Rubbing Mud: Who Gets Credit For Happ?

J.A. Happ has been great since being traded from the Mariners to the Pirates at the end of July. By now, there’s no way that’s news. The Pirates are one of the biggest stories in baseball, and Happ’s stabilizing effect on the back end of their rotation has been a big part of their sustained success down the stretch. He’s fanned 27 percent of opponents and walked fewer than four percent since arriving in Pittsburgh, and he’s posted a 2.04 ERA in 10 starts. Thanks to his new pitching coach's excellent track record and the pretty picture Happ’s breakout helps to paint, Ray Searage is coming in for some love again. He’s been credited with taking a fringe starting pitcher and making a co-ace out of him. Searage is genuinely great, so good for him. By all accounts, he’s earned this praise, if only by reviving the careers of A.J. Burnett, Francisco Liriano, and Edinson Volquez within the last few years. When it comes to Happ, though, Searage might be getting a little too heaping a helping of the congratulatory cake.

Last season was the third in a row in which Happ was worth roughly half a win in a significant (though not enormous) number of innings.

J.A. Happ, DRA WARP, 2012-14

The huge majority of that time was spent with the Blue Jays. Happ had been worth even less (in over 150 innings) for the Astros in 2011. Despite a deceptive delivery that had facilitated a good rookie season in 2009, and despite average (maybe even a bit better) stuff for a left-handed starter, Happ was a spare part. He was traded to the Mariners over the winter in a deal that showed he still had some value on the market, but Seattle was something of a last chance for him.

Before dealing him away, the Blue Jays gave Happ something important. As Happ was struggling through September at the end of an injury-riddled and disappointing 2013 season, John Gibbons and Jays pitching coach Pete Walker proposed a change to the way Happ had been doing things for as long as he’d been in the majors. They asked him to try throwing from a lower arm slot. They liked what they saw right away with that change to his delivery, and Happ reported greater comfort with each of his three most important pitches (four-seam fastball, changeup, curve), but the breakout didn’t come in 2014. Dropping his arm slot was an important change for Happ, but it was hard to tell how important at the time of the trade this winter, because the results to match his improved feeling about things weren’t yet there.

The main problem in 2014 was that left-handed hitters teed off on Happ in a way that they never had before, and in a way that more or less prevents a left-handed pitcher from having much success. In 140 plate appearances, lefties hit .268/.345/.528 against Happ. He was missing bats, but walking too many, and the amount of power same-handed batters were able to generate off of him was alarming. The culprit: too many pitches left up in the zone over the outer half of the plate.

As the season wore on, Happ threw his cutter to lefties less and less often, and his curveball more and more. That was the right idea, because it was the cutter that was too often finding its way to the middle of a good lefty hitter’s happy zone. The problem with the change was that Happ’s curveball wasn’t a strike even out of his hand. He was successfully burying it low and away, but hitters weren’t chasing it.

Whether it was the suggestion of a Mariners coach or Happ’s own idea, the plan for fixing that problem was apparent from the first time Happ took the mound in 2015.

These are the average release points for Happ’s four-seam fastball for each of the last four years. The highest and furthest left is 2012. The small dot is 2013. The next dot over is 2014 (where you can see the drop in his arm slot show up). And the right-most point is 2015. Happ isn’t over on the extreme first-base side of the rubber or anything; he’s starting his delivery from almost the same place at which he used to start. Once he gets going, though, he has a less linear, more cross-body delivery. His stride foot is landing further toward first base, as though his destination were the left-handed batter’s box, whereas he used to take aim pretty directly at home plate.

That change has helped create more deception and increase the effectiveness of Happ’s fastball and his curve, especially to left-handers. It (or some other change to his delivery to which my inexpert eye is not privy) also helped Happ consistently keep the ball down more, a crucial step for a sometimes homer-prone hurler. The immediate results were good: Happ fanned 82 and walked only 31 in the first four months of 2015. The surface-level numbers weren’t pretty, but part of the problem was just batted-ball luck. In 106 PA against left-handed hitters with Seattle, Happ struck out 32 and walked five. He also gave up a .403 BABIP, though, which hurt his overall numbers against lefties, and he was giving up a lot of power against righties.

Being traded to the Pirates really helped Happ tie together some threads of growth and improvement. He’s increased his fastball usage every month of this season (probably as he realized that his adjusted delivery allowed him to hide the ball long enough to make the pitch play up beyond its former efficacy), but that’s really taken off in Pittsburgh. The Pirates have had Happ all but put away his changeup, leaning more on the heater, cutter (to righties), and curve, and they’ve helped him work batters with hard stuff inside in a way he’d never been comfortable doing before. That last part is the Searage signature; the Pirates bust opposing hitters inside and seek groundballs. Happ became a groundball guy almost the moment he made his initial change in arm slot, back in Toronto, and he solidified that during his tour with the Mariners, as they helped him alter his mechanics and consistently get the ball down. What had been missing was the ability to keep mistakes from being meatballs over the outer half of the plate, and the Pirates were the perfect team to fix that.

Give Gibbons and Walker credit for coming up with a great suggestion for Happ. Give the Mariners credit for seeing a second, subtler adjustment that would help Happ realize the full potential of the first change (which had widened his path to success, but hadn’t necessarily moved him further down that path). Give Neal Huntington and the Pirates’ scouts, analysts, and coaches credit for identifying Happ as a pitcher who could gain a special something by coming under the tutelage of Searage and company. Most of all, of course, give Happ credit, because it seems as though he has actively sought advice, listened openly, recognized changes that were beneficial to him even absent positive results, and made a dedicated effort to maximize the value of those changes.

And hey, don’t forget that this is two months of a pitcher with an inconsistent 1,000-inning track record suddenly looking like an ace, and that that could be a total mirage. There are a bunch of great reasons to think J.A. Happ’s renaissance is at least somewhat real, but there’s a significant chance that this whole article has been an exercise in bad baseball science. Even if that turns out to be true, though, make sure not to take back the plaudits due to the parties listed above, because Happ’s two-month run is impressive and important, and the people who made it possible did good work. That would be true with or without the results that have made this a story.