The D-backs have set about rotation upgrades with the relentless abandon of Liam Neeson in Taken, signing Zack Greinke and trading for Shelby Miller in the last week without blinking at the cost. But those two pitchers have something in common other than some sweet new uniforms — they both surprised with especially low ERAs in 2015. So low, in fact, that neither is projected to come close to their 2015 performances — and both did better last year than ERA estimators like FIP and SIERA expected. Projections are great tools, and the good saber-slanted analyst would cringe at relying on ERA to target both pitchers. But that’s the crazy thing: the D-backs may be onto something here, something that gives us reason to think both Greinke and Miller can get closer to their 2015 results than projections tell us. Old school meeting newest school.
Here’s what had the baseball internet zeitgeist snickering like Marco from Tropojë:
No, neither pitcher is likely to repeat his 2015 ERA. But for both, their likely 2016 ERA may be a lot closer to their 2015 performance than projection may have us believe. Here are the two ways that could be true:
1. An improvement in 2015 that each pitcher may be likely to repeat. Suddenly do better, and a projection isn’t going to automatically believe that was for controlled reasons rather than luck; there’s a ton we don’t understand about pitching success. The addition of a new, effective pitch or an uptick in velocity (as in getting healthy) would fit here. Improved control and some of the other things we see in developing pitchers could also result in a pitcher getting better in a sustainable way.
2. The pitcher had more control over whether balls in play became hits than we would expect. That’s the whole idea with defense-independent pitching statistics like Fielding-Independent Pitching (FIP): in looking at how well a pitcher actually pitched, it’s often useful to filter out the likely effect of differences in defense (which can be very significant). Some pitchers, though, seem to yield hits more often than average — and others appear to have a “contact management” skill they’re able to repeat.
On the latter point, I’m aware of two basic kinds of things that can cause a pitcher to significantly outperform his FIP. One is causing batters to miss up or down — batted ball rates. There’s a small but significant group of pitchers with ground ball rates so high that they give up fewer hits than expected; if you have a ground ball rate like Brad Ziegler, the ground balls themselves tend to be easier to turn into outs than the average ground ball. On the flip side, there’s an even more exclusive club of pitchers who lean so far toward fly balls that they get an especially high number of easy fly ball outs (including popups); it looks like Silvino Bracho may join that illustrious group.
A second way in which a pitcher can be a good contact manager and reliably outperform FIP is to cause batters to miss in or out. The sweet spot on a bat is really, really small — and hitting the ball with the end or handle of the bat means not hitting the ball as hard. Weak hits turn into outs more frequently, and hard hits turn into outs less frequently. We call this “barreling the ball,” and if you’re able to play with horizontal movement, you might make things a whole lot easier on your defense.
Up/down is something we’ve been able to track for a while: those are the ground ball, line drive, and fly ball percentages we use a lot. But the rollout of Statcast all over MLB in 2015 gave us a new tool: batted ball velocity. And while batted ball velocity is partly a function of swinging the bat hard, it’s also largely a function of “barreling the ball.”
Still with me? Let’s talk Shelby Miller. He made some changes in 2015 that give us some reason to believe that he actually got better, rather than lucky. After that — we’ll get back to this “contact management” stuff.
Shelby Miller: Different in 2015
In his breakdown of the Miller trade, Jeff teased some changes that Miller made in 2015. He changed his pitch mix, and apparently as a result, he went from having a middle-of-the-road batted ball profile to having a fairly high ground ball rate. In Miller’s three full seasons:
In 2013 and 2014, Miller was highly reliant on his four-seam fastball (FF%), and for good reason; Brooks Baseball has him at an average release speed of 94.4 mph on the pitch in 2013 and basically the same in 2014 (actually went up a tick in 2015). Miller got pretty good strikeouts that year (23.4% K%), and he was an industry darling with that 3.06 ERA. In 2014, that just didn’t work the same way. Hitters weren’t missing, and Miller was in more hitter’s counts; his K% slipped all the way to 16.6%, from solidly above average to solidly below average.
