Yu Darvish’s Bad Command Comparables
Last night, Yu Darvish took the mound against the Red Sox, and not surprisingly, he racked up a lot of walks and strikeouts. This is a common trend for Darvish, who has ended 39.6% of opposing plate appearances with a walk, hit batter, or a strikeout. Darvish is the kind of pitcher who succeeds or fails on his own, relying less on his defense than just about any other pitcher in the sport.
It’s not unusual for guys with premium stuff — which Darvish definitely has — to struggle with command early in their careers. However, as Bill Petti showed back in May, normal aging curves for starting pitchers don’t show a drastic improvement in command. Is it any different with high walk, high strikeout guys who simply need to learn to harness their stuff? Or, to put it another way, have other Darvish-like starting figured out how to throw strikes and take advantage of their velocity and movement?
To look at this, I applied the new filters available on the leaderboard to restrict the list to guys who matched three variables – walk rate, strikeout rate, and fastball velocity. Since we’re relying on velocity as an input, that means we can only look back to 2002, so our sample is smaller but we’re more likely to get a better match in terms of stuff, so that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. To come up with a list of guys who have had similar seasons to what Darvish is having now, I filtered using a minimum of 100 IP, 12% BB%, 20% K%, and FBv of 91.0 mph. While Darvish is well above the 20% strikeout mark, we do want to account for the fact that strikeout rate has been trending upwards, and so slightly lower K% in prior years were similar in terms of difference to league average. The list of names who match those inputs aren’t all that flattering.
Those filters return 14 seasons, but three of them belong to 2012 pitchers — Darvish, Francisco Liriano, and Edinson Volquez — which doesn’t really help us in understanding how pitchers like this develop in later years. Eliminating those three leaves us with the following 11 seasons, with Darvish’s 2012 left in for context.
| Season | Name | Age | IP | BB% | K% | ERA- | FIP- | xFIP- |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Clayton Kershaw | 21 | 171 | 13.0% | 26.4% | 69 | 75 | 91 |
| 2006 | Carlos Zambrano | 25 | 214 | 12.5% | 22.9% | 73 | 88 | 94 |
| 2005 | Daniel Cabrera | 24 | 161.1 | 12.2% | 21.9% | 104 | 94 | 94 |
| 2012 | Yu Darvish | 25 | 134 | 12.4% | 25.8% | 106 | 87 | 94 |
| 2009 | Jonathan Sanchez | 26 | 163.1 | 12.4% | 24.9% | 103 | 100 | 98 |
| 2006 | Daniel Cabrera | 25 | 148 | 15.7% | 23.7% | 103 | 92 | 102 |
| 2005 | Scott Kazmir | 21 | 186 | 12.2% | 21.3% | 88 | 88 | 102 |
| 2003 | Oliver Perez | 21 | 126.2 | 13.3% | 24.4% | 135 | 122 | 103 |
| 2011 | Edinson Volquez | 27 | 108.2 | 13.3% | 21.3% | 145 | 135 | 106 |
| 2008 | Daisuke Matsuzaka | 27 | 167.2 | 13.1% | 21.5% | 64 | 90 | 107 |
| 2008 | Oliver Perez | 26 | 194 | 12.4% | 21.3% | 101 | 111 | 110 |
| 2005 | Oliver Perez | 23 | 103 | 14.9% | 20.6% | 140 | 149 | 124 |
You’ll note a couple of repetitive names on there, as Daniel Cabrera and Oliver Perez both had multiple seasons that fell within the bounds of this type of year, so we’re not dealing with 11 unique pitchers. However, the fact that both show up on the list more than once illustrate the fact that neither really conquered their command problems as a starter. And neither did most of the other guys on the list.
Kershaw is obviously the huge success story, as he went from a 13% BB% as a 21-year-old to a 6% BB% as a 23-year-old, and has established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball despite early problems throwing strikes. He is what people hope for when they see a guy with bad command of good stuff.
