The Pittsburgh Pirates Seem To Be Re-Emphasizing The Curveball

After utilizing pitches such as cut fastballs and sliders in recent years, the Pittsburgh Pirates may now be re-emphasizing the curveball.

During their return to competitiveness, the Pittsburgh Pirates put a lot of stock into pitches that had movement condusive to ground balls.

Two-seam fastballs, cut fastballs, sliders and sinkers were all the rage in Pirates circles. Those pitches and the organization’s emphasis on them directly led to A.J. Burnett milking more time in his career, Mark Melancon becoming an elite closer, Francisco Liriano rediscovering success and Jared Hughes producing prodigious groundball rates.

That concentration of pitches with serious movement will likely never go away entirely, but it was a comment from manager Clint Hurdle – along with a look at the team’s 2016 pitch f/x data – that could signify a new hallmark in the club’s pitching approach.

Separation Anxiety? Hardly.

During his 2016 Winter Meetings press sessions, Hurdle was asked about the difficulty in hitting a curveball.

Q. You’re a hitting guy. Is a good curveball an extremely difficult pitch to hit or if you see enough, do you start hitting it?
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”Clint Hurdle” link=”http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=125874″ color=”” class=”” size=””]It all depends on the fastball velocity that enhances the whole thing. Because when you can separate the velocities, when you can get a breaking ball and curveball velocity 15 to 20 miles apart that’s when it’s really challenging. If you’re throwing 88 miles an hour and your curveball is 77 miles an hour, there is not enough separation. So it’s easier to time, to anticipate and to put the barrel on it. So I still think it’s a lot about separation. You’ve got to have fastball command, fastball location to set up the other pitch.[/perfectpullquote]

A quick look at the separation figures for Gerrit Cole, Tyler Glasnow, Jameson Taillon, Ivan Nova and their heavily rumored trade target – Jose Quintana – shows an excellent foundation of just that separation that Hurdle spoke to.

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Across the board, most of these Pittsburgh Pirates starters had a separation factor of 14+ mph between their four seam fastballs and their curveballs. Nova is a notch behind the pack at 12.65 mph, but a tick less in separation had little to do with his curveball’s effectiveness, as you’ll see below.

Note: Chad Kuhl is not included in this discussion, as Pitch F/X data did not track a single curveball thrown by Kuhl in 2016.

But Will the Pirates Starters Change How They Pitch?

Perhaps more to the point, Hurdle had this to say about the club’s usage of the curve in 2016:

Q. Sort of the Rich Hill model of 50% curveballs or Drew Pomeranz, maybe a 35, 40 percent, you could see more of that going forward?

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”Clint Hurdle” link=”http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=125874″ color=”” class=”” size=””]It’s trended up in the past season. I think the game runs in cycles, though. I mean splint finger fastballs was the romance pitch for a long time. That was the pitch where everybody tried to develop and throw. I think you’re seeing the game cycle back around to the curveball because there was many years the curveball disappeared.[/perfectpullquote]

From Hurdle’s comments, we can reasonably infer that the Pittsburgh Pirates will feature the curveball more in 2017. That may be the right call with the staff that is in place:

 

There is a lot to unpack in the information presented, so let’s take a look at each pitcher listed here and talk about their curveball usage and results.

Cole’s Reluctance

By far, Cole has the least usage among likely 2017 Pittsburgh Pirates rotation options in terms of usage percentage. This is nothing new, as Cole’s curveball usage has dipped each season since its high water-mark of 14.64 percent in 2014.

In the intervening seasons Cole has relied more on his slider than the curve, but he too may want to revisit things. In 2014, Cole’s bender produced a solid 14.64 percent whiff rate, and hitters hit a respectable .235 off of the pitch. More importantly, they had trouble driving it, slugging  .338.

Perhaps Cole is still haunted by the curveball demons that plagued him in 2015. It was during that season that hitters slugged .404 and hit .319 on the pitch. That might explain why Cole’s curve usage dropped off a relative cliff over the next several years,

Regardless of past performance, Cole would likely do well to shore up his curveball usage to keep hitters honest. Corresponding to the years in which his curve usage decreased rapidly, batters started to key in to Cole’s tendencies, and in the span of two seasons, including an injury-affected 2016 – they went from hitting the slider at a .184 clip at the end of 2014 to a .273 rate in 2016.