Toward the end of 2014, Miller started mixing in a sinker (SI%), throwing it about 10% of the time in the season’s last two months. By 2015, he was using it as if it were a featured secondary pitch, and the cutter (CT%) rose to the same level. Those fastballs replaced four-seam fastballs for the most part, but Miller also backed away from his curveball (CU%). The change in repertoire coincided with a change in hard-hit profile. If you faced Miller in 2015 after last seeing him in the first half of 2014, you faced a much different pitcher:
When we think of an ace pitcher, the kind of pitcher Zack Greinke has been, we’re thinking of strikeout pitchers that are also contact managers that also limit walks. We looked at Johnny Cueto recently, though, and found a kind of contact manager ace, a pitcher who was so good at mixing speeds and deliveries and movement that he ended up very hard to hit. Cueto still throws hard for a starter, but barely above average for a right-hander; only in 2014 did Cueto have a K% better than Miller did in 2013, and he’s spent most of the last four years just above 20% (still quite good). It certainly looked from that research like a formidable trio of fastballs helped him manage contact — sinker much more than cutter — and with so much going on, Cueto’s changeup has been extremely effective (but not thrown particularly often).
Miller went from strikeout pitcher in his first full season to the same kind of power junkballer that Cueto has been. But for the fact that Cueto also throws sliders and Miller’s bender is a little longer and bigger, they’re pretty similar now. Cueto may represent Miller’s extreme upside now that Miller has embraced a cutter and mixed in a sinker with success. Up above, we said there are two ways in which a pitcher might be expected to outperform FIP projections, and the first was doing something different in a sustainable way. We have that; Miller really is really different now, if he keeps along the 2015 track that he started on in the latter half of 2014.
Shelby Miller: Contact Manager
The second thing way in which a pitcher might be expected to outperform FIP projections: do good things in terms of managing contact that FIP is not designed to address. And Miller wasn’t just different last year in a positive, sustainable way; he was good in a way that FIP just doesn’t capture. Miller’s ground ball percentage did rise, and that could keep his home run rate down. But it’s the “barreling the ball” thing that Miller appears to have done in 2015, and it has a lot to do with the new use of the sinker — and especially the cutter.
The WHAV (Well Hit Average) and SHAV (Softly Hit Average) numbers in the table in the last section come courtesy of ESPN Stats & Info, and while that .404 SHAV in 2015 is very, very good, that 2015 WHAV of .109 is positively excellent. Miller’s increased ground ball percentage is probably connected to his drop in home run rate, but the drop in WHAV also contributes to that — and it contributes to less contact turning into hits. At the same time, Miller’s ground ball percentage rose in a big way, if not enough to put him into that club of elite GB% pitchers. Check out how each pitch did along those lines:
None of Miller’s pitches were hit hard; he was on all cylinders here. Sadly, the ESPN database doesn’t distinguish between four-seam fastballs and sinkers, and at any rate those classifications might have been different than those used for the other rows, which come from Brooks Baseball. But, suffice it to say: Miller’s fastballs were excellent, somehow managing very good contact rates at the same time the four-seam got a really great whiff rate, more than one every four swings. The contact rates may be great because of the sinker, which had a high enough ground ball percentage for that to really matter.
Look at that freaking cutter, though. Nearly as high a whiff rate as Miller’s four-seam, and yet the WHAV is incredibly low. The SHAV is very, very high, like Jeremy Hellickson at his absolute best. And in Miller’s middle-of-the-road 2014 season, his curve was nowhere this good — the whiff rate was just 12.4% to last season’s 21.7%. Miller’s curve improved in huge way in WHAV (from .188 to .096), and even in SHAV to some extent (from .444 to .466).
Miller didn’t ride a single pitch to victory in 2015. Everything starts with his fastballs, which were hit hard quite a bit more often in 2014 (.162 WHAV) and even in 2013 (.178 WHAV). This isn’t proof that Miller’s increased use of cutters and introduction of a sinker made his other pitches better — but they were better. It looks like as a result, Miller was a contact manager overall, playing with horizontal movement. The span from the best part of the bat to the worst parts of the bat are something like six inches apart, and the difference between Miller’s sinker and cutter is about eight inches, with similar “rise.” The cutter has the same velocity of the change — which has the same movement as the sinker, just, you know, 7.4 mph slower. You can be right about two of those four pitches’ three attributes (up/down, side/side, speed) and still be wrong enough to hit the ball poorly or miss it entirely.
