Coming into this season, there was a lot of talk about Dodgers’ left hander Alex Wood. With the exodus of Zach Greinke and injury to Hyun-Jin Ryu, Wood is one of the guys the Dodgers will be counting on this season to pick up the slack in the rotation. Wood is particularly interesting because of his extremely funky pitching motion. Here’s a gif of Wood throwing a pitch from his days back with the Braves:
As you can see, weird.
This spring, there was a lot of talk about Wood looking a lot better coming into 2016 because he had finally figured out how to throw all of his pitches from the exact same arm angle. This, coupled with an uptick in velocity, spelled big, big things for him coming into 2016.
So far, Wood has’t been very good. He hasn’t been awful either, he’s just been very inconsistent. His velocity has been better though, all three of his pitches- his sinker, changeup, and curve – are almost three mph faster than at any other point during his career.
So what gives? If he’s throwing harder, as predicted, why isn’t he seeing the better results that were also foretold?
Let’s take a look at the release locations for each of his pitches. This awesome chart from Brooks Baseball, which dates back to the start of 2015:
At first blush, a few things stand out. First and foremost, it is certainly not the case that Wood is releasing all of his pitches at the same spot. In fact, relative to each other, there seems to be no change in where Wood lets go of the ball, with respect to height.
However, there is a pronounced change in where Wood is releasing the ball compared to last season. He seems to be coming more over the top than ever before. As you can see though, it hasn’t really affected his vertical movement all that much in an admittedly small sample size:
We should note, though, that that one peak on the chart in 2016 was Wood’s 4/13 start, by far his best of the young season.
So, what I think we can surmise is that Wood is throwing harder, but still not all that hard as his sinker tops out around 92, and from a more over the top, and therefore less funky, arm angle, without adding much movement at all. We could sum it up like the following:
Less Funky + More Velo + Same Movement = 0 change
If Alex can replicate his April 13th movement from his new (slightly higher) arm angle, he has the potential to be as good as the Dodgers thought he could be. That start seemed to pair the uptick in velocity with quality movement. In that one good start, he went 7+ innings and gave up 1 run on 5 hits. By every measure, advanced and otherwise, it was his best outing by far.
If he can’t get that kind of movement consistently, however, LA might have some problems.
-Max Frankel
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