the first shot in fifth starting spot. Johan Oviedo’s overall average and location pack continued as he threw 41 pitches in his last timeout.

There’s one or two people between Ortiz and a rotation spot in Pittsburgh. Stay vigilant.

Beau Briske, Tigers

Owner of the second highest speed jump in spring training to date, Beau Briske also has the fewest throws per appearance in this sample. So maybe take his jump in fastball Stuff+ — from 96 Stuff+ last year to 121 this spring — with a grain of salt. Maybe he’ll drop more than five points if the Tigers push his pitches per appearance.

Or maybe even as we searched for starting pitchers here, we found a sleeper in the Tigers’ pen. In his last appearance, Brieske threw 10 fastballs and had a Stuff+ of over 140 on it. It’s interspersed with getting better with the changeup and slider, but overall both look like real weapons too.

The Tigers need someone to get behind Alex Lange in the bullpen, and they might have their Beau.

It’s not the fastball this spring with Baumann (last year his fastball was his best throw from Stuff+). Only the sparsely thrown change was above average by Stuff+, and that came in such a small sample (on such an awkward pitch) that it’s probably more instructive to say that only three percent of the time it was thrown the change was a touch got. So, in a way, Baumann was a one-pitch guy on a team that was starting to get busy in the rotation.

Well, the Orioles acquired two more starters in the off-season and Grayson Rodriguez looks ready, but Baumann’s arsenal has taken a leap forward, with both his slider (118 Stuff+) and curve (112 Stuff+) ratings also now above average.

The slider also has two inches more drop and two inches more horizontal movement. It passes the eye test, with a brisk 90 mph speed and movement in two planes:

A slightly firmer turn (+1 mph) can get back to where he was, but a little more drive on the fastball and more movement on the slider have made Baumann a legitimate three-pitch pitcher. And all of these numbers have held up even as Baumann has pushed his pitches per appearance above 50.

Where does it ultimately fit? FanGraphs doesn’t even have him in the club’s top 10 starters OR relievers right now, so he has some making up to do. But Tyler Wells has lost some gear this spring, and if the team decides they want to watch Baumann as they send Rodriguez down, it wouldn’t be an impossible outcome. Or Baumann is what Keegan Akin was last year, a multi-inning bridge in the middle. However, it looks like he’s improved his stuff and should get some sort of role.

(Top photo from Pivetta: Winslow Townson/Getty Images)