But the rest of the list essentially serves as a cautionary tale. Zambrano had a nice career as a quality starter, but he never really got past his inability to throw strikes. He only managed to get his BB% below 9% in one season — last year, at 8.8% — but also posted his lowest K% in that same season, and his career best K/BB ratio in any year was 2.35. He had a four year stretch where he was extremely good despite mediocre walk rates, so he’s an example of how a pitcher can be effectively wild, but his command problems have stuck around for most of his career.
The rest of the list is essentially filled with guys whose command and health issues kept them from consistent production. Cabrera, Kazmir, Perez, Sanchez, Volquez, and Matsuzaka all had individual seasons where they were effective despite the walks, but none of them ever put together long stretches of success, nor did they develop into guys who could throw strikes with consistency. Whether we can learn anything from the fact that all of these guys had arm problems is still an open question — it would make logical sense that one significant mechanical issue could lead to both high walk rates and a propensity for injuries, but we don’t know enough about biomechanics to substantiate that kind of claim.
With only eight “similar” pitchers in the last 10 years, we shouldn’t be making any kind of definitive claim about whether Darvish can overcome his command problems. That said, given the Rangers investment, they probably would have rather seen a better success rate than two for eight, with only one of those two successes actually becoming a strike thrower. Unless Darvish is Kershaw 2.0, it seems like his problem finding the strike zone might not be so easily fixed.
So Oliver Perez is his future?
Is there any way we can compare O-Swing% against Darvish while he was in Japan to this season in the MLB? If they are significantly different, one possible take-away is the implication that MLB hitters are more patient or have significantly better pitch recognition than NPB hitters. If NPB hitters constantly swung at bad pitches form Darvish, it could explain a lot. I would posit that there is a profile of a pitcher who doesn’t have the truly premium stuff to get whiffs in the zone, but has good enoughstuff to fool lower level hitters out of the zone and thus present the illusion of potential dominance at higher levels.
trevor bauer?
Precisely
Jeremy Hellickson?
i have been saying this the whole time! hooray someone else gets it.
His owners will have to hope he’s still getting used to the differences from Japan. He showed real nice control in Japan and a sick K/BB rate there for years.
What changes he’s dealing with this season:
-different league, culture, hitters, etc.
-different baseball(size of ball)
-mount height? -I don’t know…just wondering if it’s different
-one less day of rest between starts
The very good control and command he displayed for years as the best player in Japan leads me to believe he’s got a much better shot than most pitchers to improve his command the next season The amount of change he’s had to adjust to this year could be a big factor…if he doesn’t show improvement in ’13 though, it probably will never be all that great.
I can’t source it, but I believe NPB recently changed the ball to match MLB regulation size. However, it is still made with horse hide instead of cow hide, and it still has higher seams.
He throws a lot harder than most Japanese pitchers, so hitters would be more aggressive in an effort to not get down in the count.
Very good study. Thank you.
In my mind, the ultimate success story for a guy finally harnessing his stuff is Randy Johnson. For fun, I looked up his stats: he “peaked” in 1991 with a 17% BB% and a 25.6% K%. He turned it around in 1993 at age 29 with a 9.5% BB% and a 29.5% K%. Then he just kept improving until 2004 (age 40) with a 4.6% B% and a 30% K%.
So clearly we just need to give Darvish another 12 years to develop. Legend has it that Johnson’s mechanics were fixed by a suggestion from Nolan Ryan, so maybe he can work some magic with Darvish, too.
There will never be another Randy Johnson. If he is your comp, then you might as well pack it in.
If something has happened before in baseball, it will probably happen again, even something like a 40 game winner. For instance, 100 years from now it seems feasible enough that medical advancements will allow teams to not be too concerned about pitching guys even every 3rd day or the like. For similar reasons, it may also become common for particularly skilled players to have 30-40 year careers, or more. Who knows how the game will change in the future to allow for easily breaking old records which today are considered unbreakable or stats considered unachievable?
In this specific case, what makes you think another guy couldn’t come along who could stay reasonably healthy throughout his career and have a great slider and a great fastball, boosted by how close he releases to the plate, as well as develop impeccable command? Pitchers of Johnson’s caliber don’t come along every day, but they certainly aren’t even once in a lifetime, let alone once ever.
