On Momentum (Part III)

There's No Such Thing as a Pitching Prospect, But Here are Two of Them

Mass times velocity times spin rate

Clarke Schmidt

Profile: 6-1, 200lb, Age 28

Contract: one-year, $2.03 million (arbitration year one), free agent in 2028.

Best Season: 2022, 57.2 IP, 3.12 ERA (127 ERA+), 56 SO, 0.9 WAR

2024 Zips Projection: 130.2 IP, 4.41 ERA, 129 SO, 1.8 WAR

Modern baseball lingo is lousy with acronyms.  There are the obvious ones I use above, ERA (earned run average), IP (innings pitched), and WAR (wins above replacement).  But delve any deeper into any team message board and you’ll also immediately need to learn what it means for your team get “royally BABIP¹’ed,” why it’s a problem that the guys can’t seem to perform with RISP², the significance of the discrepancy between your shortstop’s OAA and DRS³, and just how freaked out you should be by your best hitter’s recent, precipitous drop in XwOBAcon⁴.  And whenever your team is negotiating a deadline trade involving young minor-leaguers, you’ll hear about TINSTAAPP: “There’s no such thing as a pitching prospect.” 

         It’s not true, of course.  Every MLB pitcher was once a pitching prospect.  But twenty years into the Moneyball revolution, teams have sophisticated forecasting models developed by the brightest MIT grads, which factor in terabytes of data about each player’s spin rate, arm angle, diet, and zodiac sign, and they still can’t predict which 22-year-old flamethrowers will develop into studs and which ones will suck.  And especially for the Yankees, most fall into the latter category.  Since 2016, seven pitchers in the Yankee farm system have ranked in MLB.com’s annual Top 100 prospects list.  They are James Kaprielian (#58 in 2017,  career 318.0 IP, 4.61 ERA, 2.2 WAR, currently a minor league free agent), Justus Sheffield (#48 in 2018, career 186.0 IP, 5.47 ERA, -0.9 WAR, DFA⁵’d by Mariners last year, currently a free agent), Albert Abreu, (#74 in 2018, Career 135 IP, 4.52 ERA, -.1 WAR, currently playing in Japan), Chance Adams (#75 in 2018, Career 41.2 IP, 8.42 ERA, -1.1 WAR, currently playing for the epically named Albuquerque Isotopes, the AAA affiliate of the Rockies), Deivi Garcia (#91 in 2021, Career 61 IP, 5.31 ERA, -1 WAR, currently getting absolutely lit up on the Chicago White Sox AAA-affiliate), Jonathan Loaisiga (turned into an elite reliever for us, sadly will miss the rest of the season with a UCL tear), and Clarke Schmidt.  

The point is, if Schmidt plays up to his Zips projection as a backend starter, who can pitch every five games at slightly-above-replacement level, eat some innings, and keep the offense within striking distance, all while under team control for the next three seasons, his development will be, by recent Yankees standards, an outrageous success.

There are reasons to dream even bigger.  Schmidt spent the first half of last year dominating right-handed hitters and getting clobbered by lefties.  There are sufficiently few lefties on most teams that a MLB pitcher can get away with splits like this in short bursts from the bullpen, which is how the Yankees mostly used Schmidt before 2023.  A starter needs to be able to get lefties out sometimes, and for his first 10 starts Schmidt could not, leading to a 6.10 ERA and a bunch of ugly losses.  But then, Schmidt made some sort of adjustment (a new curveball?  Sharper pitch mix?  A mood ring?) and had much more success against lefties, and a 4.10 ERA, in his last 22 starts.  Can Schmidt build on this success, take the next step, and become actually good this year?  For a top-100 ranked Yankees home-grown pitching prospect, this is asking way too much.  Let’s just be grateful that he’s still pitching at a big-league level, under team control, with intact elbow ligaments, and not yet on the Albuquerque Isotopes. 

Luis Gil

Profile: 6-2, 185lbs, Age 25

Contract: 1 year, $750,000 (Pre Arbitration), free agent in 2029.

Best Season: N/A, he’s technically still a rookie.

2024 Zips Projection: 92.1 IP, 4.29 ERA, 115 SO, 1.1 WAR

On the other hand, sometimes Major League-ready young pitchers emerge out of thin air.  Michael King ranked 25th in the Yankees farm system in 2020.  In 2022, he was completely unhittable, and was for three months the most valuable reliever in baseball, accumulating 1.9 WAR, before gruesomely injuring his elbow in July.  In 2017, 24-year-old Domingo German began the season in Double-A, and didn’t even make MLB.com’s top 30 in the team’s system.  In 2018, he pitched six innings without surrendering a hit in his first career start.  As discussed in the first installment of this series, the Yankees DFA’d Nestor Cortes twice before his emergence in July of 2021 and his All-Star run in 2022.

Luis Gil never cracked the MLB.com top 100 prospects either, but the Yankees called him up anyway in August of 2021, after a COVID outbreak sidelined starters Jordan Montgomery and Gerrit Cole.  In his MLB debut, Gil shut out the Orioles for six innings.  Five days later, he went five innings against the Mariners, scoreless again.  And then nine days later, he pitched four-and-two-thirds innings against the Red Sox in Fenway Park, an explosive offensive team in the league’s most hitter-friendly ballpark, and again did not allow a run to score.  No one had ever started this hot.  “Luis Gil is the first pitcher in the Modern Era (since 1900) with 18+ K and 0 runs allowed in his first 3 career MLB games,” tweeted statistician Katie Sharp, pointing out that this was also by far the best three-game debut for a rookie pitcher in franchise history, by every metric.  

