What is Up With Carlos Martinez?
The St Louis Cardinals have this tendency to produce All-Star caliber players out of basically nowhere. Notably, Matt Carpenter came to St Louis as a former 5th-year senior, ranking as high as number 14 on the 2012 Cardinals prospect rankings as a 26-year-old. Number 4 on that list was a 20-year-old named Carlos Martinez who had the ceiling of a number 2 starter, but who might be destined for reliever duties. Fast forward to April, 2017 and Martinez is the Cardinals’ Opening Day starter with $50 Million in future guaranteed earnings. Those salaries guaranteed by the Cardinals thanks to a 3.02 ERA across 375 innings in the 2015 and 2016 seasons. Martinez sure looked to be exceeding that Number 2 ceiling that hung over him in 2012.
Well, possibly thanks to some ill-advised white hair extensions, Martinez has struggled through his first 5 starts of the 2017 season. The hair extensions will apparently be gone for tonight’s start, because baseball players are a rare breed. Note: I witnessed a shoulder (hair) shaving in college that was highly correlated to a hot streak. These types of hair adjustments have worked in the past, but in case that doesn’t work for Martinez, I am going to take a look at what might be ailing him baseball wise.
The first stop while donning my investigative pitcher hat is to check that the stuff is still intact. Sidenote: I should really get a hat for pieces like this. Martinez’s stuff is intact. He’s averaging roughly 95, just like last year. Any concerns about a hidden drop in velocity that comes from how we are measuring velocity this year is diminished by Martinez’ slight uptick in fastball movement. His change and curve are moving more as well.
However, Fangraphs appears to have changed the classification of his cutter to “slider.” It’s still the same 85 mph, but the movement on the pitch is different. Check out the below.
They’re roughly the same pitch. Maybe the 2017 pitch has a bit more vertical movement, but there’s so much noise there that it is hard to tell. The averages spell it out a bit more clearly:
- 2016: 5.3 xMov, -1.0 zMov, .313 xOBA (Balls in Play)
- 2017: 4.7 xMov, 1.8 zMov, .346 xOBA (Balls in Play)
That last number there is the expected value of the contact that he has given up on the pitch. 2017 has been worse in terms of expected value, but that is not where opposing teams have been doing their damage. These expected stats are great, but we have to be careful how deep into the analytics we go; it’s just baseball and we all know the hair probably was to blame.
Investigation must continue!
It’s his two seamer where people are doing the most damage; they’re hitting his two seam fastball at a 236 wRC+. That’s 136% better than average. They didn’t do that last year, but batters also crushed his two seam in 2015 (168 wRC+). So, what gives? Theory: the cutter keeps batters off of the two seam. In 2015, his cutter pitch did only have a downward movement of -0.2. He enhanced that and got batters out more efficiently with his two seam. This year, the two seam is the same but the cutter pitch now moves more similarly to that two seam.
The solution is basically to get more depth on his slider/cutter.
Also, he needs to get ahead more:
Time to get this thing posted and see how he does tonight.
-Sean Morash
