How Long Can Javier Assad Be This Good and This Underestimated?

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs' stocky Mexican righthander is now 195 innings, 50 total appearances, and 27 starts into his MLB career, with a 2.67 ERA. It's time we all reckon with our doubts about him.

Image courtesy of © Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

 

In technology, there's a commonly used term for what's happened to pitching analysis since the dawn of the PITCHf/x Era in 2008: lock-in. It's what happens when a particular technological framework becomes so much the default that it becomes impractical (and eventually, unthinkable) to make a meaningful change. The QWERTY keyboard has you locked in. So does the standard file system for saving documents and photos on the computer. Lock-in is a common phenomenon, in some ways, and it's not always bad.

Sometimes, though, lock-in blinds us to the opportunities that exist to reach something better. We've all gotten locked into the pitch-tracking model of pitcher evaluation, to such an extent that algorithmic and machine-learning tools have been called upon to boil pitches and pitchers down to single numbers, which are then treated as nearly definitive in conversations about those pitches and pitchers. It's a good example of how we can quickly become overly reliant on technology in certain settings, and Javier Assad is one good reminder of its flaws.

Assad doesn't throw especially hard. He doesn't have any individual pitch that overwhelms hitters, impresses Stuff+ and other models, or generates a hilariously high number of ground balls. Even zooming out and looking at his overall numbers, he doesn't do the things (strike out more than a quarter of opposing batters, walk fewer than an average pitcher, etc.) that we expect above-average big-league starters to do. We're locked in on the concepts of velocity, movement, spin rate, Stuff+, FIP, and so on. Assad doesn't excel in any of those aspects, so we tend strongly to doubt the staying power of whatever success he finds. I'm not making an accusation; I'm making an admission. I do this, too, in no small measure.

It's time for that to change, even if there's some chance I'll be burned by the pivot in another month or so. Assad made his 50th career appearance Wednesday night in Atlanta, with six scoreless innings to bring his ERA down to a baffling 1.49. His career mark is now 2.67, and vexingly, it's even lower (2.47) as a starter than it is in relief. That's with both a strikeout and a walk rate on the wrong side of the MLB average, and even in this sparkling start to the 2024 campaign, he's only crept up to 21.6% strikeouts and down to 7.7% walks. He's one of just 19 pitchers in the Wild Card Era to post an ERA under 3.00 over his first 50 career outings (among those with 150 or more innings in those games, clearing out short relievers), and he's far from the high end of that list.

Query Results Table

Rk	Player	Team	ERA	IP
1	Tony Gonsolin	LAD	2.37	224.0
2	José Fernández	MIA	2.47	305.2
3	Tanner Roark	WSN	2.56	260.1
4	Matt Harvey	NYM	2.61	331.0
5	Alek Manoah	TOR	2.65	302.1
6	Jacob deGrom	NYM	2.66	321.1
7	Javier Assad	CHC	2.67	195.1
8	Mark Prior	CHC	2.69	334.0
9	Shane McClanahan	TBR	2.71	275.2
10	Sonny Gray	OAK	2.87	319.1
11	Noah Syndergaard	NYM	2.89	305.0
12	Joel Piñeiro	SEA	2.89	214.2
13	Michael Wacha	STL	2.90	273.0
14	Jeremy Hellickson	TBR	2.95	295.2
15	Stephen Strasburg	WSN	2.96	282.2
Rk	Player	Team	ERA	IP
16	Matt Morris	STL	2.97	330.2
17	Hideo Nomo	LAD	2.97	348.0
18	Julio Teheran	ATL	2.98	302.1
19	Jaime García	STL	2.99	256.0

Provided by Stathead.com: Found with Stathead. See Full Results.
Generated 5/16/2024.

How is he doing this? It would defeat the point I made above for me to come to you with some overly technical, analytical explanation. That said, we can look briefly at a few things, more for the way they depart from the modern norms of pitching success than for the ways they fit them.

First, Assad has a deep arsenal. He's a true six-pitch pitcher, willing to use four different offerings pretty frequently against righties and five different ones against lefties. He throws the kitchen sink at hitters, which hardly anyone does anymore (and, thus, which hitters are less able to adjust to than they could 20 years ago).

Second, Assad's stuff has a wide range of movement profiles, and he forces opponents to cover the whole plate and the whole vertical zone. That's hard to do, and most hitters get frustrated by it. Again, too, there's a platoon dynamic at play. He trusts different pitches to do different things against lefties and righties, and shapes them in pleasingly subtle, meaningful ways based on situation, familiarity, and swing path.

Finally, and importantly, because of the above, Assad gets hitters out of the aggressive, damage-focused, pull-happy approach so common in today's game. He puts them on the defensive. When Statcast rolled out bat-tracking data earlier this week, it showed that Assad gets some of the slower swings in the league from his opponents, and that's because of his extreme unpredictability. His soft stuff also plays some part in taking the juice out of hitters' bats. They very rarely pull fly balls and long line drives against him, and as nervous as a middling ground-ball rate can be for those of us raised in a league full of strikeout artists and ground-ball guys, the opposite-field fly ball is another relatively safe way to get a lot of outs.

That list of great career starts above tells the story here. Assad is not yet guaranteed to be any kind of ace. He's certainly more directly comparable to Tanner Roark than to José Fernández. Still, he's on the list, which is far more than I ever expected from him, and the fact that his success is difficult to explain in a 21st-century pitching paradigm doesn't invalidate it. Even Roark had his best career season in 2016, after exiting that first 50 games window. Don't expect Javier Assad to regress too much, just because he doesn't throw 98 or rival Tyler Glasnow for sheer dominance.

 

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[Guest234]

He is one of the good people.

[CubinNY]

el Mago 

[Transmogrified Tiger]

6 hours ago, Matthew Trueblood said:

Finally, and importantly, because of the above, Assad gets hitters out of the aggressive, damage-focused, pull-happy approach so common in today's game. He puts them on the defensive. When Statcast rolled out bat-tracking data earlier this week, it showed that Assad gets some of the slower swings in the league from his opponents, and that's because of his extreme unpredictability. His soft stuff also plays some part in taking the juice out of hitters' bats. They very rarely pull fly balls and long line drives against him, and as nervous as a middling ground-ball rate can be for those of us raised in a league full of strikeout artists and ground-ball guys, the opposite-field fly ball is another relatively safe way to get a lot of outs.

This is excellent, the idea of using the bat tracking data as a proxy for aggression against a pitcher is really clever.  I wonder how Assad looks in that regard when sorted by count? The Roark comparison I think is a very good one too.

[Guest234]

On 5/16/2024 at 8:00 AM, CubinNY said:

el Mago 

More like El Torero!