Gil eventually gave up runs, and then lost the fifth starter roster spot to Nestor in 2022 Spring Training due to some issues controlling the fastball.  This makes sense; Gil has a crazy fastball, which spins at a rate of 2,415 rotations per minute, the 14th highest in the league.  This gives it velocity, but also “rising action,” or the property of a pitch to fall down to earth slower than expected.  To the hitter, it looks like the pitch is actually accelerating upwards, or rising, even though this is actually impossible.  But when the fastballs are traveling at more than 95 mph, an illusion of rise is all you need to get swings and misses, or at least weak, glancing contact that usually leads to an out.  Most pitchers who throw four-seam fastballs with such high spin rates cannot throw them with consistent accuracy, and the ones that can usually do so from the bullpen, because they can’t do it for long.  A starter who can throw this hard, with this much spin, has the potential to be completely unhittable.

Of course, more spin rate and velocity also brings the potential to ravage all the ligaments in your throwing elbow, something that an alarming number of elite pitchers seem to be learning this season.  Gil learned this in the May of 2022, when he suffered an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery to repair, which sidelined him for the rest of 2022 and all of 2023.  Tommy John is something of a rite of passage for MLB pitchers these days, some pitchers have gotten it twice, and young pitchers are often (erroneously) urged to get it out of the way early in their development.  But between ten and twenty percent of pitchers never regain full-strength after Tommy John surgery, and there’s no guarantee they will be good even if they do.  For every Jacob deGrom and Justin Verlander success story, there are also cases like Chris Sale and Luis Severino, former Cy Young-caliber aces who have mostly pitched terribly since their post-surgery return.  This places Gil in the same situation as virtually every other Yankee starter I’ve profiled: with elite, nearly unlimited upside potential, but also decent likelihood to be completely unusable, and off the team by May.

III.

Baseball momentum feels amazing.  When you have a dominant pitcher in your rotation, once every five games, you get to look at the day’s matchup and exhale, secure in the feeling that you’ve essentially already won.  When you have a full rotation of dominant pitchers, that feeling extends indefinitely into the future.  “Will we ever lose again?” you might say to another fan, carefully adding a giggle to imply (falsely) that you have some awareness of how ridiculous you sound.  But you have no such awareness, because it’s not ridiculous at all.  This team has momentum.  They keep winning.  What could stop them?

The Yankees had momentum in the 2009 playoffs, when manager Joe Girardi boldly decided to shrink the rotation to just CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett, and Andy Pettitte.  Each one pitched every three games, often six or seven innings deep, all on only three days rest.  And they all delivered, eating up valuable innings, keeping the offense within striking distance, and then handing the ball over to closer Mariano Rivera.  Together, they shut down the Twins, Angels, and Phillies offenses, and won the World Series for the first and only time in my conscious life.⁶

The Yankees had momentum in the first half of 2022.  Led by Nestor’s absurd bout of nastiness, the five-man rotation of Nestor, Gerrit Cole, Luis Severino, Jordan Montgomery, and Jameson Taillon all pitched to the top of their capabilities at the same time, and the Yankees went on two different runs of fifteen-wins-in-sixteen-games in the span of three months, the team’s hottest first half of a season in franchise history.  They lost momentum only when Severino got hurt, Montgomery got traded, and Nestor’s nastiness began to fall back to earth.  

And God help me, but the Yankees have momentum right now.  We’re 10-3, Juan Soto is the best hitter of all time, and so far, all five of the starters I’ve profiled are pitching well.  Gil seems the most electric, averaging 14 strikeouts per nine innings.  But Rodon and Stroman both have ERA’s below 3, Clarke has gotten himself into some dicey situations but has so far gotten the outs he needs in big moments, and Nestor just pitched an eight-inning shutout.  It’s very early, and all five of these pitchers know how quickly elite pitching results can vanish.  Pitchers can get injured, they can get grumpy, they can get triggered online, or they can simply regress back to their fundamental ability.  But they can also get hot, and sometimes it helps to be playing with other hot pitchers.  Sometimes, all you need to get hot is a little momentum.

1.  BABIP is Batting Average on Balls in Play.  Hitters have a little bit of control over this depending on how hard they hit the ball, whether they can beat the shift, etc but it’s generally seen a measure of luck and random variance.  Getting BABIP’d means making contact consistently and getting unlucky with where the ball ends up.  Imagine a bunch of hard line-drives hit directly at the third baseman, sure to be doubles if they had been hit a few feet to the left or right.

2. Runners In Scoring Position (on second or third).  This is a measure of how “clutch” you are, whether you get hits in the high leverage situations.  Whether you see this is as luck or skill depends on how religious you are feeling that day.

3. Outs Above Average and Defensive Runs Saved, two advanced defensive metrics that often diverge significantly and inexplicably.

4.  “con” means “on pitches where the batter made contact,” “wOBA” is Weighted On Base Percentage, which is how often you get on base, weighted for how many runs the way you reach base is expected to create (ie a single is slightly more valuable than a walk, a double is not twice as valuable as a single, etc).  And the prefix “x” means expected, based on the trajectory and exit velocity of your hits, regardless of how they end up.  So xwOBAcon is expected weighted on base percentage on contact.  Lindsay Adler prefers plant-based xwOBAcon.

5. Another acronym: Designated for Assignment.  It’s a euphemism for getting cut from the Major League roster.

6. They won in 1999 and 2000, then lost in the World Series in 2001 and 2003. I was born in 1999 and sadly remember none of this.