Batted ball exit velocity data are something we’ve used in this space for hitters, and I think in apples to apples comparisons, those data can shed a lot of light about freaks of nature like David Peralta and Jake Lamb. With pitchers, it’s a lot trickier — a decent chunk of balls in play do not have tracked exit velocity data, and as has been observed by Tony Blengino at FanGraphs, the part that’s left out tends to be on the extreme low end. Since those are great batted balls for pitchers — the ones that great contact managers get more regularly, and that are classified within SHAV — we risk missing the point completely.
Still, what the hell, right? Let’s give it a whirl. Batted balls that are 100+ mph are hits something like 70% of the time, the hitter research tells us. In the 90s, that drops to some .500 batting average or thereabouts; after that it’s nicer to be in the 80s (.250-.300) than the rest (.200-.250), but that’s nowhere near as big a difference. The smaller the colors, especially the top ones, the better and more suggestive of contact management. Red is 105+ mph, orange 100-104 mph, yellow 95-99 mph, and greenish 90-94 mph. And oh my, is it cool to be able to get these from BaseballSavant.com.
The batted ball data that is tracked here supports what the WHAV numbers told us: he got hit hard less frequently than the rest. But there are tons of problems with these numbers; if one of these pitchers had a ton of softly-hit balls that weren’t tracked, that would have the perverse effect of making the colored parts of their graph here bigger. This is just suggestive of the other findings and consistent with them. Here, it definitely looks from the 2015 tracked exit velocity data that Miller has a lot more in common with Greinke than with the D-backs’ front five for most of 2015.
Shelby Miller: Top of the Rotation Starter
Two other important things are ignored in the batted ball data above: strikeouts, and walks. Contact management is just one thing a pitcher can do. The reason that FIP has been useful is that with the basic addition of home run rate, strikeout and walk rates can tell us a ton about how good a pitcher actually is. In terms of walk rate, Miller was merely “pretty good” last year with a 8.5% BB% and 3.20 BB/9, and ever-so-slightly better than that in strikeout rate at 19.9% K% and 7.50 K/9. Those walk rates are enough to make Miller look like a mid-rotation starter — and when we think “#3 starter,” we’re really thinking “slightly above average starter.”
There are reasons to think that Miller will be worse than last year we haven’t even touched here — it’s hard to pitch at Chase Field, where the air and the baseballs may be dry, hot, and thinner thanks to a not-inconsequential elevation. And part of why we we thought Scott Kazmir seemed like a promising acquisition target is that he throws left-handed — over the last few seasons, the pitchers who have beaten expectations have both been lefty, and just about every other pitcher was both right-handed and something of a disappointment. Miller will be fighting both of those things, maybe, although the latter could be different if Colorado does ship a couple of its left-handed outfielders out in trade, as they are rumored to be trying.
One thing we maybe can say: don’t shove Miller’s 2015 season aside like he didn’t earn it. If anything, it looks to me like he probably “earned” a BABIP even lower than .285, and his contact management should have gotten him farther than it did. And the Steamer projection of 1.7 fWAR also seems to be low, both because 2015 may be much more indicative of his likely 2016 performance than his 2014, and because he happens to be the type of pitcher that FIP undervalues, and fWAR is based on FIP.
If Miller is a top of the rotation starter, it’s because contact management pushes him into that category, perhaps as high as the Corbin echelon. That’s pretty damned good, and helpful for any rotation in baseball. Whether Miller can actually repeat as a contact manager is an open question, I think. My read from the data is that it’s at least possible and maybe even probable that Miller reinvented himself as an effective contact manager the way that Cueto did before the 2011 season. Whether he actually does it will be part of the 2016 fun.
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27 Responses to Shelby Miller: Top of the Rotation Starter
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@ryanpmorrison
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In terms of keeping the contention window open past 2019, should the Dbacks consider (and I’m sorry for this blasphemous thought) extending Miller and Corbin, rather than Goldy? It seems like it’s easier to find bargain offense than it is pitching. Would that keep us competitive longer?
