The Sonny Gray Thread

[Griffey012]

Figured I would start a new thread for all discussions about Sonny Gray since the 77 page trade thread was closed up. Anyway, great article from the Athletic (subscription required) and Eno Sarris who was a former Fangraphs writer. If you haven't subscribed to it, I also highly recommend it.

https://theathletic.com/850202/2019/...back-on-track/

A few interesting clips:

About his high spin four-seamer:

“What I did in New York was find out, OK, where do we throw high spin rate four-seamers, where do we throw these?” Gray explained. “You normally want to throw them high, but what happens is that mine doesn’t have that ride, that extra life on the ball, because of the 45 percent spin efficiency on my fastball. So you might not want to throw the four-seam high if your spin efficiency is low.”

Gray talking about his home/road splits in New York

“That’s the question,” Gray said. “It was insane. It wasn’t like two or three starts, either, pretty large sample, with that drastic of a split.”

It caused the pitcher to go to his coaching staff with questions.

“What do you think?” he remembers asking. “Am I nuts? Do you see a difference? What’s the difference? They said, no, you’ve just been unlucky. I was like, ‘that’s bull****.'”

It seems like maybe the Yankees are quite as hip and on top of the player development aspect as we would assume the richest club in baseball would be. My other takeaway is that Sonny Gray might be a pretty easy fix, in fact it seems like the new baseball trend of high fastballs and lots of breaking balls was detrimental to Sonny.

[Rojo Rijo]

Figured I would start a new thread for all discussions about Sonny Gray since the 77 page trade thread was closed up. Anyway, great article from the Athletic (subscription required) and Eno Sarris who was a former Fangraphs writer. If you haven't subscribed to it, I also highly recommend it.

https://theathletic.com/850202/2019/...back-on-track/

A few interesting clips:

About his high spin four-seamer:



Gray talking about his home/road splits in New York



It seems like maybe the Yankees are quite as hip and on top of the player development aspect as we would assume the richest club in baseball would be. My other takeaway is that Sonny Gray might be a pretty easy fix, in fact it seems like the new baseball trend of high fastballs and lots of breaking balls was detrimental to Sonny.

I feel like I've read somewhere how shorter pitchers are more difficult for hitters to get better launch angles on. That should benefit Gray at 5'10. Hopefully his soft contact rate of 19% stays around there but his hard contact rate of 35% gets below 30%, somewhere it hasn't been since 2015, before his injuries.

I'm also guessing that BABIP should regress a bit from last summers .326. Career wise he's .284. Hopefully he's much closer to that this season.

[MikeS21]

Does that article make it sound as if Gray was working out with Johnson and Cothman at Vanderbilt early in the off-season, before he was traded to the Reds? Or has all this work taken place since the trade? At any rate, it appears that Johnson and Cothman have identified a couple issues and Gray seems open enough to try to adopt their ideas.

[Griffey012]

Does that article make it sound as if Gray was working out with Johnson and Cothman at Vanderbilt early in the off-season, before he was traded to the Reds? Or has all this work taken place since the trade? At any rate, it appears that Johnson and Cothman have identified a couple issues and Gray seems open enough to try to adopt their ideas.

I interpreted it as he was working out with them before he was traded to the Reds. But I'm not sure if that is allowed considering Johnson was a pitching coach with another team.

[InsaneinthBrame]

I feel like I've read somewhere how shorter pitchers are more difficult for hitters to get better launch angles on. That should benefit Gray at 5'10. Hopefully his soft contact rate of 19% stays around there but his hard contact rate of 35% gets below 30%, somewhere it hasn't been since 2015, before his injuries.

I'm also guessing that BABIP should regress a bit from last summers .326. Career wise he's .284. Hopefully he's much closer to that this season.

I doubt it would be much better. The Reds are going to be a bad defensive team. Gray's good babip years are based on playing with Oakland with Billy Beane as GM who emphasizes defense (Usually in top 5 in DER or close). Oakland is an ideal pitchers park hard to homer in large foul area. GABP is nothing like that.

[texasdave]

How can a pitcher not know that if he throws a certain type of pitch in a certain location, that the batters are teeing off on it? You need analytics for that?

[Griffey012]

How can a pitcher not know that if he throws a certain type of pitch in a certain location, that the batters are teeing off on it? You need analytics for that?

I think he knew hitters were teeing off his high fastball. The question was "why were they teeing off of it?". You need analytics to answer the why.

[texasdave]

I think he knew hitters were teeing off his high fastball. The question was "why were they teeing off of it?". You need analytics to answer the why.

Why does not matter. Just don't throw that particular pitch.

[M2]

How can a pitcher not know that if he throws a certain type of pitch in a certain location, that the batters are teeing off on it? You need analytics for that?

Once it leaves my hand, it's none of my business.

[westofyou]

How can a pitcher not know that if he throws a certain type of pitch in a certain location, that the batters are teeing off on it? You need analytics for that?

[HammerTime]

Cincinnati Reds
‏Verified account @Reds


Sonny Gray today threw 26 pitches without issue during a live batting practice session.

[Nathan]

Cincinnati Reds
‏Verified account @Reds


Sonny Gray today threw 26 pitches without issue during a live batting practice session.

Remind me tomorrow.

[Griffey012]

Why does not matter. Just don't throw that particular pitch.

Because learning from failure is never useful, eh? Why is certainly important. Big league pitchers everywhere are moving to high spin, high location fastballs with major success, so knowing why it doesn't work for Gray is important to helping him be successful.

He could learn why it was getting teed off of and pick a location that is more appropriate for his variety of fastball based on what he learned. Or he could just do trial and error. I'll take the former as the better method.

[RedsManRick]

How can a pitcher not know that if he throws a certain type of pitch in a certain location, that the batters are teeing off on it? You need analytics for that?

It's oen thing to know that a hung slider or straight fastball down the middle is almost always going to get crushed. It's quite another to differentiate between one guy throwing a 94 mph 4-seamer up in the zone getting swings and misses while another guy throws a 94 mph 4-seamer up in the zone and gets crushed.

Firstly, it can be challenging to differentiate between something that is genuinely not going to work in the long run vs. something that will work but just hasn't been working so far due to bad luck. But even assuming you've established that the current struggles aren't just bad luck, that doesn't mean you understand why it doesn't work. And even if you understand why it doesn't work, you still need to figure out what else you can do that might work. And once you figure out what else to do, you have to develop the ability to actually do that thing consistently. And all that takes time. And during that time, all your results are confounded by noise/variance in both the pitcher's execution of the approach (including health) and the quality and performance of his opponents.

All of that work can be done without analytics. They've been done to varying to degrees of success for 100+ years. But "analytics" helps you capturing information that was previously impossible (or extremely difficult) to capture and to analyze it in a robust, consistent manner than produces answers (or even just ideas) more quickly and with greater confidence.

[klw]

Why does not matter. Just don't throw that particular pitch.

Sure it matters for the future. It may be that batters were teeing off on the high fastball because he always threw that as the first pitch. If they failed to tee off if it was following a slider, then he would know how to use the pitch to make it effective and what to avoid.

For example, sort of the reverse however, years ago I was watching the Expos and Mets at the Big O. Carl Pavano was pitching and every single time he had two strikes on a batter he would throw a slider low and away. Why the Mets kept swinging I don't know. Eventually I yelled out "Here comes the slider" to a hitter with 2 strikes on him. With me and 10 other people in attendance, I am pretty sure he heard me but the dude swung and missed anyway.

Another example: Tony Cingrani
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/analysis...tony-cingrani/