One of the cooler perks about working here at Baseball Prospectus is that I get to spend time slogging through the literally thousands of pages of data we have in pursuit of interesting angles to write about players in different ways. Some of my favorite corners of the site to kick around are the PITCHf/x leaderboards, which, if you’re unfamiliar, make for highly recommended viewing. Anyway, I’ve recently found myself gravitating toward Put Away % as a tasty little nugget for evaluating how good pitchers are at finishing off batters. It’s a straightforward metric measuring a pitcher’s whiff rate once he gets two strikes on a batter, and while there is naturally a good amount of overlap there with the noted strikeout artists in the game—Clayton Kershaw sets the pace, after all—you can also find some intriguing names popping up in the top 20.
There is of course no set formula for producing well in this situation, but as a general matter of course, the metric works as something of a catchall for pitchers with solid secondary arsenals. So let’s take a little stroll through the weeds and talk about a few less-heralded guys who’ve piqued interest with their demonstrated ability to finish off batters this year. I’m using a 500-pitch minimum to give at least some semblance of size to our sample, though there will admittedly be significant noise with a couple of these guys.
Aaron Nola, RHP, PHI
Nola’s rookie campaign has been stellar pretty much any way you slice it. His DRA has been 28th best among pitchers with at least his 77 innings, while his cFIP checks in 50th. But while he has posted a solid whiff rate thus far in his 13 starts, his sub-8.0 K/9 doesn’t scream burgeoning ace. Put Away % suggests greener pastures may just lie ahead, however, as his 25.2% rate comes in sixth-best of any starting pitcher this season. The curveball has been his go-to in two-strike situations throughout his debut campaign. He drops a hook almost every-other pitch once he gets a hitter to two strikes, and when he does, he generates a ton of swings (seventh-highest rate) and misses (14th).
True to scouting report form, Nola’s called-strike rates also suggest a pitcher who can both command and deceive. He has a high in-zone rate and an extremely low swing rate, and the combination has led to the 10th-best called-strike-to-ball ratio during his time in the league. All of this is to say that Nola checks the boxes of a pitcher who, at least in the early going, appears capable of trending towards the top percentiles of his scouting projections. The lack of a true top-of-the-rotation pedigree may just give you the daylight you need to acquire him in your keeper league on the relative cheap this winter, and as such he makes for a nice target in most formats.
Jonathan Gray, RHP, COL
Gray has been a divisive player in scouting circles since his professional debut, as reports repeatedly suggested that his stuff backed up and the command turned out to be more of a work in progress than pre-draft reports had projected it would be. Fast-forward to the final throes of his rookie season, and while some of the inconsistencies that plagued Gray’s minor-league career followed him right on up to The Show, he also probably deserved a better fate than the 5.53 ERA he’ll wear on the back of his baseball cards forevermore.
On the one hand, he proved far too hittable in the zone and allowed an absurd amount of hard contact to drive his astronomical BABIP. But on the other, he showed a highly intriguing ability to dispose of hitters when he harnessed his stuff. His 23.4% rate of putting hitters away was good for 12th among starters who logged his (admittedly limited) workload, driven by a slider that registered the fourth-best whiff-per-swing rate. It should be noted, however, that a much more pedestrian swing rate against that offering hints at the aforementioned command issues that dogged him during his stint in Denver. Basically, Gray’s debut performance mirrored expectations of a high-whiff, high-WHIP type of pitcher, and in a vacuum that’s the stuff a decent SP3 is made of in a standard mixed format. Unfortunately for fantasy leaguers, Coors Field is not a vacuum, and given the volatility in the profile, you’re probably best served looking elsewhere for your innings and strikeouts next year.
