Rick Porcello: What's Wrong?

[Joshv02]

(1) He doesn't say he came to the realization on his own, he says he came to the realization.  He does not tell us the process of realization.
(2) You should want people to think they came up with solutions on their own, because that way they own them.  That is kind of management school 101.  You want to lead, but you want people to own the decisions that you are asking them to make.  
 
We tend to try to read into snippets of information the story that we already think we know.

 

[DJnVa]

He definitely needs to get back to what got him there. Porcello's career GB/FB ratio is over 1.00, this year it's .80. That's actually lower the the MLB average.

 

[iayork]

(1) He doesn't say he came to the realization on his own, he says he came to the realization.  He does not tell us the process of realization.
(2) You should want people to think they came up with solutions on their own, because that way they own them.  That is kind of management school 101.  You want to lead, but you want people to own the decisions that you are asking them to make.  
 
We tend to try to read into snippets of information the story that we already think we know.

 
 
It's not even true that his number of two-seams was particularly unusual this game; there are a half-dozen games earlier this year where he threw a similar percentage. 
 
This game he had better location.  As far as I can see, that was the biggest difference.
 
People are obsessing about his two-seam usage, probably because it's a simple narrative.  But it's not a real thing.

 

[wade boggs chicken dinner]

It's not even true that his number of two-seams was particularly unusual this game; there are a half-dozen games earlier this year where he threw a similar percentage. 
 
This game he had better location.  As far as I can see, that was the biggest difference.
 
People are obsessing about his two-seam usage, probably because it's a simple narrative.  But it's not a real thing.

According to Fangraphs, he had more V-Movement on his 2-seamer than he has had all year. I didn't go back to past years to see if more V-Movement correlates to good outings, but it would seem to help getting groundballs, which are his forte.

Maybe the narrative isn't true, but it certainly is possible that throwing fewer 4-seamers could give him better location and movement on his 2-seamers.

 

[iayork]

Maybe the narrative isn't true, but it certainly is possible that throwing fewer 4-seamers could give him better location and movement on his 2-seamers.

 
Yeah, but he didn't throw fewer four-seamers.  
 
Edit: Here's the pitch breakdown from Brooks (PITCHf/x raw data are very bad for Porcello -- even though his four-seam and two-seam are reasonably distinct pitches, PITCHf/x consistently mis-classifies a significant number of his pitches.  Usually it calls obvious 2-seams 4-seams, but it goes the other way as well.  Brooks' reclassifies pitches and I believe fixes the errors in the raw data.)
 

It's easy to see that while Porcello's most recent game had a slightly higher than average percent of 2-seams, it was not at all an outlier.  And his use of the 2-seam hasn't particularly correlated with success.  He threw >50% sinkers on June 20, and gave up 6 runs in 5 innings; 30% on May 16 and gave up 2 runs in 6 2/3.  
 
It took me less than ten minutes, during my morning coffee, to look up the data on Brooks, work out the percentages, and make some simple charts.  If I'd just wanted to look up the numbers it wold have taken about a minute and a half.  Can we please stop with the "Porcello is too stubborn and stupid to throw his sinker" narrative?

 

[iayork]

According to Fangraphs, he had more V-Movement on his 2-seamer than he has had all year. 

 
This seems quite possible, though I'd rely on Brooks rather than FanGraphs for this.  
 
Because PITCHf/x mis-classifies so many of Porcello's pitches, if you don't manually re-classify the pitches before calculating break or whatever, you'll end up including a fair number of 2-seams in with 4-seams and vice-versa.  I am pretty sure FanGraphs doesn't correct classification errors, so what they show is the break on a subset of 2-seams, with a couple of 4-seams thrown in, and the biggest influence on the average movement will be the number of misclassified pitches included in the mix.
 
That said, Brooks also shows his last game to have good vertical movement.  Just a quick eyeball of the numbers doesn't show a really obvious correlation between his vertical movement and success, but it certainly seems like it can't hurt.
 
I still think the most obvious difference between Porcello's most recent game and his less effective ones was location -- he placed all of his pitch types much better, with far fewer misses down the heart of the zone.

 

[jscola85]

 
This seems quite possible, though I'd rely on Brooks rather than FanGraphs for this.  
 
Because PITCHf/x mis-classifies so many of Porcello's pitches, if you don't manually re-classify the pitches before calculating break or whatever, you'll end up including a fair number of 2-seams in with 4-seams and vice-versa.  I am pretty sure FanGraphs doesn't correct classification errors, so what they show is the break on a subset of 2-seams, with a couple of 4-seams thrown in, and the biggest influence on the average movement will be the number of misclassified pitches included in the mix.
 
