What’s obtained 4 thumbs and is ready up for an actual doozy of a pitchers’ duel in Arlington this night? That’s proper, Nathan Eovaldi and Spencer Strider. These two are second and third in baseball in pitcher WAR, and have many issues in frequent moreover: They’re each right-handed starters with massive fastball velocity who’re pitching properly now after struggling to remain wholesome at instances… Okay, that’s about all they’ve in frequent.
It’s a bit early within the season for any particular person sport to be a must-watch, significantly an interleague matchup between two groups with mainly no historical past other than the Mark Teixeira commerce. But when you’ve obtained time to kill and no sturdy desire about which sport to scroll all the way down to on MLB.TV, that is set to be one of the best pitching matchup of the evening, and top-of-the-line of all the season thus far.
Strider has change into probably the most internet-popular pitchers on the market for 3 causes. First and most necessary, he’s good. Second, Strider has the vibe of a cool nerd from the early 2010s. He and a pal, impressed by their frustration with Pitchfork’s album grades, preserve an in depth Google Sheet the place they rank indie rock data. Baseball Twitter is stuffed with lapsed emo youngsters with an excessive amount of liberal arts schooling for their very own good (together with me), and these of us love nothing a lot as a ballplayer who gives the look of getting learn a e-book as soon as.
The younger Braves righty is like Ken Griffey Jr. to that crowd. He wears a mustache, an uncommon jersey quantity, and pants so tight you possibly can see the muscle definition in his quads. The latter grew to become newsworthy in his final begin in Toronto, when an incredulous Buck Martinez broke a number of seconds of silence by yelping, “I mean, look at the thighs on this kid! He’s got huge thighs, it’s like Eric Heiden, the speed skater.”
Love an Eric Heiden reference. But there’s a lesson; one other American hero of the Lake Placid Olympics as soon as mentioned, “the legs feed the wolf.” That’s as true for pitchers as it’s for individuals who make their residing on ice skates; nice energy pitchers from Nolan Ryan to Roger Clemens will testify at size to that impact. Which brings up the third compelling high quality about Strider: He’s good in such a approach that it’s simple to grasp.
Strider has three pitches. Well, two and a half. Strider’s four-seamer has the fifth-highest common velocity amongst certified starters, one spot beneath Shohei Ohtani and three spots above Gerrit Cole. PitchingBot additionally credit him with having the fifth-best fastball command amongst certified starters. And in response to Baseball Savant, Strider’s fastball has the seventh-most rise vs. common amongst 375 pitchers on the leaderboard.
The most necessary pitch within the sport is a well-located fastball, and Strider can throw as laborious as any starter on the market (apparent Hunter Greene-related caveats however), with motion, wherever he likes. That units up his slider, which is available in, on common, 12 mph slower than his fastball with 27 extra inches of vertical drop. That fastball-breaking ball combo is likely one of the only methods to pitch, and displays an strategy that’s been round since Candy Cummings. (I wrote about it within the context of David Bednar two weeks in the past, and Jordan Romano final September.) Strider’s slider has a 55.5% whiff fee, which is eleventh out of the 1,389 distinct pitch sorts on Baseball Savant’s leaderboard.
But his most fascinating pitch is his changeup, which might be tied for first in whiff fee if he threw it sufficient to qualify. He barely makes use of it; he’s thrown simply 37 this 12 months, with none coming to right-handed batters. Righties have solely seen the changeup 9 instances in Strider’s total massive league profession.
But this little dribbler, which Jeff McNeil hit into the bottom at 74.9 mph, is the closest anybody’s come to getting successful off Strider’s changeup this 12 months:
The solely extra-base hit off Strider’s changeup, ever, was a dying quail off Francisco Lindor’s bat that might’ve been a single had Ronald Acuña Jr. not taken a foul angle to the ball and Roger Dorn’d it right into a triple:
Whether Strider is a finesse pitcher is dependent upon the way you consider the phrase. No, he’s not a latter-day Zack Greinke, who will get by on guile and tips. He’s an all-gas, no-brakes fastball-slider man. But it takes quite a lot of refinement to command the ball the way in which Strider does, which is why he’s an early contender for the NL Cy Young and never the seventh-inning reliever for a fourth-place group.
Eovaldi’s obtained a distinct secret. Where Strider mainly throws two pitches to most batters, Eovaldi has 5, 4 of which he throws between 10% and 40% of the time. Strider has two totally different motion profiles; Eovaldi has one thing that strikes mainly in each course you possibly can consider:
The three-fastball strategy doesn’t result in as many swings and misses as Strider’s wipeout repertoire. Eovaldi’s whiff fee, one of the best of his profession, is 12 share factors decrease than Strider’s. Strider will get way more swings and misses than Eovaldi will get whiffs and known as strikes put collectively.
But what that strategy does is maintain hitters from squaring the ball up. Out of the 241 pitchers with at the very least 50 balls in play this 12 months, Eovaldi has the 18th-lowest xwOBA. (Strider is ninth.) Eovaldi has the Tenth-highest groundball fee amongst certified starters, and the third-lowest HR/FB ratio.
It hasn’t at all times labored. Eovaldi gave up at the very least two runs in every of his first 5 begins, and the BABIP gods had been unkind to him; after a loss to the Reds on April 24, Eovaldi had a seasonal BABIP of .413, and an ERA (5.20) two and a half instances as excessive as his FIP (2.19).
Since then, he hasn’t allowed a run. More than that, he hasn’t allowed a run whereas pitching so deep into video games you’d suppose it was 1980 once more. Eovaldi has thrown 25 2/3 out of a attainable 27 innings in his previous three begins. That contains one in all simply seven full sport shutouts throughout all the league this season. His three consecutive begins of eight or extra innings and 0 runs allowed are probably the most since Clayton Kershaw’s MVP marketing campaign of 2014. Nobody else within the 2020s has even had back-to-back scoreless appearances of eight innings or extra.
Will that maintain in opposition to one of many National League’s most harmful lineups? Or can Eovaldi and Strider commerce zeroes all evening lengthy? Tune on this night to seek out out.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com