Playing To Strengths
And Countering Weaknesses
Matt Waldron was superb Tuesday pitching seven shutout innings with eight strikeouts and no walks. And he passed the eye test keeping Marlins hitters off balance all night. All eight of his strikeouts came by way of the knuckle ball:
The outing marked his fourth straight start of five or more innings while allowing two or fewer earned runs. He’s been remarkably effective over that stretch not just for a fifth starter, but by any measure:
Waldron has been a different pitcher since his worst start of the season against the Diamondbacks on May 5th. His stellar results don’t seem to be just variance. He’s made deliberate changes with his knuckle ball:
Since the disastrous May 5th start Waldron has increased his Knuckle Ball usage significantly, lodging the highest rate of the season Tuesday at 55.3%. And while the spin rate hasn’t changed much, the velocity has been up all four starts since he and Ruben Niebla dissected what went wrong in Arizona. Waldron talked about changing his delivery to keep his front shoulder closed, and later fixing his release point to get his hand directly behind the ball. He increased the number of pitches he threw in the pre-game bullpen session to get a better feel for the knuckle ball before the game. He’s also essentially abandoned his cutter since the start of the season:
His knuckle ball has been a well above average pitch since he came into the league. He’s finally on a stretch of producing well above average results after a nadir which inspired multiple deliberate changes in approach. Waldron has pitched like an ace his past four starts including games against the Dodgers and the Braves. As we wrote about Monday when discussing Jeremiah Estrada, it’s wise to use caution interpreting results from a small sample size, but when the results are extreme and have a plausible physiologic explanation the odds that there is some real signal here increase. There’s a possibility that Waldron is getting more comfortable with a well above average pitch, and using it more frequently, and it would follow from there that better results could be sustainable.
The Padres immediate goal remains surviving the regular season, and an above average fifth starter, while not as significant of an asset in the playoffs, is massive during the regular season. This is really something to watch.
Gamesmanship
Waldron’s knuckle ball kept every Marlins hitter off balance all night Tuesday. Every hitter except Josh Bell that is, who was three for three and seemed to be timing up Waldron well in his at bats. Which is why it was so funny to watch how Wandy Peralta approach Bell in the eighth inning:
It’s easy to miss. Peralta’s first three offerings came from a normal wind up, but on his fourth offering he quick pitched Bell who was tied in knots. Here’s the third and fourth pitch synced up, watch Wandy’s shorter leg kick on the right:
Here’s the slow mo:
Who knows whether facing a knuckle baller for seven innings had any sticky effect on the Marlins’ hitters’ timing later in the game, but that does seems like right time to try out this type of gamesmanship.
MLB Record
We wrote Monday about why, although the sample size is small, it appears Jeremiah Estrada’s success is sustainable. Padres fans have been dialed in on Estrada’s rise all season, on Tuesday Estrada announced himself to the rest of the world. He took a streak of 10 straight strikeouts into the game, one off of the MLB record of 11 straight, and proceeded to do this:
He struck out the side in ninth to set a new major league record with 13 straight strikeouts. We saw something new from Estrada as well. In a dazzling pitch sequence against Jake Burger, Estrada’s fastball hit 100.2 MPH on the outer half of the plate. Burger just got a piece of it. The next pitch was the one and only slider he threw all night:
In the slow mo of the slider you can see that for the first half of the flight path it looks headed to the same part of the zone as the four seamer one pitch earlier, before diving a few inches down and out of the zone:
Burger has to respect the possibility of another four seamer coming in at 100.2 MPH and is compelled to swing early in the flight path to catch up, and hence ends up waving harmlessly way out in front of a pitch that ended up a foot off the plate. Masterclass.
It shouldn’t go unnoticed that when Estrada started warming up for the ninth the score was 3-0, a save situation. The Padres tacked on a run in the bottom of the eighth removing the save situation, but Estrada was essentially the team’s closer on a night Robert Suarez was given rest. The ability to have an elite arm available late in the game virtually every game could be huge across the remainder of the season.
Last Word On Lefties
The Padres have won back to back games against lefty starters and face another Wednesday in Braxton Garrett. We wrote about part of the explanation for the Padres struggles against lefties this year: they’ve faced a lot of very good left handers so far. This is probably the explanation for why several right handed hitters haven’t seen the usual positive OPS platoon split against lefties. But there’s more to it. A team with multiple struggling right handed hitters would be expected to perform particularly poorly against left handed pitchers because the lefty on lefty penalty would be applied to the left handed hitters in the lineup and right handers that are struggling globally would not be able to make up the difference even if they enjoy a slight boost to production from the platoon split. And most of the right handed hitters in the lineup are struggling globally. None are performing at their 2023 levels:
The story here seems to be less that the Padres right handed bats have negative splits vs left handed pitching, than that the overall low level in production means that even if they had their typical boost of ~50 points of OPS versus lefties the overall production would still be underwhelming.
You can probably sum up the Padres struggles against left handed pitchers with these bullet points:
The quality of left handers they’ve faced has been extremely high which has meant dramatically bad platoon splits for Padres left handed hitters and surprisingly negative splits for several right handed hitters
The right handed hitters have had such a low baseline performance that they cannot make up for the loss in production from the lefty on lefty penalties in the lineup, even presuming a normal OPS platoon boost
Two things would likely course correct the Padres struggles against lefties:
If the quality of left handed opposing pitchers normalizes and,
The performance of the right handed hitters in the lineup regresses towards career means
The first point is likely to occur. The second point is the big question.
Win Conditions
The Padres seem to be finding themselves on the defensive side of the ball. They’re piling up weapons to keep opposing hitters at bay. The struggles on offense really seem to revolve around the group of right handed bats that were expected to carry the team, and opposing left handed pitchers are exposing that weakness. At the start of the season the team’s win condition appeared to be run prevention that allowed for a good enough offense to eke out more wins than losses. Although the season has felt really tumultuous, that win condition seems to be essentially where the team is at. To raise the ceiling on the season outlook the right handed bats are going to have to come alive. Bogaerts is already out most of the season. There’s a lot of leverage on Tatis and Machado finding their stride.
nice article as always!