I think the best course might be to not extend anyone at all beyond 2017, at least not beyond their current club control years.
Two years from now will be a crossroads. If the run worked and there’s tons of money and it all seemed worth it, the path of trying to keep the team together as long as possible could be the right one. If it doesn’t work, though — that’s when the team may have to seriously consider going into a rebuild mode. Then, they could hit the offseason shopping single, reasonably-priced years of Pollock, Corbin and Miller, three years of Peralta, and even two years of Goldy. Greinke may or may not be in that picture, looking like a Cole Hamels asset at best (2015 edition) or… nevermind. It’d be a tough call, and if the team’s outlook for 2018 wasn’t all that rosy, chances are not all of those guys would be trade assets anyway.
Maybe the team will hold on and keep the Contention Window going, and maybe that will look like the right move. But none of these guys we’re talking about are going to come at much of a discount anyway, with the possible exception of Corbin, and with the exception of signing Castillo for his last two arb seasons all in one go if they can get an option for 2018 by doing so. If the team locks itself into a handful of long-term contracts and needs to trigger a rebuild, they’ll end up being stuck with a few contracts — and they’d be stuck, almost by definition, with the ones that are liabilities.
It never hurts to see what players would be looking to take, but I’d stay away from extending Miller, in particular. Last year was a Miller best-case scenario, and an extension pays him for that. Chase Field means he’s unlikely to get even better than he was last year — and so the team’s bargaining position can, realistically, only get better.
Overall, I think flexibility has a lot more value to this team.
One thing that would help: extensions for players who are NOT extension candidates, like we proposed for Jake Lamb over a year ago. If you can get these guys very early, you can save a lot of money — and that would definitely help the team extend its window if they want to get there (and even though those deals wouldn’t all work, the ones that did would have tons of trade value). Lamb, Ahmed, Bradley, Bracho, Drury, Ray, maybe Chafin. Those guys are all years away from their first real fortune, and all have tons of risk. If you were any of those guys, $10M for 6 years could be tough to turn down (some would).
In terms of ERA and FIP, Steamer predicts that Miller is going to have his worst year ever, and Greinke will have his worst year in the last four. It is probably unrealistic to think that they can match last year, but they should certainly be better than Steamer projections.
Agree, last year is probably not attainable for either of them, but I distrust the projections.
I distrust what WAR said about their 2015 seasons, as well. As contact managers, they were more valuable than their K, walk, and HR rates indicated.
That might seem like cherry-picking, but there are reasons behind it, some fairly rare things that are rare enough for us to use FIP and WAR without amending the statistics themselves. Think Brad Ziegler, who had a 1.85 ERA but a 3.44 FIP last season. He’s got a career ERA of 2.47, but FIP doesn’t see ground balls as much as it could (only does through HR rates, indirectly). Ziegler’s FIP projection for next year is 3.75, per Steamer.
The deeper numbers say Ziegler contributed something like 3 wins last year, but his WAR was 0.6.
To quote Daniel Hudson, “Suck it haters”.
Hopefully that quote is applicable to critics of the Miller trade following 2016, and your article has given me some hope that it will be!
This is baseball, and weird things happen. For all we know, the D-backs will try to take Miller’s cutter away from him like it sounds like they did with McCarthy. And some weird, crazy things happen to pitchers with Arizona. No guarantees.
But yeah, the point is that there IS some hope. Snap guess, I’d say maybe 3.50, 3.60 as the over/under for ERA?
The thing is though, the critics are right, and they’ll be right even if the trade does happen to work out. We can assume any team has a better knowledge of its own players than anyone else, so even if they happen to know, for some reason, that Swanson and Inciarte aren’t as good as everyone else seems to think, they could still have traded this package for a better pitcher than Miller. Someone on the level of Carrasco or Harvey, for instance. And similarly, if Miller happens to beat his projections, that will just be a happy accident. We can’t say that Arizona had some special insight into Miller than the Braves didn’t have.