Jerad Eickhoff, RHP, PHI
Acquired in the Cole Hamels deal, Eickhoff burst onto the scene with a quality start in his major-league debut in Miami on August 21st. And outside of a shellacking at the hands of Boston’s rejuvenated offense, he’s been quality in all of his other six starts to date. He currently sits 13th on our list with a 23.2% Put Away rate. He earns the biggest, boldest, and red-letter-est small-sample-size warning of the bunch, but there’s a pretty fascinating driver of his success to date: his slider. That same previously unheralded slider has yielded a crazy 60.9% whiff-per-swing rate, which is the best in baseball for anyone who’s thrown at least 100 of ‘em. It is the best by five full percentage points, in fact. Third-best? Chris Heston at 46.7%, a full 13 percentage points behind. What’s particularly notable about his performance with the pitch has been the lack of raw material. It turns out that the offering was unheralded through his ascent for a reason, as it’s a short break with little vertical drop. Extremely limited two-plane movement, in other words, and not a pitch that looks like it should be performing at an elite level. The pitch has a shape roughly akin to the versions Colby Lewis, Matt Garza, and Kyle Gibson throw, and Gibson’s 41% rate is tops among that troika.
What Eickhoff has done exceptionally well with the pitch, however, is command it. Again it’s worth reiterating the extremely small sample size here, but he’s shown himself impressively adept at starting the slide piece against right-handed hitters in the outer lower quadrant and sweeping it out of the zone for a chase. So while it is still unlikely that the offering has enough bite to ultimately play as a cornerstone pitch for Eickhoff, the exceptional command of it that he’s shown at the dawn of his big league career should at least raise an eyebrow for managers in deep mixed or NL-only leagues.
Patrick Corbin, LHP, ARI
A semi-popular draft-and-stash target last spring as he made his way back from Tommy John surgery, Corbin provided solid value to those who committed a DL slot to him for the first chunk of the season. Of particular note in his 15 starts has been positive migration in both his strikeout and, surprisingly for a pitcher so recently off the shelf, his walk rates. On the one hand, his control has at first glance shown the requisite signs of rust you’d expect, as his first-pitch strike rate is down about 8.5 percentage points from where it was in his breakout 2013 season. On the other, hitters haven’t exactly forced him into the zone, as he’s currently rocking the seventh-best out-of-zone chase rate of any starter to log his 77 innings.
He has morphed into much more of a four-seam/slider pitcher this year, and the latter has been his primary weapon when he gets hitters to two strikes. And while his overall swing-and-miss rate is down a bit from his last healthy season, it’s not his slider’s fault. He currently sits 18th in Put Away %, in large part because he’ll go to that pitch twice out of every five with two strikes—and when he does, he generates a top-20 amount of fruitless swings. Overall, the early returns on Corbin this season have been extremely positive, and if the slider continues to play at the level it has he’ll be a good bet to reproduce this year’s roughly 8.0 K/9 and slot into the middle of your rotation for 140 or 150 innings next year.
Raisel Iglesias, RHP, CIN
As some of you who’ve read my columns in the past may be aware, I have a blind spot when it comes to Cuban hurlers who work off varied release points. Hey, the heart wants what it wants, what can I say? In the case of Iglesias, however, the blind man may just see a little bit after all. His 22.3% rate of putting hitters away with two strikes rates 19th among starters, and most impressively, his whiff rate climbed significantly as the season went along despite his recent history of working as a reliever in Cuba. After he backed off using his slider in May and June, the rise in his strikeout rate corresponded with a tamping down of four-seam usage in favor of additional secondary deployment in the second half of the season.
In particular, he started going to his slider more frequently, especially with two strikes. That turned out to be a very good thing, as he generated the 11th-best rate of whiffs per swing with that pitch. Well, really those pitches is a more appropriate way to phrase it, as he showed three distinct arm slots when deploying the pitch. Personal biases aside, the Reds appear as though they may just have found themselves a solid rotation asset going forward, and if you snagged him off the wire this year in pretty much any format you may have done the same.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now
As for adjustments, they're are a part of baseball regardless of initial success or failure. In most cases with young pitchers that means adjusting to what isn't working for you against the best hitters in the world. Ultimately it's obviously up to each of these guys to make appropriate ones, but again I think it's worthwhile to look at some of the cases where that initial burden of adjustment is on the hitters.