Hisashi Iwakuma's Logic-Defying Fastball

Who would have thought that arguably the leading candidate for the 2013 AL Cy Young Award would be a Seattle Mariner not named Felix Hernandez? As good as King Felix has been, rotation mate Hisashi Iwakuma has been even better. In his second season stateside, Iwakuma ranks second among qualified major league starters in ERA+ (204) and strikeout-to-walk ratio (6.21).

The 32-year-old righty has emerged as an ace in part due to dramatic improvement with his fastball. Hitters are slugging just .362 against the pitch this season, compared to .595 in 2012. Iwakuma's success with his fastball flies in the face of baseball logic -- he's throwing it slower and putting it over the plate more often, yet he's getting swings and misses like a flame-thrower

Iwakuma didn't throw hard during his rookie season, with an average fastball velocity (90.3 MPH) that was one tick below the MLB average for right-handed starters (91.3 MPH). This year, he's lost some of his already modest zip, averaging 89.5 MPH on the radar gun. At the same time, Iwakuma has increased his percentage of fastballs thrown within the strike zone from about 58% to 62%. No starter outside of knuckleballer R.A. Dickey has pumped more fastballs over the plate this season.

As you might imagine, slow fastballs get fewer swings and misses (11.8% for sub-90 MPH gas) than higher-velocity heaters (15.6% for 90+ MPH fastballs). And fastballs thrown over the plate get dramatically fewer whiffs (12.1%) than out-of-zone fastballs (22.1%). Iwakuma was already a soft-tosser who filled up the strike zone in 2012, and those tendencies only became more pronounced in 2013. Therefore, his fastball miss rate should drop, right? Wrong.

Iwakuma's fastball contact rate, 2012

Iwakuma's fastball contact rate, 2013

In 2012, Iwakuma got swings and misses with his fastball 14.5% of the time. This year, while throwing more soft strikes, he's getting whiffs at a 22.5% clip. To put that into context, Yu Darvish (27% fastball miss rate), Shelby Miller (25.5%) and Matt Harvey (24.2%) are the only starters to miss lumber at a higher rate. Darvish (92.9 MPH average fastball velocity) Miller (93.4 MPH) and Harvey (95 MPH) all bring the heat. One of these things is not like the other. Iwakuma's fastball remains a mystery, to hitters and analysts alike.

Decline, Illustrated. Featuring: Dan Haren

Once upon a time, Dan Haren was what, in baseball, could only be referred to as a horse: 33-34 starts, 200+ innings, and each one, valuable. He flew a tick under the radar pitching for no-name teams in Oakland and Arizona, but when a pitcher is good, people will notice. 

Dan Haren is also the kind of pitcher that you could call, "unlucky." In his 11 years as a major league starter, he's never won more than 16 games. He's also had six seasons where he lost 10 or more games, with career highs of 13 in 2006 and 2012. And considering his 4-8 record this year, chances are that he will set a new career high (low?) by the end of the 2013 season.

But pitchers' won-loss records are silly. They are hardly the proper barometer for evaluating a pitcher's current performance. Nor is it right to use pitching wins and losses as a predictive tool for future performance.

So then, what should you use for predicting future performace.

You can use xFIP, which might be the best predictive pitching stat available on the interwebs.

xFIP stands for Expected Fielding Independent Pitching. It's a stat that holds pitchers accountable for the things that they can control (walks, hit batsmen, strikeouts and home runs). It assumes league average fielding and league average HR/FB rates. It is one of the best stats available for predicting a pitcher's future performance. For a more detailed definition of xFIP, go here.

Dan Haren's current xFIP for 2013 is 4.09. Which is far less unsightly than the atrocious 5.70 ERA he is currently carrying around on his back. But a 4.09 xFIP would be a career high for Haren.

But stats like xFIP are still foreign to a majority of the baseball loving population.

So how about this?

How hard is Dan Haren being hit this year compared to, oh, let's use 2011 and 2008?

In 2008, Haren was an All-Star who finshed the season with an ERA of 3.33 and an xFIP of 3.16. He also had a WAR of 6.1. In other words, Dan Haren was fantastic in 2008.

In 2011, Haren had the second lowest WHIP of his career at 1.024, an ERA of 3.17 and an xFIP of 3.29. He also set a career high for single season WAR with 6.2. In other words, Dan Haren was also fantastic in 2011.

But let's illustrate this better with pictures, shall we.