That said, Brooks also shows his last game to have good vertical movement.  Just a quick eyeball of the numbers doesn't show a really obvious correlation between his vertical movement and success, but it certainly seems like it can't hurt.
 
I still think the most obvious difference between Porcello's most recent game and his less effective ones was location -- he placed all of his pitch types much better, with far fewer misses down the heart of the zone.

 
Pretty funny how that can dramatically improve results - avoid grooving fastballs down the plate.  It's simple to say but as we've seen with all of Porcello, Kelly, Miley and even EdRod, whether you throw 88-90 like Miley or 96-98 like Kelly, fastballs down the pipe more often than not get deposited a far distance from the catcher's mitt.

 

[wade boggs chicken dinner]

Yeah, but he didn't throw fewer four-seamers.  
 
Edit: Here's the pitch breakdown from Brooks (PITCHf/x raw data are very bad for Porcello -- even though his four-seam and two-seam are reasonably distinct pitches, PITCHf/x consistently mis-classifies a significant number of his pitches.  Usually it calls obvious 2-seams 4-seams, but it goes the other way as well.  Brooks' reclassifies pitches and I believe fixes the errors in the raw data.)

It's easy to see that while Porcello's most recent game had a slightly higher than average percent of 2-seams, it was not at all an outlier.  And his use of the 2-seam hasn't particularly correlated with success.  He threw >50% sinkers on June 20, and gave up 6 runs in 5 innings; 30% on May 16 and gave up 2 runs in 6 2/3.  
 
It took me less than ten minutes, during my morning coffee, to look up the data on Brooks, work out the percentages, and make some simple charts.  If I'd just wanted to look up the numbers it wold have taken about a minute and a half.  Can we please stop with the "Porcello is too stubborn and stupid to throw his sinker" narrative?

I understand your frustration after looking at the numbers, but this particular narrative isn't something we the posters are creating ourselves - it's a direct quote from Porcello himself. Whether or not he threw fewer sinkers, he think he is doing something differently. Even Swihart said that Porcello had probably the most trust Ive seen him have (with his sinker)" (whatever that means).

So maybe the issue is the numeric count of the four-seamer but that he was only using his four-seamer to set up his two-seamer. But any rate, Porcello thinks he did something different - and whether or not the numbers can verify it, it seems to me that it's worth discussing.

 

[iayork]

That said, Brooks also shows his last game to have good vertical movement.  Just a quick eyeball of the numbers doesn't show a really obvious correlation between his vertical movement and success, but it certainly seems like it can't hurt.

 
Thinking about this later, I realized it is exactly backward.
 
Because sinkers are fastballs, and are thrown with backspin, their vertical motion is a rise, relative to the path they'd take with no spin (i.e. relative to pure gravity).  The four-seam fastball is thrown with more or less pure backspin, and mostly "rises"; its vertical movement is a relatively large positive number.  A curve, thrown with no backspin or ideally with front spin, actually drops relative to gravity; its "vertical movement" is a negative number.
 
The sinker is a fastball, but thrown so that the spin axis is less purely backspin, but it still has considerable backspin.  Sinkers therefore rise relative to gravity, and have a positive vertical movement, but they rise less than a four-seam.  The "sinking" action is a double illusion -- because hitters expect a fastball, and compensate for the rise that they're used to, they swing over the sinker.
 
So for a two-seam fastball, you're not looking for a large vertical movement component, you're either looking for a small vertical movement, or (more likely to be effective, I guess) you're looking for a reasonable amount of separation between the rise of a four-seam and the rise of the two-seam.
 
So the fact that Porcello's two-seam had lots of vertical movement the other day actually means it had less sink than normal, and it actually had much less separation from his four-seam that day too (in terms of vertical movement, anyway).  
 
So we're back to the fact that he was very effective even though he didn't throw an extraordinary number of two-seams, and his two-seam was less sinker-like than almost any other game this year.  
 
Again, I think his location was the key.

 

[Savin Hillbilly]

 
Thinking about this later, I realized it is exactly backward.

 
Yeah, the way vertical movement is calibrated and expressed is a bit counterintuitive. It might be good to see those numbers expressed not relative to a "pure", spinless trajectory, but relative to a batter's presumed baseline expectation--i.e., set the zero point at league-average V-mov for a 4-seam fastball. That way, a sinker, a slider and a curve would all have V-mov in the same direction, just differing in degree, which is how I suspect most of us think of it. (As long as I'm dreaming, I'd like to reverse the sign and make positive V-mov downward movement. ....if I were King of the Forehhhhhhhst......)

 

[Darnell's Son]

Porcello's last start got the iayork treatment:

 
 
But on August 26, Porcello pitched like the ace the Sox had hoped they signed: seven innings, five hits, no walks, no runs and five strikeouts. Of course, he has pitched good games in a Sox uniform before, and followed them up with disasters, so it is far too soon to say he has turned any corners without some objective evidence in the pitch data. Is there any such evidence?