I don’t think there’s any question that it was a bad value proposition — and I have no doubt that the Braves “won” the trade in that respect. I’m not sure that means it was a bad trade for Arizona, though. Stew says he engaged the Indians on Salazar, and knew for sure this package wouldn’t have done it. If Inciarte and Blair were the chips you determined you could cash, and you were determined to try to make an upgrade using those chips, I don’t think we could say there was a better deal out there, even though it included Swanson.
I also wouldn’t claim the D-backs went beyond scouting and ERA on Miller. I do think that ERA actually says more about Miller than it normally does when there’s a difference between ERA and ERA estimators. Happy coincidence or not, I think Miller’s 2015 happens to say a lot.
Let’s hope that we don’t try to tinker too much with Shelby’s success. The good news is that Shelby already has embraced some the concepts we’ve been pushing on pitchers (probably why he was a high value target). But I’ll be really disappointed if I’m reading in a year that they messed with his approach resulting in poor results.
I endorse every last part of that 100%.
Analyzing trades is a science and art at the same time. So many things in the mix. I remember when my Royals sent Will Myers out and received Shields and Davis, it was the worst trade for me and many at that time. And it turned out amazing. Good luck to Arizona on this one (they will need it)
We can probably just call this one now. KC wasn’t as close to contention then as the D-backs now… at least, I feel pretty confident in that read. It follows that I would credit the FO if they had the same read… and after that, this is kind of a matter of taste. None of these guys have actual prices or all-your-money-back return policies; you’re a farmer with 29 neighbors, and sometimes, most people just don’t have what you need and don’t have a need for what you have. Yeah, you could try to go without the thing you “need” if you can’t get a fair price. But if you didn’t, it’d come down to how dire you thought the need was (will the whole harvest go to waste if you can’t borrow _____?).
“don’t shove Miller’s 2015 season aside like he didn’t earn it. ”
Nice work, and excellent data presentations.
1.) Have you looked to break any of this out by inning ? Not sure if you can access data that allows that. I’m curious why his Late and Close numbers overall, including BABIP, are so horrific the last two years.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/split_stats.cgi?full=1¶ms=clutc%7CLate%20%26%20Close%7Cmillesh01%7Cpitch%7CAB%7C
Also his late and close was pretty bad too
http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/split_stats.cgi?full=1¶ms=lever%7CHigh%20Lvrge%7Cmillesh01%7Cpitch%7CAB%7C
2.) Miller gave up 13 unearned runs. ERA of course is a woeful stat at times. Miller’s RA-9 was 3.59, or 0.57 higher than his ERA. Thats a HUGE gap. His job didn’t end when his fielders made an error, but he was especially poor at limiting the damage.
3.) He’s not good at controlling the running game
Poor performance in Late and Close, allowing too many unearned runs, poor control of running game…..yup
When people look at the long long winless streak I agree
“”don’t shove Miller’s 2015 season aside like he didn’t earn it. ”
He needs to get the mental aspect of the game under control to become a TOR starter….see Greinke, Zack
Didn’t see the late and close thing — and with 20%-30% of batted balls missing exit velo numbers (and most of those weighted in favor of pitcher-friendly events), I hesitate to cut them up even more. I’ll check it out, there might be something in the ESPN Stats & Info database that will help.
Completely confusing this even farther, another thing I missed: strand rate. At BtBS, Nick Lampe found that of 176 pitchers with at least 1,000 innings since 2000, only Kershaw and Santana have sustained a strand rate over Miller’s career 76.9% LOB% (575.1 innings).
Miller did suppress the running game a bit more than the average pitcher (BP’s SRAA), but not SO much more that we can just hang Miller’s strand rate on that. Still, in terms of the mental game, maybe a good sign.
I’m sticking with the working theory that Miller is a contact manager. There’s almost definitely luck in his 2015, but a ton of that, too, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining the strand rate, which wasn’t all that high in 2015 specifically anyway (73.8%). Brad Ziegler kills baserunners with ground balls, but he also gets particularly weak ground balls particularly often, and maybe his great record in the latter has more to do with the weak contact than we realized.
