In the first test for Ray Searage after the departure of Jim Benedict, the Pittsburgh Pirates seek to bring Ryan Vogelsong back to the level of his 2011 All-Star performance. What does the team need to do to fix the latest reclamation project?
After a series of pitchers have seen their careers brought back to life from the brink of retirement, the Ray Searage and Jim Benedict pitching factory has produced stellar returns from small investments for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
From the perspective of a fan, it’s frustrating watching the team spend pennies to dollars hoping the player doesn’t run off with their investment to get five-fold the original investment from another team. From the team’s perspective, it’s one of the best practices for a small-market team like the Pirates to remain relevant in a big revenue sport.
Once the team lost assistant to the general manager Jim Benedict to the Miami Marlins to take the role of director of pitching, many have questioned the ability of Ray Searage and the Pirates to continue churning out results from pitchers that have fallen on tough times or simply never experienced much success to begin with. The effects have already been felt, as a deep pitching market was expected to allow the Pirates restock a depleted rotation, but the departure of Benedict combined with massive inflation of free agent prices have forced the Pirates to roll with a rotation that includes Jeff Locke and Ryan Vogelsong.
In 2008, the year before Jim Benedict arrived, the team posted a 5.08 ERA. Since then, the team has posted a 3.92 ERA, including the lowest team ERA since 1984 of 3.21 in 2015. While acquiring a decent rotation takes time, the team has been even better with Ray Searage as the pitching coach. Since 2011, the team has posted an average team ERA of 3.57.
So how did the Pirates experience so much success with reclamation pitchers and how can Ray Searage and company continue this success? More specifically, what does it mean for Vogelsong?
For Edinson Volquez, it was adjusting his combination of pitches. For Francisco Liriano, it was changing up the sequence of his pitches. For A.J. Burnett, it was changing the location he pitched in the zone to induce more ground balls. For Vance Worley and Charlie Morton, it was adding a pitch to replace one that had previously had poor results. In every instance, the Pirates found something that was the root of a player’s problems.
The key for Vogelsong will be the Pirates isolating that one problem. Make no mistake, with every reclamation project, the Pirates advanced scouting department did their due diligence before the ink ever hit the paper. In every single case, Jim Benedict, Ray Searage, and others had realized the problem and developed a strategy to hit the ground running to fix it. When Ryan Vogelsong reports to Bradenton in just 15 days, the Pirates will begin trying to make him a viable candidate for the rotation.
More specifically, they will be trying to get him back to his 2011 form, the same year he returned from Japan to make it all the way to the All-Star game with the San Francisco Giants. The first thing any pitching coach will look at to help a pitcher performing poorly are his pitching mechanics. Let’s take a look at the difference in mechanics for Vogelsong between 2011 and 2015, including a look back to 2004 with the Pirates.
Notice the evolution in how he pitches, particularly the stride and the follow through. While Vogelsong has never had the most deceptive delivery, he has at least maintained relative consistency with that. Unless the Pirates feel he can make a drastic change, look for him to end his career with that untouched.
However, early in his career (2004), his stride tended to stray a little, mainly towards the third base side. Even for a pitcher that’s 6’4” tall, he has a long stride. The longer the stride, the higher the ball will be left up. In the follow-through, his body corkscrews, his stride foot pivots, and he leaves himself vulnerable as a fielder by not squaring up. In the second video, he sports a nasty change-up.
Notice the changes in his stride and follow-through. The stride foot plants facing the plate, it doesn’t pivot, and it’s just the right distance for his frame. He stays high in his delivery, allowing his frame to produce a downward angle rather than artificially producing it as part of his delivery. He finishes the stride with a proper follow-through by squaring up facing a little off towards the on-deck circle, but far closer to the plate than his first time with the Pirates.
In the third video, it’s all kinds of messed up. On this pitch against Neil Walker in 2015, Vogelsong returns to corkscrewing. His stride foot pivots, and once again, he winds up facing the first base dugout on the follow-through, completely vulnerable as a fielder (not that he needed to worry about that here as Walker lined it to the gap in left center). He also started pitching from the first base side of the rubber. For a pitcher that traditionally works away in the zone, the disadvantage would explain why left-handed batters hit .283 off of him in 2015, while right-handed batters hit .251.
The Pirates will need to make some minor mechanics adjustments to help him return to his 2011 form. Ray Searage will also need to look at Vogelsong’s pitches and his pitch combinations.
First, here’s a general overview from the catcher’s perspective of the zone profiles for Vogelsong from 2011 and 2015.
In 2011, only 38% of his pitches were thrown in the zone against right-handed batters. Of the 62% that were thrown out of the zone, 29% were thrown away, of which 86.8% were mid-to-down and away. Right-handed batters batted .096 on pitches away out of the zone in 2011. Left-handed batters were pitched away more frequently, but they experience moderately more success away. However, they struggled high and away and low and in. In 2015, Vogelsong maintained similar patterns but with troubling results.
The answer to his woes may lie in consistency. From the charts below, you can see that Vogelsong varied his pitches more in 2015 than in 2011. He went from being a three-pitch pitcher to four by using the cutter more often. He also was less consistent in the usage of his pitches. The change could be attributed to the change from starter to reliever, but it could also scream that he was simply looking for anything to produce positive results.
Positive results were in short supply for Ryan Vogelsong after the 2011 campaign. With the exception of the cutter, every pitch experienced at least a minor increase in batting average against from 2011 to 2015, while the four-seam fastball returned to form in 2015. With the increase in batting average against also came an increase in slugging percentage against. However, once again, the average for the cutter declined, and the average for the four-seam fastball remained consistent. More telling are the isolated power average increases over time.
Earlier this week, Steve Kubitz tackled the explanation of isolated power in relation to the Pirates’ lineup; you can view the article here. In simplest terms, isolated power looks at how often a player hits for extra bases. It’s a sabermetric statistic that’s good for hitters and bad for pitchers the higher it goes.
The pattern with the cutter and four-seam fastball remained consistent. The sinker rose sharply in 2015, but more important were the rises in the isolated power averages for the change-up and the curve ball.
The curve showed declines in both horizontal and vertical movement. While it’s encouraging that Vogelsong’s average pitch speed has not declined and the number of change-ups and curves that he grooved did, the percentage of batters that whiffed on the change-up was cut in half over the last three seasons, while doubling in line drive percentage. The line drive percentage for the curve also doubled over the last three years.
Ryan Vogelsong will have to recapture the effectiveness of his cutter, maintain the consistency of his four-seam fastball, and rediscover the secret to what made his off-speed pitches so effective in 2011. He will need to reestablish the change-up and curve ball as effective off-speed pitches, especially in two-strike scenarios. In both 2011 and 2015, the four-seam fastball was Vogelsong’s most effective “out-pitch,” but unlike in 2011, he was forced to rely on the cutter, for lack of a better option, in 2015.
On the bright side, all of Vogelsong’s glitches are minor. The downside is that he has many of these minor glitches, and they appear to be cumulative issues. Nonetheless, this should hardly be a problem for a coach as effective as Ray Searage. The consistency has garnered Searage a reputation as one of the greatest pitching coaches of all time, as Aaron Benedict pointed out yesterday.
Even if the signs indicate that the veteran pitcher may be able to salvage some remnant of his past success, no one can blame the fans crying once again in the face of another reclamation project, “help him, Ray Searage; you’re his only hope.”
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