Twins Kenta Maeda Trade Still Good, Despite Brusdar Graterol’s Dominance
When top-tier professional athletes begin to play for a different team, no matter how good they were before, they have to do learn to do a couple of things differently. When Alex Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees, he had to change positions and abide by the classic Yankee gentleman rules. When Jason Bay signed with the Mets, he had no choice other than to completely forget how to play baseball in exchange for 4 years and 66 million dollars. And when Kenta Maeda was traded to the Twins from the Dodgers, one would assume that Maeda would pitch differently for a different team.
Well, that’s not true. Nobody knows exactly what sparked Maeda to change his pitching approach, but we know his approach changed this season. But before I discuss the new ways Maeda has chosen to attack batters, I must clarify a few things before going any further.
The first is that the Dodgers traded away Maeda for a young pitching prospect that the Boston Red Sox rejected for medical reasons. That pitcher, Brusdar Graterol, has been a weapon for the Dodgers bullpen and is a big reason why the Dodgers are favorites to win the World Series. The Twins have Maeda now and as we will see, he’s been great for them. But one has to wonder if Graterol will reach a level of performance that renders any improvements from Maeda marginal.
The second is that Maeda holds his changeup like a splitter. He’s done this for years, but this is the first year where pitch analysis websites have been at odds about its classification. Websites that track and analyze pitch type values have jotted Maeda’s main off-speed pitch like a changeup from 2016-2019, but in 2020, all bets were off.
According to Baseball Savant, the “changeup” ranges from 84.5 to 89.2 mph and drops 5 inches less than the league average changeup, leading me to believe this has turned into more of a Splitter this year, yet Baseball Savant and Fangraphs still refer to it as a changeup. Brooks Baseball pitch value charts mostly refer to this pitch as a Splitter, citing the same usage and speed as Savant, and choosing to list it as a Splitter for the first time. Regardless, this pitch has helped increase Maeda’s ground ball rate by 8.4%. It’s an important pitch for Maeda.
I’m going to refer to this as a split-change. Do I want to call it a Splange-up instead? 100%, but my editor may take turns practicing their favorite 90s WWE finishers on me if I did that, ultimately resulting in me being locked in the Walls of Jericho for the foreseeable future, so it’s a split-change going forward. (Editor’s note: My favorite 90’s WWE finisher is the Undertaker’s tombstone, but according to the 30 question quiz I just took online, I’m RKO’s Rock Bottom?)
Why did I put so much emphasis on what this pitch is? Because of its’ effectiveness and slowly increased usage from 2016 to 2020 for Maeda. In 2016, he started as a pitcher with two main pitches, a four-seam fastball and a slider. Unfortunately, for Maeda, his Curve (17.9% usage) and Sinker (13.5% usage) were not performing well enough to become the complimentary third pitch that most pitchers look for. With his Curve featuring an ugly .411 xWOBA and the Sinker producing a below-average .342 xWOBA.
Luckily for Maeda, he threw his special split-change 9.6% of the time. He threw about 85% of those to left-handed hitters, but that pitch increasing in usage is what finally gave him a complete three-pitch repertoire. As his time in the big leagues has progressed, Maeda has increased the split-change’s usage by .8%, 4.6%, 8.9%, and 5.8%, resulting in Maeda throwing his split-change 29.5% of the time by 2020. And when that pitch is thrown, hitters flailed to achieve a minuscule xWOBA of .212 and xSLG of .260.
It’s hard to say that Maeda had any glaring problems. According to Fangraphs, from 2016 to 2019, he threw 589 innings and averaged an xFIP of 3.75, which doesn’t any real disparity from his FIP of 3.71 and SIERA of 3.74. A majority of pitchers would sell their first-born child for those numbers, and teams would sell valuable assets (Brusdar Graterol?) to get a pitcher with those numbers. But the real glaring weakness for Maeda was the effectiveness of his four-seam fastball.
Maeda’s four-seam fastball on average is 91.6 mph, landing him in the 23rd percentile of fastball velocity in the league for 2020. In my handsome, humble, and unprofessional opinion, a good fastball is the most important thing for predicting future success. A good fastball need not sit in the high 90s or have extreme movement, but it needs to be an effective pitch. While Maeda’s four-seam was a good pitch during his first two years, resulting in xWOBAs of .300 and .299, his four-seam the last two years accumulated xWOBAs of .379 and .364.
With the split-change finally developed, the last step for Maeda to become an elite pitcher was to figure out how to maximize the value of his four-seam fastball. It was his most thrown pitch for the last 3 years, but maybe that was the problem? His two most effective pitches have been the slider and split-change: those pitches had xWOBAs over the last two years of .231 and .218, making them both beyond useful against hitters.
Traditional baseball thinking tells you that you need to work off your fastball; that it makes your other pitches better and you’re gimmicky if you choose to work off anything else. This leaves some pitchers with a frustrating question: what if your fastball just isn’t fast? And that question begins to touch on the more important question, how does one maximize the value of a slow fastball?
