Can We Prove That Jameson Taillon Has Trouble Stopping the Bleeding?

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs were unable to escape with even a series split in Milwaukee Thursday. Starter Jameson Taillon pitched six strong innings, but in the one frame in which he struggled, he allowed three runs. It's a pattern for the Cubs righty.

Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports

It's a hard thing to pin down and quantify, but anyone who has watched baseball for a long time can tell you: getting out of tough innings and minimizing damage is a real and invaluable skill for a pitcher. Bearing down and retiring a hitter with two on and two out is obviously important, but the way that moment changes a game goes beyond the run that goes up on the scoreboard if the batter gets a single. It cascades through the rest of the game, one way or another.

Cubs fans know this well. Hall of Fame play-by-play man Pat Hughes is always quick to explicitly identify early turning points in games, and usually, those are two-out situations with runners on base. That might sound facile, and Hughes sometimes leans too far into the bit, but there's a real and more subtle reality to that phenomenon than we grok, sometimes. No Cubs hurler better embodies the concept than Jameson Taillon, and unfortunately, he's an example of the danger of not being good in those moments.

Isolating high-leverage or men-on-base situations can muddy and confuse the issue, when we talk about how a pitcher manages either a game or an inning. Let's try a new method. Before I introduce it, though, walk through Taillon's Thursday start with me. Here's how it went, inning by inning:

• First Inning: Walk, double play, strikeout. 3 batters, 3 outs.
• Second Inning: Double, groundout, sacrifice fly, single, double, single, strikeout. 7 batters faced, 3 runs home.
• Third Inning: Flyout, popout, single, flyout. 4 batters, 3 outs.
• Fourth Inning: Strikeout, single, flyout, flyout. 4 batters, 3 outs.
• Fifth Inning: Groundout, lineout, groundout. 3 batters, 3 outs.
• Sixth Inning: Strikeout, groundout, flyout. 3 batters, 3 outs.

Taillon came so, so close to a downright dominant outing. In fact, if you examine that chain of events in the second inning, you can see that he had a clean slate with one run in and two outs, before surrendering three straight hits and two more tallies. It was still a quality start, but... well, the scoreboard tells the story. It wasn't enough to win, and it so easily could have been. And the turning point, perhaps, wasn't one Hughes would have spotted. It was that first single after clearing the bases on the sac fly in the second.

That's because, if Taillon can't hold you to a short inning in which he's in control all along, you can quickly unravel him a bit. I divided all completed innings by starting pitchers (in other words, ones in which the manager didn't remove them in favor of a reliever) since the start of 2023 into three categories:

1. Quick Innings: 3 or 4 batters faced. If you only allow one baserunner, most of the time, you're not giving up a run. You can't, by definition, give up a crooked number. Maybe they got you for a solo homer, but it's 2024. Solo homers happen. An inning where you face only four batters is a successful one.
2. Medium Innings: 5 or 6 batters faced. A lot can happen in those extra three batters, if you get to six within a frame, but you can still theoretically get through such an inning without allowing a run. Somewhat often, you're holding the opposing offense to one, and you were able to stop the bleeding there. You got the team back into the dugout, and you probably have a chance to pitch another inning, if it's not already the sixth or seventh.
3. Long Innings: 7 or more batters faced. These are the killers. We all know them. We all feel a pitcher's pain when they happen. Often, a defensive lapse contributes to them. Maybe it's just bad BABIP luck. One way or another, the inning stretches out. It feels like you'll never escape. The only secret lies in not letting things get this far. No one's perfect, of course, but some guys only have a few innings like this all year. Others seem to have one every other start.

Most innings are Quick Innings, of course--especially since we're removing innings in which the skipper yanks the starter. There are some five-, six-, and nine-batter innings we're throwing out, because we don't know when (or if) the hurler was ever going to earn his way back to the dugout the right way. We're also throwing out some of those times when a manager sends his starter out with a short leash and pulls them after one runner reaches base, but it doesn't even out, and anyway, we're selecting for the pitchers trusted enough to be given starts here. They wouldn't be big-league starters if a majority of their innings involved multiple runners reaching base.

Some 118 pitchers have made 25 or more starts since the start of 2023. As you'd expect, there's a strong relationship between overall pitcher quality and the distribution of Quick, Medium, and Long innings. Tarik Skubal, Bobby Miller, Max Fried, Sandy Alcántara, and Gerrit Cole have the highest Quick Inning percentages in baseball, each coming in over 77 percent. Rich Hill, Tylor Megill, Ryne Nelson, Patrick Corbin, and Josiah Gray have the fewest Quick frames, all south of 63%. However, there's also variation from a perfect mapping of talent onto inning length distributions--enough to make things interesting.

When looking this up, I hypothesized (as implied above) that Taillon would rank fairly highly in Quick and Long innings, and low in Medium ones. Sure enough, here are all the pitchers with at least a 71% Quick innings share, and at least a 6.5% Long innings share, with their breakdowns across all three categories:

Pitcher	Quick %	Medium %	Long %
Reid Detmers	71.7	19.7	8.6
Jack Flaherty	71.3	21	7.7
Bryce Miller	76.1	16.4	7.5
Alex Cobb	72.1	20.4	7.5
Pablo López	72	20.7	7.3
Spencer Strider	75.7	17.5	6.9
Freddy Peralta	75.6	17.6	6.8
Jameson Taillon	74.2	19.2	6.6

As you can see, Taillon is barely sneaking into this club in terms of Long Inning%, but he's more than qualified based on Quick%. Of the aforementioned 118 guys, he ranks 27th in Quick innings, 27th in Long innings, and 109th in Medium ones. The above is a list of excellent pitchers--especially if we focus on the ones (Miller, Strider, Peralta) who are truly on Taillon's level in terms of being able to mow down opponents in clean innings. As Twins fans can tell you about López and Brewers fans will say about Peralta, though, it's also a list of frustrating pitchers. They tantalize. They clearly have the ability to be aces, but often, they fall short of that goal, and it's because of their inability to get out of tough innings expeditiously.

Yes, luck and defense contribute to the ability to do those things, but so does the ability to avoid throwing the ball down the middle in spots when opposing hitters might be particularly disposed toward aggressiveness at the plate. So, too, does the mental toughness to shake off a bad break or a costly bobble. Taillon has to get better in those aspects, or he'll continue be a pedestrian mid-rotation starter, despite the capacity to be something better and more valuable to the playoff-hopeful Cubs.

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[mul21]

EV on the hits that inning: 84.5, 89, 72.4 (double), and 98.6. Exactly one ball that qualifies as hard hit.  I'm not sure you can glean anything from it.