A Report Card on Kyle Hendricks's First Start of 2024

Desperately looking for something to feel good about after a frustrating loss on Thursday, compounded with the news of Justin Steele’s placement on the injured list, I'm sure the Chicago Cubs were looking for a vintage Kyle Hendricks performance on Saturday night. Unfortunately, it didn’t go the way they had hoped: Hendricks was pulled in the fourth inning after giving up five runs (all earned) on nine hits and two home runs. The Cubs eventually lost the game, 11-2.

Plainly, Hendricks was not good enough. He walked 9.5 percent of the hitters he faced, and struck out the same number. This after a 2023 season in which he struck out 16.1 percent of the hitters he faced and walked just 4.7 percent. The .467 BABIP that he allowed will come down, but it was justified: he allowed a 41.2 percent hard-hit rate. Again, for context, that figure was 24.9 percent for the veteran righthander just last season.

But, since we are all desperate for something to feel good about, I am going to attempt to provide it. According to Pitch Info data at FanGraphs, the soft-tossing Hendricks averaged 88.2 mph on his four-seam fastball, and 88.6 mph on his sinker. He’s never averaged 88 mph for a season with both pitches since 2016, when he led all of baseball in ERA and finished third in the National League Cy Young voting.

Hendricks’s velocity actually ticked up a bit to end last season. He averaged 88 mph with his sinker and his four-seamer in seven of his final 10 starts. His ERA in those seven starts was 3.29. Sure, the control was not there in his season debut, but it is a really good sign for the rest of the season that the velocity was there.

Now 34, Hendricks is at an age when a lot of pitchers start to lose velocity quickly. For someone who has always been one of the slowest-throwing pitchers in baseball, a decline in velocity is a much greater concern than it would be for, say, Max Scherzer, who has very slowly been losing velocity for about five years now, but maintains effectiveness since he can still sit at about 94 mph. (And because he is Max Scherzer, but the point remains.)

Control, on the other hand, tends to age much more gracefully. Using Location+, which measures a pitcher’s ability to put a pitch in the right place, we can see that Hendricks has been hovering in the 102 to 110 range for the past four seasons. In this case, 100 is average, so I have full faith that Hendricks can right the ship and return to form in this department.

One other small note on Hendricks from Saturday night. Sahadev Sharma reported in the preseason that Hendricks had been playing around with a new grip on his curveball. According to Sharma, Hendricks had very good reactions to his curveball this spring, and was considering using it more often this year. His curveball usage had fallen from a career-high 16.6 percent in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, all the way to a career-low 3.5 percent last season. He didn’t throw any curveballs the first time through the order, and I got really excited when his first pitch to Marcus Semien to begin his second time through the order was a curveball, but he only ended up throwing one more, and both ended up breaking outside for balls. 

A two-pitch sample size is not nearly enough to go on, so I won’t bother getting into the pitch shape of the curveball and if it was really different. This is just something else to watch for, in addition to the velocity, going forward. Yes, Hendricks was bad on Saturday night. But there were still some good signs that he can right the ship and be an effective pitcher. Hopefully that happens very soon, because with the pitching staff starting the season as banged up as it is, the Cubs really need Hendricks to be good right now.