Remember RA Dickey? He was with the Twins for one season and was completely underwhelming in his time here. He had a 5.88 ERA and entirely lamentable peripheral statistics. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a player left the Twins and was met with great success. What should be surprising is that a player went to the New York Mets and was good. Queens usually seems like the plae good players go to die.
In any event, I am mostly curious as to what is leading to Dickey’s success. This year, he is a Cy Young candidate, if he keeps at his pace. It’s not necessarily smoke and mirrors either. Since he has gone to New York, his strike out rate has gone up, his walk and home run rates of gone down. This season, all of those numbers have spiked positively (if you are a Mets fan).
I looked at his PitchFX data, and his fastball speeds are… down by a few mph to 82. His knuckleball speeds are up though. Is his improvement entirely to do a harder knuckleball? I guess? He also seems to be throwing his other pitches less. I guess when your fastball is 82mph, you don’t need a change up.
It doesn’t seem like enough, though, does it? Once again, I am convinced that the root cause of a player’s success upon leaving Minnesota is magic. It’s just some sort of voodoo magic that lets players be good when they leave Minnesota.
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