Considering how very few non-unique successes being discussed so far — and perhaps, one might argue there are no non-unique ones here — we’re probably looking at something rather unique anyway, if Darvish will succeed at all. Of course, Darvish is already clearly a rather unique case anyway as he’s a 25-yo import from Japan w/ the kind of stuff (and past successes) he has.
It’s not like we regularly see young pitchers of Kershaw’s caliber succeed the way he has (or Zambrano for that matter).
Still, one problem w/ trying to comp RJ (or even Kershaw or Koufax to name another) is he’s a lefty. I don’t know of any particular study offhand — and haven’t dug into it myself — but perhaps, hardthrowing lefties tend to take longer to develop than hardthrowing righties. IF that’s really the case, then that’s sort of one more strike against Darvish’s chances relative to someone like Kershaw (or RJ or Koufax). Then again, those lefties didn’t need to go thru the exact same transition that Darvish has to right now, so…
All that plus RJ is a freakishly tall (for a pitcher) to boot. For someone like RJ to “succeed” (wrt control/command), it’d almost certainly take a good deal more development than usual anyhow…
One cherry-picked example is meaningless.
I’m wondering why you chose to include fastball velocity in this analysis. Would the results be any different if you had only used walk rate and K rate? I just think that using only those 2 variables might elicit a larger sample that might be more conclusive. As it stands, the Rangers can’t be too happy with the results.
On the other hand, Randy Johnson’s another guy who emerged as a star after beginning his career pretty erratic.
Presumably, he was trying to filter for “stuff” pitchers. I doubt it changes much if you look at guys who can’t throw hard.
The real question here is will Yu Darvish be the one who finally forces MLB teams to wise up and stop throwing tens of millions of dollars at NPB All Stars? According to reports I’ve read, scouts say NPB baseball is somewhere in that High-A to AA level of baseball. Would any GM in baseball give a 24 year old dominating in AA a $100MM contract? Would they even give that player a $10MM contract? At some point even the “it just takes one” rule of free agency isn’t going to apply to these guys right?
I’m in this line. The only player I can look to and say, “he’s probably worth 100MM” is Ichiro. He was worth that, whatever the M’s paid to get him here and keep him for his HOF caliber career was worth it.
What about Hiroki Kuroda? He’s been nothing but successful in the Major Leagues. Maybe not worth the hundreds of millions or whatever, but he sure can get guys out.
This isn’t just and NPB problem, though. $100M pitchers are just a very, very poor investment, whether they’ve played in Japan or the US.
Kuroda was also a fringe player in the NPB who wasn’t expected to have much success in MLB.
The Dodgers gave Kuroda 40 million dollars for 3 years of service(his first contract)
Pretty sure they thought he would be a decent investment.
Doesn’t the recent experience with Cuban players answer this question “yes”? In a true free market, I think a guy with Darvish’s numbers in AA could well get around a $100M contract.
If Trout, Strasburg, and Harper were all available as pure free agents instead of being subjected to the draft, I’ll bet they all could’ve gotten contracts in that range.
Maybe not Trout bc he didn’t have as much pre draft hype.
You’d have signed Harper to a 5 year, $100 contract? And hoped to get 3-4 years at the majors from that?
I think there is a very siginificant error in your reasoning, you may argue that the NPB’s “overall” level is something like AA ball, that however, does not imply that “all NPB players” are AA level players.
Just put it this way, if Mike Trout starting “this season” was a free agent, would it be crazy to give him 8/100 m ?, obviously not, if anything it would be a huge steal, but by your logic if AA = NPB, then they shouldn’t.?
You could make the arguement that he was 24 years old and not 19…. except that Yu Darvish also dominated the NPB at age 19-20 .
You could use the AA = NPB rational yes, but that rational should lead to the conclusion that NPB stars should be viewed as prospects, some are not going to pan out nearly as well as you hope for, while others may exceed expectation (sometimes by a lot) .
See Takashi Saito, he was essentially DONE in the NPB (his last season was injury riddled, ineffective, and he was already 35 years old), when he decided to come over to the US to chase a dream… in the 5 years since he has a 2.22 ERA, a 2.74 FIP. and a 10+ k/9 . in his first season he racked up 3.2 fWAR as a reliever, that level of reliever goes for 10million plus on the free agent market easily.
