Drew Smyly: Working on Stuff

[Guest]

Not sure who caught the game Sunday on Marquee, and especially who stuck around until the late innings, but I found something late in the broadcast very interesting. Drew Smyly had a fairly rough start, giving up three runs on a couple of homers and some hard-hit contact, but near the end of the game, they cut to an interview Elise Menaker had done with him, and he talked a lot about the positives. He said he and Tommy Hottovy are working on a slightly improved arm slot for him, with a shorter arm action and his hand passing a bit closer to his head, and that he saw a lot of what he wanted to see from it.

 

I love games at Salt River Fields, where the Rockies and Diamondbacks play their Cactus League home games, because we can validate and evaluate these kinds of statements in a way we still can't with most spring training contests. Statcast data is available for those games, and we can look at what Smyly was throwing and how it differed from what he's thrown in the past. So here goes. First of all, yes, it's true that he's changed his horizontal release point.

 

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Obviously, there are ways to make changes to mechanics or release point that would be tough for us to detect. I still much prefer when we can see evidence of it in the data, though, and lo, here it's pretty clear. That smaller cluster in the first photo is slightly but plainly shifted toward 0 (the center of the mound), relative to last year's release points.

 

The second question, of course, is whether the changes he's made are valuable, and that's harder to assess. It's great that he's still trying new things to improve at age 33, but he got hit very hard during those two innings Sunday. Smyly said it didn't bother him, but he would say that even if he were scared out of his horsefeathers. The thing to check, then, is whether there's further evidence that he was, in the favored spring training argot, "working on stuff". And, again, good news: he certainly was.

 

Last year, Smyly threw his curveball nearly half the time against righties. Against lefties, his cutter was the top offering, at about 39 percent, with his sinker and curve splitting the rest of his offerings about evenly. He was the very model of a crafy veteran southpaw, mixing three pitches as well as most guys mix six, denying hitters the sinker they kept trying to key in on and bash. On Sunday, though, 28 of his 47 pitches were sinkers. He threw just 11 curves and eight cutters.

 

Now, none of this is to suggest that all is hunky-dory. If Smyly's going to be an effective starter in 2023, I think he needs to start working the arm side of the plate (away from righties, inside to lefties) much more regularly with his sinker, and he didn't show any sign of being able to do that on Sunday. In that in-game interview, he talked about creating more separation between his sinker and his cutter with the arm slot changes, and the evidence on that is sketchy, because he threw so few cutters.

 

Still, I take a lot of encouragement from the combination of Smyly's words and the numbers his start generated. I don't think he's going to go back to throwing his sinker 60 percent of the time once the regular season starts. It makes sense that, if he's working with altered mechanics, he wanted to do so primarily with his fastball while in a competitive setting. If he and Hottovy are right about the upside of his adjustments (and I think they are), then this start was a good step toward being ready to unleash those changes in concert with the pitch mix changes he made last year once the games count.

[CubinNY]

Bryant hit a ball to the moon. It was like a college kid in a little league park. I pretty much think Smyly is who he is at this point. There is nothing wrong with tinkering to see if you can bend the curve in your direction, but he's a back-end-of-the-rotation pitcher on a middle-of-the-road team.

[Ding Dong Johnson]

Why no, I did not catch the game on Marquee. In fact, I have never watched a game on Marquee.

[Bertz]

Another positive I'd take away from yesterday is the velo. Smyly averaged 92.4 on the sinker and 88.8 MPH on the cutter. That sinker velo is right in line with what he did last year (averaged 92.7) and that cutter velo was actually a smidge better than his full-season mark (88.7).

 

If you want some assurances that Smyly's the guy he was last year moreso than the guy he's projected to be, that velo holding is a key factor. And hell if he's at mid-season velo already in early March maybe he's got a little more in the tank heading into the regular season.

[Guest]

Bryant hit a ball to the moon. It was like a college kid in a little league park. I pretty much think Smyly is who he is at this point. There is nothing wrong with tinkering to see if you can bend the curve in your direction, but he's a back-end-of-the-rotation pitcher on a middle-of-the-road team.

 

All true. The difference between a good and a bad back-of-the-rotation starter is still an important one, though.

 

Yeah, KB *crushed* that. His other two homers this spring have also been monster shots. Best swings I’ve seen from him since at least 2019. Probably 2017.

[Bertz]

Another positive I'd take away from yesterday is the velo. Smyly averaged 92.4 on the sinker and 88.8 MPH on the cutter. That sinker velo is right in line with what he did last year (averaged 92.7) and that cutter velo was actually a smidge better than his full-season mark (88.7).

 

If you want some assurances that Smyly's the guy he was last year moreso than the guy he's projected to be, that velo holding is a key factor. And hell if he's at mid-season velo already in early March maybe he's got a little more in the tank heading into the regular season.

 

Adding in here, looks like Smyly's spin on his curve was way up too? 2278 yesterday, averaged 2119 last year and 2096 the year before.