If Miller has this special weak contact skill, it could mean 1) fewer sac fly advances, if they fly balls tended to be closer to the infield; 2) more double plays, if there’s a connection with the Ziegler thing, and because at least fewer of the ground balls would get through; 3) maybe this is nothing or just a few plays, but very weak contact on the ground could also keep a runner on 3B with fewer than two outs.
I’ll check out the late and close thing, but it’s a really small set, less than 10% of his pitching. In 48 PA, the difference between .396 AVG and .292 is only five hits. Maybe the weirdest thing is that 7 of the 19 hits were XBH? Especially two triples… what the hell…
The high leverage numbers you have in the second link raise the eyebrow higher, but if most of the first set is in the second set, I think we’re still talking about 5 hits (and SO/W ratio recovered mostly).
The guy is a far cry from a guarantee, but I like our chances. Even with some Chase Field added in there, seems like a good chance he can be closer to his 3.16 Deserved Run Average in 2015 than his 3.74 ERA in 2014. And if the latter is his worst case scenario, he’s still a strength.
The trade burns, but if I had the chance to reverse it, as I type this, I don’t think I would. We’re close without him, but he might be the cigar.
i need to see more projections before determining how close we are. steamer projections.indicate not as close as many think. see my fan post at.the pit. waiting for zips and others. no time to do my own this year but they are never better than the aggregate of top 3-4 systems anyway. will give you link to post and search i did on similar guys in terms of.era.vs.fip over last 20 years at same age and workload. i need to see it at least one more year to believe that he is a.cuetoesque contact manager. your data ups my confidence.factor a notch but doesnt get.me.to the buy in stage.
I’m with you. Miller will be the first thing I look at when we get ZiPS and PECOTA.
Even though SIERA is an estimator and not a projection, it fares pretty well in predicting next-season performance. We’ll see what happens with PECOTA, but I wonder if Miller’s 3.16 DRA in 2015 still belongs in the projection discussion for now.
Steamer projects a .287 BABIP for Miller, lower than league average but still higher than in any of his individual seasons. And that 1.7 fWAR projection is blind to even that lower (than .298-.300) BABIP; it’s based only on walk, strikeout, and home run rates. I’ll be waiting mostly on PECOTA, I think, which can spit out a DRA along with everything else.
Chances are that Miller is something of a contact manager. That 0.57 HR/9, though, probably can’t happen again, at least not at Chase. One thing I really should have gotten into in this piece is what “top of the rotation” means, anyway. Nearly every RHP has done worse than “we” thought they would with the D-backs within the last few seasons, and most got better after leaving. I’d put the over/under on Miller around 3.50, but in these parts, where would we draw the TOR line?
You and I are pretty close on the over/under. My over under would be about 3.70, so not a huge difference.
Here was that comment I was mentioning. Sorry for long link
http://www.azsnakepit.com/2015/12/8/9869730/snake-bytes-the-winter-meetings-day-2-open-thread?&_ga=1.120694856.1781372869.1437374641#344785601
Lot to like about Miller, the guy has tremendous stuff, and appears to have reinvented himself in a good way. Him and Zach Godley look similiar to me as well, with Miller a little harder thrower.Another reason I would of preferred your Kazmir signing, to this trade, because Godley looked so good. At same time weak catcher, who isn’t go to ambush anybody next year, let alone his lazy feet behind the plate , lost a great lead-off hitter coming into his own. I do like Miller, I just don’t like losing Ender mostly.
i shouldn’t say reinvented, he’s improving himself.
I think that’s justified. He was a pretty good strikeout pitcher, then he was the same guy but not as good, then he was a pretty good non-strikeout pitcher. Plus, he started making those changes in 2014. The repertoire change really could be huge.
My wonder is was it worth it to trade all the players they did when Leake wants to play for Diamondbacks. It might have made more sense to keep everyone (from the trade) and add Leake. Or they should still get Leake not (disregarding La Russas comments) because depth matters and moving a back end arm to the bullpen could only help. Relief pitching is getting rather expensive so being able to make sure Hudson or one of the other guys could help at end of game would be helpful.
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