 

[Drek717]

Going by iayork's pitches per start graph it seems to me like Porcello's problem pitch isn't the four seam fastball, it's the cutter.  Starts with the fewest cutters are (generally) the best and starts with the most cutters are (also generally) the worst.

 

[InsideTheParker]

On MLBN's Quick Pitch today, Costas and Kaat were raving about Porcello's performance last night, Kaat showing the spin-rate on P's two-seam fastball. It's on all morning, and for all I know may be available on line.

 

[iayork]

On MLBN's Quick Pitch today, Costas and Kaat were raving about Porcello's performance last night, Kaat showing the spin-rate on P's two-seam fastball. It's on all morning, and for all I know may be available on line.

I haven't seen that, but I'm not sure they know what they're talking about. Spin rate is not a major factor for a sinker (spin angle would be more important). As I noted above, the higher the spin rate on a sinker, the less it sinks (i.e. the less it's differentiated from the 4-seam fastball). And what I saw with his previous start (haven't looked at last night's yet) there actually was less differentiation between his 4-seam and sinker than usual.

 

[Ribeye]

 
Thinking about this later, I realized it is exactly backward.
 
Because sinkers are fastballs, and are thrown with backspin, their vertical motion is a rise, relative to the path they'd take with no spin (i.e. relative to pure gravity).  The four-seam fastball is thrown with more or less pure backspin, and mostly "rises"; its vertical movement is a relatively large positive number.  A curve, thrown with no backspin or ideally with front spin, actually drops relative to gravity; its "vertical movement" is a negative number.
 
The sinker is a fastball, but thrown so that the spin axis is less purely backspin, but it still has considerable backspin.  Sinkers therefore rise relative to gravity, and have a positive vertical movement, but they rise less than a four-seam.  The "sinking" action is a double illusion -- because hitters expect a fastball, and compensate for the rise that they're used to, they swing over the sinker.
 
So for a two-seam fastball, you're not looking for a large vertical movement component, you're either looking for a small vertical movement, or (more likely to be effective, I guess) you're looking for a reasonable amount of separation between the rise of a four-seam and the rise of the two-seam.
 
So the fact that Porcello's two-seam had lots of vertical movement the other day actually means it had less sink than normal, and it actually had much less separation from his four-seam that day too (in terms of vertical movement, anyway).  
 
So we're back to the fact that he was very effective even though he didn't throw an extraordinary number of two-seams, and his two-seam was less sinker-like than almost any other game this year.  
 
Again, I think his location was the key.

Iayork, are you sure about your take on sinkerball spin/mechanics?  i remember watching slow-motion footage of Derek Lowe pitching, and hearing analysis that the sinkers have topspin that results in late sinking action (along with a little bit of sidespin, which accounts for lateral movement in towards RH batters) that is produced by pronating the forearm at release (the motion the arm would make when reaching forward for a freestyle swim stroke).  i've never played baseball, so i might be talking outta my ass...but it made sense to me from a Bernoulli principal point of view.

 

[iayork]

Iayork, are you sure about your take on sinkerball spin/mechanics?  i remember watching slow-motion footage of Derek Lowe pitching, and hearing analysis that the sinkers have topspin that results in late sinking action (along with a little bit of sidespin, which accounts for lateral movement in towards RH batters) that is produced by pronating the forearm at release (the motion the arm would make when reaching forward for a freestyle swim stroke).  i've never played baseball, so i might be talking outta my ass...but it made sense to me from a Bernoulli principal point of view.

Yes.  It's not physically possible for a human to throw a fast ball with topspin (unless they throw underhand).  
 
Mike Richmond has a primer on the two-seam fastball here: Pitches and Stuff: Two-Seam Fastball that talks about spin angle on the sinker.  He shows the backspin on a sinker. I made an animation in that article showing Lester's four-seam vs. sinker, showing that both of them actually rise (relative to the path they'd take under the influence of gravity alone) but that the four-seam rises more:
 

Spoiler

 
 
For Porcello specifically, I show the spin angles on his pitches here: Red Sox Starter Rick Porcello Can Still Be Dominant:
 

Spoiler

You can see there's little difference in the spin direction (but there is a difference and it's consistent), and that both two-and four-seamers have backspin.
 
Derek Lowe didn't throw underhand, so he couldn't put topspin on a sinker.  This link will hopefully take you to Brooksbaseball's card on Lowe showing vertical movement vs spin direction for his four-seam and his sinker: Both have backspin, with the four-seam having more than the sinker; both rise, with the four-seam rising much more than the sinker. 

 

[Ribeye]

dude, those graphs are pretty bad ass.  thanks!