You have think in two level.
A. give considerablly less penalty for age as you would for a prospect, since they can’t control that .
B. consider how you would pay a top prospect in the minors if he was a free agent.
I saw somewhere that Darvish was the fifth player in the last 50 years to reach 150 strikeouts in his first 21 starts. The others were:
Hideo Nomo
Kerry Wood
Mark Prior
Dwight Gooden
It seems that Darvish keeps unfortunately finding his name linked to players that had much promise, but ultimately unfulfilling careers.
Wow, Strasburg missed by 9 Ks.
Hmmm… Is that a good thing? :-p
None of the others were on serious pitch counts. His k9 is right there with those guys.
Nomo’s career would seem to be a good comp to me.
yes, but a younger Nomo would be pretty awesome. Nomo was already kinda in decline in the NPB when he left.
“Would any GM in baseball give a 24 year old dominating in AA a $100MM contract?”
This is a terrible comparison. If a guy is 24 in AA over here, it means he’s not very good. NPB is the best Japan has to offer, it’s not like Darvish can go to a better league in Japan to prove himself.
And when you combine that with his stuff, yes, the market is going to be very high for that player.
And, personally, I laughed at the nonsense that people like Dave tried to sell us that, oh, Daisuke’s hype was just hype, Darvish is really that good, and pretending that that wasn’t AT ALL hindsight wrt to Daisuke.
A large part of Daisuke’s hype came from his showing in the WBC against major leaguers. Most of his problem was staying healthy. Staying healthy isn’t an issue only for pitchers coming from Japan or Cuba.
Seems to me that you’d want to at least compare player performance trajectories, not merely single seasons (of “success” and/or “failure”), for this kind of analysis to get anywhere meaningful/useful — and as someone above suggested, you’d probably also want to dig deeper into the underlying numbers rather than the higher level walk and K rates.
Still, it just may be that there’s not a whole lot one can (come close to) figure out w/ this approach given available stats…
I’ve been making the Jonathan Sanchez comp all year, and it seems like it fits a little bit too well.
Hmmm… He too is a lefty though, which may or may not make the comp different enough.
Besides, the other problem here is that Darvish didn’t seem to exhibit any of this problem in the NPB. We’re only looking at a 4-month stretch here after plenty of success in the NPB.
I’d think you need to at least look for some hardthrowing youngsters who at least showed extended control/command success in the minors before running into trouble in the MLB (or AAA perhaps)…
Pre-1993 Randy Johnson would have envied Yu Darvish’s control up to this point. ;-)
Could’ve sworn I posted a comment earlier. Probably forgot to hit submit. Gio Gonzalez only missed this list by 4 outs. Brandon Morrow would be on it if you looked at his first 2 partial seasons combined. And there are quite a few players who started off with control that was poor (10+ BB%) without being quite as bad as Darvish’s this year. Guys like Johan Santana, Matt Cain, Josh Johnson & others. Of course, there were also a few who had that poor BB% who never got beyond serviceable, like Chad Billingsley.
Billingsley should be a point in Darvish’s favor, as he’s posted 3.4 fWAR per 200 innings over his career. Definitely more than “serviceable”, no?
Definitely a semantics issue regarding the word ‘serviceable’, but I’d define it as ‘above replacement’. Billingsley is most certainly that.
You mean “Above average”?
Playing in Texas doesn’t help either, it was always going to be tough for any Japanese pitcher first adjusting to MLB. I know why Texas threw all that money at him, they realize premier free-agent pitchers simply don’t want to sign there and they thought it was a shot at an ace of their own.
I think a good comp for him is Max Scherzer. What do you guys think? Also I’d like an analysis of whether Ron Washington continuously letting Darvish throw 120+ pitches a game is having any effect? A guy not used to having one less day to rest being used this much must be detrimental.
I don’t necessarily mind the Scherzer comp. Both of these guys can absolutely dominate games when they have command of their stuff, but more often than not they turn in less than stellar performances. FWIW, I think Scherzer would be better suited to be a closer. Let him air it out for an inning in a situation where control/command isn’t as necessary. I’m not saying Darvish should close yet, but I think Scherzer should.