During the 2020 season, Maeda ignored traditional baseball values and maximized the value of his slow fastball.
Maeda chose to throw his slider 38.6% of the time and his split-change 29.5% of the time, equaling over 68% of Maeda’s pitches during the 2020 regular season. But what happened to his fastball, you know, the stupid slow one? Maeda’s four-seam fastball wound up being thrown 19.4% of the time in 2020, decreasing from the 2019 total of 33.7% usage. You see a dropoff of more than 14%, but more importantly, Maeda’s fastball went from his most common pitch to his third most common pitch.
The rest of Maeda’s arsenal is a mixture of curveballs, sinkers, and cutters which equal up a little over 12%. Maeda’s growth as a pitcher is fun to look examine over time. His curveball and sinker totaled over 31% of his pitches during his rookie season in 2016, but those pitches are less than 10% of his arsenal nowadays.
When it comes to Maeda facing right-handed hitters in 2020, the most noticeable difference is the almost 10% increase of split-changes thrown, going from 5.9% in 2019 to 15.8% in 2020. What was that 10% increase replacing? Well, they replaced his fastballs. Maeda went from throwing four-seam fastballs 33.2% of the time against righties in 2019, to just 21.6% in 2020, almost a 12% difference.
Against left-handed hitters, Maeda’s four-seam fastball was getting lit up, averaging xWOBAs of .416 and .398 in the 2018 and 2019 seasons respectively. In 2018, the four-seam was thrown 45% of the time against left-handed hitters, it experienced a drop off to 34.3% usage in 2019, but that did not change its effectiveness by any means. In 2020, the four-seam usage was almost cut in half, totaling 17.9% usage, and that seemed to have made all the difference.
Another big revelation in Maeda’s approach against left-handed hitters was his slider becoming his second pitch against them. His slider usage spiked from 11.1% against lefties in 2019, to 30% in 2020. Maeda’s curveball was the main loser of his change in slider usage, going from 11.9% to 5.5%, almost phased out of his repertoire completely. Was the increase in sliders effective? Kind of, sorta, eh. Maeda’s slider accumulating an xWOBA of .393 against left-handed hitters is certainly not ideal, but it takes the stress off of Maeda’s fastball, seemingly the biggest reason that Maeda’s slider is being thrown so much. This article is about Maeda’s 91mph fastball and splange-up, and I will not let you forget that.
Maeda’s four-seam fastball was thrown 191 times in 2020. What were the results of those 191 pitches? According to Baseball Savant, 51% of his four-seams were thrown in the strike zone, and they resulted in 3 hits over the entire season. And to be clear, this pitch is a four-seam fastball, a pitch with little to no movement that would shock a batter enough for him to swing and miss because of it. A league-average four-seam fastball has a horizontal movement of 7 inches and 15 inches of drop, Maeda’s four-seam fastball moves 8 inches towards a right-handed batter and drops 17 inches. Some of that extra drop is due to Maeda’s fastball being slower than 77% of pitchers’ four-seam fastballs in the league (and thus enduring a greater gravitational effect).
All of this added up to Maeda being in the top 2% of the league in hard-hit rate (and wOBA), while putting together a 2.70 ERA and leading the league in WHIP at a 0.750 figure that challenged Pedro Martinez’s all-time record from 2000 (0.737).
I love when pitchers do what they can to reinvent themselves. Mostly because it is really hard to look at a pitcher, let alone yourself, and recognize where the struggles originate. For a start, a week, a month, or a year, all pitchers will struggle.
Simple improvements, like “throw your best pitch more often”, still require tons of theory. It’s nonsensical to decide that you’ll throw more or less of one pitch if you don’t have a set plan of how you’ll attack batters on each side of the plate with your repertoire.
There are still a couple of things I’m sure Maeda wants to fix going into next season. While his slider had an xWOBA of .297 overall, left-handed hitters regularly made solid contact off the pitch. Also, 7 of 9 home runs came off that slider as a whole, while the other two off of a poor curveball and sinker. Maeda has found solace within his split-change, and if he wants to continue his four-seam effectiveness, he needs to find ways to improve his slider against left-handed hitters.
When slider-dominant pitchers struggle with left-handed hitters and lack a pitch to replace it, they tend to resort to developing a cutter. A great example is Corbin Burnes, who learned to throw a cutter to aid his approach against left-handed hitters when his bread and butter slider didn’t prove to be good enough. He’s now doing really well. Also, Mike Mayers developed a cutter after three poor seasons with the Cardinals, and the Angels are reaping the rewards of his newfound weapon.
I would not be surprised if Maeda develops a cutter to help his approach against left-handed hitters, now that his slider seems to lack the effectiveness to take the stress off the four-seam. If he develops a cutter, manages to evolve again, and you want to sound smart at a — I don’t know, Bill James themed coffee shop — take a sip on your sabermetric soy latte and know that Maeda’s pitch mix has been shifting for years.
-Case Bongirne
