The Houston Astros promoted Lance McCullers Jr to make his big league debut on Monday. Normally, a move to promote a 21-year old who wasn’t ranked among the top 100 prospects in baseball, or even the top 10 prospects in the Astros system before the the season, would not be enough to stir me from my nearly month-long blogging hiatus. Normally, I would write off the decision to promote a 21-year old coming off a year with a 5.47 ERA across 97 AA-ball innings as another example of the Astros over-aggressive approach to handling young pitchers. That same approach has effectively ruined Jared Cosart and the Blue Jays fell victim to the curse of promise with Miguel Castro earlier this year. But, this Lance McCullers is special to Off The Bench in much the same way that Joe Panik holds a place among our favorites.
McCullers struck me out in the final inning of a varsity high school game. I was a senior and we were down a few runs to the top team in the country, Tampa Jesuit, when the third baseman came in to pitch. McCullers, then a few inches shorter and not all too imposing, took the mound and threw easy cheese. I didn’t have a radar gun, but I know that McCullers was throwing harder than anyone we had faced that year. After the game, we somehow found out that McCullers was just a freshman and I somehow found comfort in the fact that his dad, also Lance, had played in the Majors in the late 80s/early 90s.
Fast forward three years and the Astros make McCullers the 41st pick in the draft. Fast forward another two years and he’s ranked among the top 50 of mlb.com’s annual top 100 prospects list. Then a poor 2014 shot him in the foot and led many casual fans to think he would never amount to much, but the Majors are littered with successful pitchers who struggled a bit before a promotion to the bigs. Julio Teheran notched a 5.08 ERA as a 21 year old at AAA. All of this is to say that it was a surprise that the Astros were so aggressive and confident in McCullers that they chose to start him yesterday.
McCullers’ final line yesterday (4.2 IP, 1 ER, 3 hits, 3 BBs, 5 Ks) was nothing especially outstanding, but once McCullers settled and the nerves eased back, his natural stuff began to show. His fastball and curveball combination was impressive and the changeup that has reportedly flashed as plus so far this year, again flashed as plus. With McCullers, his stuff has never been the issue. He’s walked 4.5 men per 9 innings in his minor league career (More than Ubaldo Jiminez has in the Majors, but less than Nolan Ryan). Once he learns to trust his 95 mph fastball over the plate rather than off the edge of the corners, he will be a good major leaguer. Things get very exciting if McCullers can can pair that trust with a good changeup, or another third offering.
With only 93 pitches worth of data and inspired by Jeff Sullivan’s look at Marcus Stroman’s pitch comps, I decided to have some fun and look at the pitching comps for Lance McCullers. Jeff’s look was likely a bit more scientific than mine, but I did look at the Pitch f/x data and attempt to find pitcher comps that kept popping up.
Fastball
| Velo | H-Movement | V-Movement | |
| Lance McCullers | 93.9 | -2.3 | 7.9 |
| Michael Pineda | 94.2 | -4.7 | 6.9 |
| Shelby Miller | 93.9 | -4.3 | 8.5 |
| Chad Billingsly | 91.4 | -2.4 | 7.8 |
| Jesse Chavez | 92.3 | -3.6 | 8.7 |
The first two names on this list are a lot more compelling than the last two. Michael Pineda and Shelby Miller have each seen their share of success and failure accompanied by their ability to offer a quality third pitch. Each has increased the use of his cutter this year and each has found more success than in year’s past. The next two, 2015 Chad Billingsly and Jesse Chavez aren’t the type of big name flamethrowers that really get one excited. However, Billingsly found plenty of success in his younger days in 2008/2010 when he had a fastball that was slower and moved less than McCullers’ current offering.
Curveball
Among pitchers who have started games this year, McCullers’ curveball ranks as the third hardest (behind some chumps named Matt Harvey and Yordano Ventura), and moves sideways the 17th largest distance (tied with some chumps named Adam Wainwright and Stephen Strasburg).
| Velo | H-Movement | V-Movement | |
| Lance McCullers | 83 | 8.1 | -5.3 |
| Yordano Ventura | 82.8 | 2.5 | -5.8 |
| Sonny Gray | 81.4 | 10.1 | -4.1 |
| Masahiro Tanaka | 74.1 | 7.5 | -4.8 |
| Asher Wojciechowski | 82 | 8.6 | -1.8 |
| Corey Kluber | 82.9 | 10.1 | -1.3 |
I’m thoroughly surprised at how this turned out even after the analysis. I know McCullers curve/slider thing looked good last night, but this is impressive. Kluber and Gray are two of the best right handed curveballs in the game right now and it appears that McCullers’ has slightly more downward tilt. Pitch f/x is tricky in how it categorizes breaking pitches with a slider often be miscast as a curveball or vice versa. But with just the data we have (20 curveballs in a Major League debut), McCullers appears to have the breaking pitch to match anyone’s offering.
Cutter/Change
In watching the game last night, I didn’t notice a big difference between McCullers’ primary fastball and his cutter, but Pitch f/x had him throw 17 of them in his debut. And the data seems to back me up a bit. The different between the horizontal movement on his cutter and his four-seam isn’t really there to amount to two distinct pitches. Maybe McCullers falls off of his fastball sometimes. Watching him pitch with his long-armed delivery and lower-than-average arm slot make me think that McCullers could struggle with a consistent hand angle on his release.
But more likely, it’s a changeup. McCullers struck out Coco Crisp at the end of this video with what appears to be an 89-mph changeup. Pitch f/x had him at just 2 changeups on the game, but I’m thinking that the pitch f/x cutter could be his changeup-in-progress. He also sprinkled in a “Pitch f/x two-seamer” that could have been that hard changeup miscast again. These “two seamers” moved a good amount in game, and appeared to be thrown with a true changeup grip.
McCullers (and the scouts) call that third pitch a changeup, but all agree that it needs more work. If it’s good enough to be a true swing-and-miss pitch as it was to Coco Crisp, then Lance could be heading for a spot atop the Astros rotation. Even if that third pitch never truly develops behind his fastball and curveball, he should be a promising and entertaining pitcher for years to come either in the rotation or at the back of the bullpen.
-Sean Morash