But he was throwing more pitches in the starts in Japan, too.
Sheesh, that is not a list any pitcher would like to be on. You hope for the Kershaw, but that seems unlikely.
http://www.baseballanalytics.org/baseball-analytics-blog/2012/4/23/is-yu-getting-squeezed.html
I bet the zone is smaller for younger players. He’ll bounce back soon.
Darvish isn’t getting squeezed so much as getting punished for not hitting his catcher’s mitt. Judging balls and strikes is tough enough, but when the catcher sets up inside and the ball is on the outside corner, it gets even tougher.
Darvish has the stuff to succeed, but that’s true of a lot of guys. Only time and further adjustment will tell.
” only look back to 2002… I filtered using a minimum of 100 IP, 12% BB%, 20% K%, and FBv of 91.0 mph.”
Go back just a couple more years and you find a couple more successful names to add to the list – including Sabathia and Kerry Wood
CC (threw 92-93)
2001 – 22.4 K%, 12.5 BB%, 180 IP
Kerry (threw 93-94)
1999 – 33.3 K%, 12.2 BB%, 166 IP
2000 – 21.9 K%, 14.4 BB%, 137 IP
2001 – 29.3 K%, 12.4 BB%, 174 IP
2002 – 24.3 K%, 10.8 BB%, 94.3 MPH, 213 IP
2003 – 30.0 K%, 11.3 BB%, 94.9 MPH, 211 IP
2004 – 24.2 K%, 08.6 BB%, 94.0 MPH, 140 IP
*arm fell off*
But possibly the single most important player to examine is this;
1996 – 24.9 K%, 14.9 BB%, 108 IP
1997 – 21.0 K%, 08.8 BB%, 192 IP
1998 – 20.2 K%, 10.3 BB%, 220 IP
1999 – 19.7 K%, 11.3 BB%, 194 IP
2000 – 22.5 K%, 10.3 BB%, 226 IP
2001 – 19.7 K%, 11.3 BB%, 234 IP
2002 – 22.5 K%, 12.9 BB%, 145 IP
*arm problems*
Thats a player Rangers fans might even remember — Chan Ho Park — who had a fairly similar arsenal, similar game transition and the same extreme Walk/HBP/K tendencies.
As a Yankee fan I dislike seeing C.C. on a list with two people who’s arms fell off.
I ran a Play Index on starting pitchers with K rates above 7.5 and W rates above 3.75 in their first season (minimum 140 innings). I got 11 names: Mark Langston, Freddy Garcia, C.C. Sabathia, Tim Lincecum, Herb Score, Kerry Wood, Bobby Witt, Ray Culp, Jason Bere, Shawn Chacon, and Tom Griffin.
The upside with Darvish though is better than any of these guys- it’s Koufax and Johnson. The downside is multiple trips to the surgeon. If I was to place odds, it would be 1 in 10 for the upside, 2 in 10 for the downside, 3-10 for continuing as a mediocre pitcher as currently and 4-10 for an above-average major league career along the lines of Langston.
Darvish’s stuff is nowhere in the same league as Koufax or Randy Johnson, that’s a horrible upside comparison. His fastball largely sits at 92-94 and flattens out all the time. His upside is likely the average version of Zack Greinke (discounting his Cy Young year). Both throw several plus breaking pitches without a dominating fastball at times.
His upside is better than Lincecum and Sabathia? Is he going to win Cy Young awards in both leagues simultaneously or something?
Whats this flattens out thing regarding his fastball? His fastball has plus plus movement and is a plus plus pitch. And he has at least two 70 grade offspeed pitches, one arguably 80 grade (slider), with just about every pitch he throws at least plus (60 grade). There are NOT many pitchers who throw that many plus pitches if any.
In fact a large issue in regards to his fastball, is that it has so much movement often it will start well inside the strike zone, but end up way outside by the time it gets to the plate.
At $60M this season, he’s been a steal!
That’s funny if we include all of the posting fee in his first-year salary, but that would also be really disingenuous, so we probably shouldn’t do that.
I’m surprised Bud Norris and Brandon Morrow aren’t on the list.
And Gio Gonzalez.