Dan Haren 2008 SLG% Against.

 Dan Haren 2011 SLG% Against

Dan Haren 2013 SLG% Against

Look at how much redder this season's map is.

The slowing of Haren's fastball 

• In 2008, Haren's fastball topped out at 96.3 MPH, and averaged out at 91.1.
• In 2013, Haren's fastball has topped out at 92.3 while generally sitting at 89.2. 

Those two to three MPH of difference can be huge, especially when a pitcher is not locating his pitches as well as he did five years prior. 

Some pitchers, as they've aged, have learned to adjust to their diminishing velocity.

Last year, I thought that Haren was entering into the decline phase of his career, but held out hope that he would fade slowly in the same way that Kevin Milwood faded.

This year, I know that Dan Haren is declining. But it doesn't look like the Milwood comp is going to hold water. It looks like Haren's career is going the way of another comp of his according to Baseball-Reference, Doug Drabek. Both of whom (Drabek and Haren) were dependable and outstanding pitchers through their age-30 seasons. They also both fell of a steep cliff afterwards.

Drabek held on until he was 35. As for the 32-year old Haren, with the way that teams are starting to pinch every penny that they can, I fear he won't make it past next season.  

Peter Gammons: Time for a Break

When Troy Tulowitski went down with a broken rib Thursday night, there had been 285 players on the disabled list this season who had combined to miss more than 10,000 days. “One of the biggest factors in the game today is the injury rate,” Billy Beane has uttered for two years, now. “The healthiest and deepest teams win.”

In Beane’s case, he saw this coming a couple of years ago, and combined with the exhaustion factor—schedule, weather, getaway night games, the enforcement of no amphetamine rules—saw that pennant races can be decided by young, talented, deep teams. Long term deals for players in their thirties may become increasingly scarce; injuries and the banning of HGH, which many of the anti-doping leaders claimed postponed the normal eyesight aging that begins in ones’ mid-thirties, are considered, and not just by a team like the Angels that in 2016 will have $95M tied up in five players well into their thirties.

But what we also have is an extraordinary number of oblique, rib cage, abdominal and other strains that were unheard of 25 years ago. In the last week, a half-dozen general managers have said that they are studying whether players today don’t work out too much. “Is it necessary to do the weight room work they do during the season, especially when they’re getting to hotels at 6 am on travel days?” asks one of those GMs. “Then look at their off-seasons. A lot of players never give their bodies time to recover, and they’re back in full training a week or two after they’re done with their seasons. They’re hitting and throwing in December, or early January. Does the body actually recover?”

This was not true in the past. In 1986, Ted Williams and Wade Boggs were riding in the backseat of my rental car from Winter Haven to Clearwater, Fla. to meet Don Mattingly and have a long dinner spent talking hitting. Going across the Courtney Campbell Causeway, Williams asked Boggs about his off-season routine. Boggs said he took two weeks off, then started hitting and training.

“I never picked up a bat in the off-season,” Williams said. “Looking back, I wish I had. Maybe I could have hit a helluva lot better.”

I almost drove into Tampa Bay, I was laughing so hard.

Giancarlo Stanton has been searching for reasons he has had assorted injuries, and it had been suggested that perhaps his body cannot take his 250 pounds when his body fat is 4%. There are several other cases like that.”

Giancarlo Stanton

“It starts with the kids,” says one scout. “The teenage kids today play year round. They have fall schedules. They all go to showcases all over the country, year-round.” In fact, this weekend, just after high school seasons and tournaments finished and the draft is a week old, there is the first huge showcase in Minneapolis for kids all across the country. We all love hearing about a kid from Gainesville, Georgia named Michael Gettys who has such a strong arm that a radar gun got him at 100 MPH throwing from the outfield. We love hearing that there is a host of “big” arms. A few years ago Dr. James Andrews talked about the incredible escalation in the summer of surgeries he performs on teenage baseball players. “It’s almost as if we like drafting a kid who just had Tommy John Surgery,” says one scouting director. “Because most of these kids play and throw so much under so much scrutiny that we know sooner or later, they’ll blow out. So better to get them pre-blowout that post-blowout.”

Oblique pulls are now part of everyday conversations. Double-A prospects miss time with torn abdominal muscles. “I know we’re having a complete review of our developmental and major league workout programs,” says one general manager. “It’s a constant conversation piece in our business. I think a lot of decision-makers look at games played per season before they look at Wins Above Replacement.”