Command Lapses Could Rule Matt Stites Out for 2015 Bullpen

When (former!) GM Kevin Towers moved struggling starter Ian Kennedy before the trade deadline in 2013, he obtained a player that filled a need in a contending team’s bullpen: Joe Thatcher. But Matt Stites also came over in the trade to Arizona to even out the value in the trade, and so far, his 6.11 ERA in 28 innings have left something to be desired. Stites certainly has not been quite as bad as the ERA would suggest, but if you think of 4.79 as replacement level, neither his Fielding-Independent Pitching mark (5.69) or his 4.51 SIERA make him look good.

It’s more than a little unfair to pick on Stites just after a stinker performance yesterday in San Francisco (0.2 IP, 3 hits, 3 walks, 3 ER), but now that he’s been with the club for nearly a half season, we can start to draw some conclusions about who he is now and who he might be in 2015.

Assuming Towers no longer has enough influence to successfully campaign for a veteran free agent reliever this offseason, most members of the 2015 bullpen appear set. There’s Addison Reed, who’s going nowhere (and not necessarily nowhere fast, as he’s done well lately). Oliver Perez is also likely to have a featured role. All Evan Marshall has done is improve this season, and the D-backs would be hard pressed to leave him out in the spring. Randall Delgado and (less likely) Josh Collmenter could also end up with spots in a 7-man relief crew, and there’s a good chance Daniel Hudson will at least start the 2015 in the bullpen. Another lefty is also likely to make the bullpen to start the season, whether it’s a free agent, a suddenly effective Eury De la Rosa, a returning Matt Reynolds, or a converted Andrew Chafin.

Brad Ziegler may be more of a dice roll at this point, unfortunately. His recent knee surgery involved microfracture, a procedure only undertaken if there is a part of the bone in the knee joint that’s completely missing cartilage. Surgeons use microfractures — really, punctures of the bone — to get some stem cells in the bone to ooze out and form kind of a fake (and not nearly as effective) cartilage. What’s worse, some surgeons believe that the procedure can make it more difficult to use allografts (grafts of cartilage from the same person’s body) to make up for the lost cartilage down the road. From injury analyst and friend of the site Stuart Wallace:

.@InsidetheZona Yes – the biggest comp for Ziegler will probably be Derek Holland and his return. Tough break for him and the #Dbacks

— Stuart Wallace (@TClippardsSpecs) September 10, 2014

Still, with Reed, Perez and Marshall having locked down spots, and with Hudson, Delgado, a lefty and probably Ziegler penciled in for 2015 Opening Day, someone who might be deserving of a spot could be left pitching for Triple-A Reno.

It’s possible that both De la Rosa and Reynolds could be in the mix, with Bo Schultz also expected to stay with the major league club in the spring at least until the team’s final cuts. Will Harris has also been better (3.49 FIP) than his bad-luck 5.18 ERA this season would indicate, and Jake Barrett will most likely be ready to contribute. Add to that the possibility that Archie Bradley or a free agent starter could push someone like Vidal Nuno or Chase Anderson out of the rotation…

…and it’s hard to see Matt Stites as a favorite to be in the Chase Field bullpen when the D-backs open the season at home against yesterday’s foes, the San Francisco Giants. It could be that Stites needs to show something in the season’s final weeks.

Fortunately, MLB rules dictate that Paradise Valley High School’s “Bruce” won’t be competition for Stites. After all… well, just look.

Matt Stites may not be having a ton of success right now, but unlike Bruce, he can throw a fastball faster than an Odrisamer Despaigne curveball. In fact, Stites is far and away the hardest thrower to take the mound for the 2014 D-backs.

Of his 481 pitches, Stites has thrown 18 at a velocity of 98 mph or higher. All other D-backs combine for zero other pitches that fast. 51% of Stites’s pitches have been 95 mph or faster — the next-highest percentage on the team is Randall Delgado (6%).

This is really crazy. Despite the limited number of innings he’s pitched, Stites has 248 pitches 95 mph or faster — that’s more than half of the 95 mph or faster pitches thrown by the D-backs this season (53%).

