Daniel Palencia Figured Something Out Late in 2024, and Could Emerge as a Relief Ace in 2025

[Matthew Trueblood]

The fire hydrant-shaped flamethrower was unpardonably inconsistent early last season, perhaps because he wasn't fully healthy. Late in the summer, though, something clicked.

Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

It doesn't require a bunch of squinting and fancy explanation to identify Daniel Palencia as a potentially elite relief pitcher. He throws a fastball that sits on the high side of 98 miles per hour and ratchets all the way up past 102 when he gets really juiced up—and Palencia seems to be juiced up almost all the time. He also has a nasty slider and a splitter that bedevils hitters, when he can properly set it up and execute it. All the elements of one of the game's best high-leverage arms are present.

Throughout his young big-league career, however, that relentless energy has tended to do Palencia more harm than good, because he's often so intense as to be somewhat out of control. That can't all be chalked up to mentality or emotions, of course. Struggling to throw strikes is an occupational hazard of throwing hard, just as injury risk is. Nonetheless, it's true: Palencia has been more exciting than honestly effective since coming to the big leagues in the middle of the 2023 season. He's made 47 appearances, with an ERA of 5.02. He's walked 13.8% of the batters he's faced.

When you watched Palencia pitch early last season, it looked like he might never find the consistency of release point and movement to be a viable big-leaguer, despite the explosiveness of the stuff. In fact, if you looked closely and knew what a fully functional Palencia looks like, you could tell that the stuff wasn't even as explosive as it ought to have been.

That's a 99-mile-per-hour fastball, but it's also a bad pitch. Palencia's body is extraordinarily powerful and he generates incredible arm speed, but there's very little control over where the ball is going or how it moves, because he's cutting it loose from an angle and at a degree of arm extension where most of his major muscles can have only a vague effect. He threw it 99, but without either life or command. When Palencia is at his best, he throws with better hop on the ball than that—and it comes in harder than 99.

Two stints on the injured list quickly affirmed what you could guess when watching him: Palencia's shoulder was not fully healthy. He struggled to maintain a release point and to keep his arm angle up where it works best, because of that functional deficiency. Across 18 appearances before his second absence, Palencia pitched 25 innings. He struck out 37 of the 116 batters he faced, but he also walked 18 of them, and he allowed 22 runs (20 of them earned), dividing that time between Chicago and Triple-A Iowa.

Upon his return in late June, though, Palencia was finally fully healthy and able to move the way he does best. Once he had cleared that physical hurdle, his release point grew more consistent. Then, in mid-August, he made a further change to raise his arm angle, and that further tightened up his release point.

This change is not about having moved over on the rubber. As you can see, Palencia's release point moved toward the center of the mound, but he was already working from the first-base side thereof before the change. The adjustment was purely about his delivery, and how he made his arm action slightly more compact. 

In the middle phase depicted above, from late June through Aug. 10, Palencia was markedly better than he had been while muddling through the shoulder fatigue early on. He had a 2.92 ERA in 11 appearances, all in Triple A. He struck out 19 of 56 opposing batters, and he didn't allow a home run. He really locked in thereafter, though. Once he firmed up a new arm slot, he finished with 14 outings in which he faced 69 batters, fanned 28, and didn't allow a homer, while holding opponents to a .573 OPS—all despite being jerked around a bit, called up twice and sent right back down.

You can see changes in Palencia's movement along the same dividing lines.

Splitters tend not to work well from low arm angles, and indeed, when Palencia raised his arm angle, he got more confident and effective in his deployment of the splitter. His fastball also gained rising action, and velocity. As a result, he missed more and more bats. Most importantly, once he found that release point, he was around the strike zone much more consistently than he had been before that.

Season Segment	Fastball Vel.	Fastball IVB	Fastball Whiff%	CompLoc%
I	97.9	15.2	30.6	79.8
II	99.2	15.8	32.3	76.8
III	99.7	16.4	38.5	82.4

(In this table, competitive locations are any within 18 inches of the center of the zone.)

Here's what Palencia looked like in September, throwing 101 instead of 99, with hop at the top of the zone.

The change in arm angle is subtle, but it's there. Compare their arm positions at release in the two examples given here, and you can see it:

Again, though, the difference is small enough that it could almost be random variation. No pitcher perfectly repeats their delivery every time, after all. Helpfully, thanks to Statcast, we can measure pitchers' arm angles directly on a pitch-to-pitch, outing-to-outing, and month-to-month basis. Doing so with Palencia tells the story pretty clearly. 

Those numbers are a bit of an abstraction, though. Here's a comparison of Palencia's arm angle to his Cubs teammates, in both his early-season stint in the majors and his late-season ones.

From small things, in pitching, big things soon come. Palencia made a fairly small change, made possible by getting fully healthy after a spring marred by arm trouble. It paid off in a huge way, and now, it's fair to hope that a healthy Palencia can come back in 2025 and deliver dominant relief work throughout the season. To be sure, he has the strikeout stuff every team craves at the back of their bullpen. He might still walk more than an ideal reliever would, but he has the raw stuff to prevent hard contact in addition to racking up whiffs. His 2024 season was a half-disguised breakout, and Palencia is as valuable as any piece in the team's prospective relief corps heading into this offseason.

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[Development DL]

Is the delivery change initiated by a timing change in the lower half ? Do you have a background in Bio Mechanics ?   You use data , with images to reverse engineer a hypothesis.   I have always enjoyed your work , but in  the past year , it seems to be even more insightful.  Thanks 

Edited November 26, 2024 by Development DL

[Bertz]

There's a really tough line to walk with this team between continuing to add depth to a unit that got severely exposed last April/May and adding filler that blocks potential impact arms like Palencia.  It's not too dissimilar from adding to the lineup actually.

The current bullpen group is one or two arms short, depending on the quality of the first arm added. If you add one impact arm (Clay Holmes?), it feels like aside from the normal minor league free agents you can probably call it a day.  If you skimp on that top guy, let's say you end up with Jose LeClerc because I saw someone on Twitter stumping for him, I think you *need* another arm beyond him.  That has the knock on effect of making it tougher to incorporate a Palencia or a Neely.