Taillon’s Non-Adjustment

Taillon hasn’t given us all that much to judge his curveball on.

Afterall, he did pitch just 104 innings in 2016, and those innings came on the heels of finally working himself back from Tommy John surgery and other maladies.

That did not preclude Taillon from utilizing the curve at a solid rate as seen above. The Pittsburgh Pirates had to be happy with the results, with the pitch resulting in 50.5 percent strikes (classified here as fouls, whiffs and called strikes) when thrown.

Doubly impressive for Taillon’s initial round of curveball usage is that it did not waver during his first season’s final days. Looking at just August through September, Taillon maintaned a good ball rate – 36 percent – and improved the curve’s hit rate at 5.4 percent for the season’s last two months.

Going into his first full season in the major leagues, Taillon, Ray Searage and the Pirates’ catching staff will need to add in some differing stuff to offset the 2016 usage. A good candidate could be his changeup, which saw just 10.48 percent usage.

Not Quite a Tale of Two Novas

I broke out Ivan Nova’s 2016 season by team to illustrate what may be the best piece of evidence that the Pittsburgh Pirates may be taking a new approach.

During his time with the Yankees, Nova threw a comparable number of fastballs against what he threw in Pittsburgh, but the results were different enough to notice. Nova saw better results across the board in balls and strikes while maintaining similar hit and in-play numbers.

When the Pirates acquire a pitcher mid-season, it is often reported that Searage and company will observe a handful of starts before beginning to tinker. In the case of Nova, the opposite may have occurred. Nova’s curveball may have caught the eye, and Nova’s subsequent performance was more a result of accentuating it.

Glasnow’s Curve Can’t Stand On Its Own

Glasnow had the highest usage of those listed, and his rates are solid across the board, albeit only in 25.1 innings. However, the knock on Glasnow is one that is well-known to many Pittsburgh Pirates observers. He has a dire need to develop his changeup as a third pitch.

If he cannot throw a changeup – or at the very least a third pitch of some type – with regularity, then his future as a starting pitcher is very much in question. He threw the changeup just 2.53 percent of the time in 2016.

There is really not much else to dissect with Glasnow’s curveball usage. The separation that Glasnow shows between his fastball and curve is encouraging, and with his frame, adding 1-2 MPH on that separation could make it even more effective.

Quintana’s Curveball Makes Him An Attractive Target

That brings us to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ ongoing pursuit of Jose Quintana.

Though Quintana’s rates of usage are a notch below the Pirates starters listed, he threw far more total curveballs. Part of that is due to Quintana’s durability – he has thrown 200+ innings each of the last four years – but also the pitch’s overall effectiveness.

Much like Nova, bringing Quintana into the fold could be a clear sign that the Pirates are embracing this burgeoning trend. Again, much like Nova, the Pirates could also see an easier road towards maximizing the left-handers bending stuff by featuring it even more. One particularly tantalizing arena in which Quintana can improve upon his curveball would be during two-strike counts.

With two strikes on a batter, Quintana’s curve usage drops to 9.51 percent. Of those 312 curveballs thrown in this scenario, 47.4 percent land for balls, while 12.8 percent are put in play. The lefty takes a more conservative approach with the curve after two strikes, as borne out in his zone profile:

Taking such an approach with a breaking ball on two strikes is Baseball 101. Why give a hitter something to hit if you don’t have to?

Of course, that thinking still has merit, but if Quintana can mix up locations outside of the strike zone – much like Taillon as shown in the graphic below – hitters will still have a hard time tracking it while trying to stay in the at-bat.

Conclusions

The approach that helped the Pittsburgh Pirates get back to playing winning baseball will never truly “go away.”

A mark of a good pitching staff is the ability to mix and match ideas, philosophies and pitch types against a vast array of variables. Hitter tendencies, recent performance, in-game situations all factor in to what gets thrown, when it gets thrown and why.

But as we can see, the Pirates may be gearing up to buckle a few more hitters’ knees than we have seen in the past.

Data Sources – Statcast, Brooks Baseball

Featured Image Credit – Flickr Creative Commons