And more and more, Stites has been a fastball hitter. Although about one tenth of his pitches in June and July were changeups (25 of 254), he’s only thrown one since. And for good reason; in July alone, every time that a changeup ended a plate appearance, the hitter got on base (well, does it really count as “on base” if the hitter just trotted around them all on his way back to the plate?).

Stites has stuck with his slider, a pitch that has rated roughly average in terms of pitch value; still, he throws it only 25% of the time or so, a rate that’s actually fairly standard.

The drop in changeup usage has meant an increase in fastball usage for Stites this season, and he’s thrown it 81.5% of the time so far in September (from Brooks Baseball):

The fastball velocity, though, has ticked down just a bit as the season has worn on. He released it at an average speed of 97.27 mph in June, but that speed has declined each month to an average of 96.20 mph in September. One measly mile per hour may not seem like much, but according to sabermetrician MGL, a pitcher’s projection does best if it increased runs per nine (essentially, ERA) by about .3 runs per mph. MGL made that comment with respect to a pitcher who was throwing 96 mph, so I think it may not make a difference whether the pitcher was a hard thrower in the first place.

The error bars in this graph show that even Stites’s max speed in September is no match for the lower end of his velocity in June (again from Brooks Baseball):

39% of Stites’s fastballs have been called for balls this season (more were probably out of the zone, but swung at). From Baseball Savant:

For what it’s worth, when I toggled the velocity limits (without getting too restrictive on sample sizes), the breakdown of events that resulted almost didn’t change at all. There isn’t a whole lot that Stites can do about outcomes from the fastball. He’s hit the middle-middle section of the plate 8.5% of the time this season, and there’s room to say that’s too much — but realistically, that would be tough to change without walking more batters (if you aim for the sides of the plate, it’s going to wonder into the middle sometimes.

Despite his doling out three free passes yesterday, I’m not sure we can call Stites a bad control guy based on walks. Before that appearance, he had a 4.3 BB/9, a rate that is poor for a starting pitcher but not entirely unexpected for a flamethrower in the bullpen.

Still, control can also hurt a pitcher during at bats. That seemed to be on display yesterday, when Stites got ahead of Travis Ishikawa 0-2. Here was the first pitch:

That was called a strike, maybe with no help from Tuffy Gosewisch, whose receiving looked a little too busy yesterday. Compared to where the glove was originally set up, it looks like Stites only barely missed. On the next pitch, however, Stites was asked to sneak one up and in, only to see the fastball fly open and away from Ishikawa:

That’s one way to do it. And so after two pitches, Stites was in a commanding position. But that’s when the wheels started to come off.

Ishikawa fouled off a 96 mph heater up in the zone, but watch what happened on the fourth pitch:

Woof. The fifth pitch was a slider that Gosewisch wanted under the middle of the strike zone — but Ishikawa was never tempted to swing, because the pitch ended up being something Ishikawa could more easily shuffle-kick than put his bat on.

With the count even, Ishikawa then fouled off a pretty good fastball up and away. Finally, Stites made another good pitch at a spot Gosewisch kept calling over and over and over: low and away with the fastball. Stites would have hit the glove, if the ball hadn’t started moving in the opposite direction.

In this at bat, Stites aimed the ball successfully four times, and three times missed the glove completely. The first of those three put him ahead in the count 0-2 because it missed over the plate and Ishikawa swung. But the other two? They were so far off the plate that there was virtually no chance of Ishikawa swinging.

Based on a review of his last few appearances, that seems like a Stites theme. It seems that either Stites gets close to the glove with his pitches (especially fastballs), or… he just doesn’t, at all. There aren’t too many times that he misses by a foot. He misses by six inches or less (just eyeballing it here), or he misses by two feet. Could it be a grip issue?

Let’s hope so, because that means it could be fixable. Either way, Matt Stites is running out of time this season to make a strong bid to stay with the major league team in 2015. Whether he makes the necessary improvements could have huge implications for the 2015 season, because giving opposing teams different looks is absolutely a thing — and the D-backs don’t currently have anyone else like him.