2015 Player Projection: Garrett Richards

Garrett Richards blew up last season but then blew out his knee. Can Richards prove he is healthy and prove that he can be an ace again?

What happened in 2014?
Oh, not much. Richards only went from being a mild disappointment to a Cy Young contender seemingly out of nowhere. Other than that, it was a pretty ordinary season.

Even the most ardent of Garrett Richards supporters couldn’t have seen his breakout 2014 campaign coming. Richards had shown some signs that he was finally putting it all together during his late-season stint in the rotation to close out 2013, but the expectation was more that he’d be a solid mid-rotation workhorse. Up until 2014, Richards was the guy who threw really hard and had killer stuff, but inexplicably couldn’t strike people out. Entering his age 26 season, it seemed like the time had passed for him to finally tap into his potential.

NOPE.

Turns out there was still time. Richards made a series of adjustments and morphed into a bona fide ace. He suddenly started racking up K’s, dramatically cutting down on hits allowed and became nearly impossible to homer off of.

Had he not blown out his knee late in the season in a freak incident while covering first base, Richards would’ve sailed past the 200-inning mark to officially earn his “ace” wings and put himself prominently in the AL Cy Young conversation.

[table id=84 /] *The MWAH projections are simply my best guess based off my own personal opinion and research (my wOBA calculation is approximate because my math skills are only “meh”)

What do the projections think he will do in 2015?
I was quite interested to see how Richards would look in all of the projections. He is an interesting case because he didn’t have all that much success in his first two MLB seasons and his major injury needed to be factored in somehow. I figured there could be some really wild numbers thrown out in either direction.

I figured wrong. His Steamer projection isn’t that of an ace, but it isn’t awful either. The strikeout numbers are still there and his ERA is actually above his FIP there, so things look worse than they really are. ZiPS though remained quite bullish on Richards. Again, not quite an ace, but really, really close. CAIRO is oddly pessimistic about Garrett sustaining his strikeout rate, but the rest of the performance holds up. Unsurprisingly, none of the systems see Richards allowing just a mere five dingers all season long as he did in 2014.

Does the Monkey agree or disagree?
I believe in Richards, but I can’t help but also believe that there are going to be some after effects of his injury, at least in the short-term. Like the rest of the systems, I fully expect Richards to miss a few starts and possibly lack stamina early in the season. Mostly though I just think he’s going to struggle to find consistency early on as he learns to trust his plant leg again. That will results in some stretches where he struggles to keep the ball down and becomes susceptible to the longball again. His stuff should be just fine, but the command and mechanics are going to take a little bit of time to get back to where they were prior to his knee exploding.

THREE OPEN QUESTIONS FOR GARRETT RICHARDS IN 2015
1) What are the long-term effects of Garrett’s knee injury?
No starting pitcher in the history of MLB (or at least the part of history where they’ve tracked such things) has EVER suffered a torn patellar tendon before. So, the answer to this question is a big fat “I don’t know.”

Oh, were you expecting me to expound on this topic more? Yeah, that’s not going to happen. I wasn’t kidding. Seriously, nobody knows what the recovery from this injury is like for a pitcher. We’re all going to find out together, Garrett included.

2) Where did this breakout come from and are they sustainable?
Richards made two major adjustments that led to his newfound success. First and foremost, he learned how to keep the ball down.

Richards has always been hard to square up, but he’s a lot easier to hit when he’s up in the zone. But when he’s down in the zone, the contract rates are much lower and the contact that he does give up is much weaker. As you can see in the above charts, Richards was no stranger to the upper-third of the zone early in his career, but as of last year it was all down, all the time. He sank that sinker so hard and opposing hitters were helpless against him.

The second adjustment actually started back in 2013, but Richards finally scrapped his changeup and replaced it with his curveball. The changeup was just never very effective, but he clearly kept it in his arsenal to help neutralize lefties because that is what you are supposed to do. It turns out that curve is pretty good at doing that too and that Richards has a much better curve than a change.

As far as sustainable goes, these changes seem like the kind that should be replicable. Richards had a reasonable BABIP, so it isn’t as if this were smoke and mirrors. The one concern I would have is if his knee injury results in minor changes in his delivery that make it harder for him to keep the ball in the lower half of the zone like he did last season.

3) Can Richards really succeed while throwing so few balls in the strike zone?
Only 16 starters in baseball threw a lower percentage of balls in the strike zone than Richards, which seems like a bad thing because of the simplistic reasoning that at some point batters will learn to be more patient and lay off Richards’ pitches. It isn’t that easy though. Richards doesn’t miss the zone because he has poor command, rather his pitches have so much movement that it is hard to keep them in the zone even though they start there.

For batters, that’s rough too because they see the pitch coming to them as if they are going to be in the zone before the sinker darts down and out of the zone or the slider sharply dives out of the zone or the cutter cuts out of the zone. I think you get it.

What you should also get is that this is a recipe others have had plenty of success with. Jon Lester and Sonny Gray are right next to Richards on that list and Felix Hernandez is even further down the list. Last time I checked, he was no slouch. Maybe it is blasphemy to put Richards in the same company as King Felix, but based on the results last season, it seems more than appropriate.

The Final Word (and GIF)
“Ouch”

I’m not trying to be morbid by using imagery of his injury (OK, maybe a little bit morbid), but rather I’m trying to use it as a reminder of just how devastating the injury was when it happened. As good as the reports have been on Richards are in training camp right now, let’s not forget what happened to him approximately six months ago. This doesn’t look like the sort of thing that a guy just shakes off after one offseason.