Bryce Elder Is The ERA Leader That Analytics Hate

how is Bryce Elder leading the national league in Era while having such an ugly looking baseball Savant page pitching obviously involves physicality and athleticism but more than anything I'd argue that it's about strategy now sometimes that strategy is I throw a hundred and my slider moves like a frisbee so good luck but not everybody can get away with that growing up I gotta watch a lot of Jamie Moyer when he was with Seattle this man pitched 25 seasons in Major League Baseball until he was 49 years old with his fastball that last season averaging 79 miles per hour and the reason why Moyer was able to pitch so long in the majors was because despite having not grape stuff he had mastered the art of pitching Moyer was great at mixing up his pitches to keep hitters off balance and putting those pitches exactly where he wanted to meaning that hitters had to hit his pitches where he wanted them to hit them I've talked about pitchers pitches a bunch on this channel already and the reason why these are so important is because on certain pitches as a hitter there's just not much you can do with it you can put as good of a swing as you want on it hit it as hard as you want but the result isn't gonna go in your favor most of the time now Bryce Elder is not a high velocity guy he doesn't have crazy stuff like a lot of the top pitchers that we see in baseball so in order to make his debut last season in 2022 he had to really figure out how to get the top hitters in the world out or more specifically how they're gonna get themselves out Elders fastball only sits at about 90 miles per hour which had him down in the 14th percentile last year and somehow the spin rate on this had him even lower down in the ninth percentile but that part's a little bit misleading see the reason why Elders fastball doesn't have a whole lot of spin on it is because most of the time he's throwing a sinker not a four seamer where you want less spin on it so that the backspin isn't making it fight gravity as much as a four seamer normally does and you know it ends up sinking in 2022 Elder threw a sinker 42 and a half percent of the time followed by his slider at about 27 then the four seamer at about 18 and a half and a change up at about 12. and he used every one of these pitches effectively with all of them having a negative run value with all of his pitches working like this he threw 54 Innings with a 317 era but a 378 Fifth and .8 F War which had him on Pace for just a little bit above your everyday starter kind of production but it's the way that Elder pitches is why we see this gap between his era and his FIP and why the advanced numbers are gonna absolutely hate this guy see Elder had to figure out a way to get the top hitters in the world out when he knew that he couldn't keep them from hitting his stuff with his whiff rate down in the 32nd percentile in 2022 so rather than trying to get a bunch of swing and misses on stuff that he knew wasn't really high-end instead he said all right if they're gonna hit it anyways I'm gonna make them hit it where I want them to and that's gonna be on the ground fifty percent of the time that guys put the ball into play against Elder it was a ground ball so all of these grounders helped him avoid damage and extra base hits because he was avoiding barrels in the 75th percentile now generally with these kind of high ground ball pitchers we see a lot of the times that they end up pitching more to contact which is Gonna Keep the strikeout rate from getting too high but at the same time then it should help the walk rate from not getting too high but this is where Elder really struggled his first season his 10.1 percent walk rate was all the way down in the 20th percentile because he not only struggled with throwing first pitch strikes only about 56 percent of the time but he was also only getting in the zone just over 43 percent of the time but after getting his first taste of the major leagues Elder has made some adjustments heading into his second season here and those mainly start with his pitch mix last season Elder slider had the lowest woba allowed of any of his pitches and for anybody that doesn't know what wolba is basically every offensive result a walk home run single all of that has a run value attached to it that's the average amount of runs that get scored anytime said thing happens offensively all of the values from everything that a guy does get added up and turned into a number that looks like on base percentage and it's meant to be one number that tells you just overall how good a hitter is hitting think I got that so with hitters doing the worst against his slider of all of his pitches that's now become his main pitch in 2023 throwing it almost 39 of the time followed by his Sinker that's down just under 36 percent then the four seamer at about 13 and the change up about 12. now he knew that his fastballs weren't gonna be blowing guys away really so by going with more off speed and throwing the slider as his main pitch he's now gotten a negative 12 run value on that slider so far with a negative three value on the change up both of his off-speed pitches as well as that Sinker are getting guys to just blast the ball into the ground with the highest launch angle against them at five degrees so then it doesn't really matter that on average guys are hitting all of these over 90 miles per hour because they can't get it in the air anyways where it's gonna do more damage and on top of this he's now getting out ahead of guys early getting his first pitch strike percentage up to 60 two percent and he is throwing more strikes up to about 46 percent even though that's still below League average so even though this hasn't really helped him raise the strikeout percentage too much where this has really helped him as dropping his walk percentage now down under seven percent and erasing a lot of the extra base runners that he was giving up last season even though now that I think about it I'm sure he just started erasing a lot of those extra base runners because of all the ground balls he's getting a lot of double plays and the more and more I think about this the more these extreme ground ball guys just break all of the numbers so thanks Bryce this is how so far in 10 starts Elder has gone 58 in a thirds Innings with a 2-0-1 era but a three four five FIP and 1.2 F war and again we see this big gap between his era and FIP mainly just because with the way that he pitches he's going to outperform the advanced stats Elder is more the old school approach to pitching whereas the new school approach says that pitchers can really only control strikeouts walks and home runs and a lot of the new pitching analytics don't take batted ball data into account because once a ball is put in play there's a ton of things outside the pitcher's control so when it comes to this whole argument I very clearly lean towards analytics on a lot of stuff but in this case I'm gonna argue that yeah pitchers do have a lot of control over what type of balls get put in play against them because of things like their location the pitches that they throw how they move which pitch they throw in which situation so by new school standards Elder's going to seem a little bit overrated mainly because of the fact that he doesn't get a lot of strikeouts which means that he's getting more balls put in play against him and he has to rely more on the defense behind him to kind of help him out but I'd argue that Elders doing a really good job of making the defense's job really easy they're not having to chase down a bunch of fly balls or line drives they just gotta field some grounders and now he could definitely help out and making sure those aren't getting hit quite as hard but you know that's me nitpicking here just let me have that one okay so Elder is the perfect example here of the argument going on between old school and new school where yeah he's not the most efficient pitcher you'd like more strikeouts out of him but he has a really good strategy to get guys out and he's gonna help you win ball games so let me know what you think about all this and any predictions that you have for the rest of Elder season I'm sure this isn't going to start an argument in the comments between the Nerds and the old heads Elder style of pitching just goes to show that sometimes it's not about how you're getting hit but where in another NLC young candidate that you can throw in this category is Zach gallon who has figured out how to get guys to hit the ball hard where he wants them to hit it so to find out more about that check out this video next don't forget to like this video subscribe to the page helps the channel grow and you get to see more baseball content like this every Wednesday and Sunday when we drop a new video thank you so much for watching have an awesome day I'll see you later

Channel: Smartr Baseball

Views: 14,608

Keywords: bryce elder, mlb, baseball, mlb highlights, atlanta braves, braves, baseball highlights, braves highlights, mlb news, mlb 2023, atlanta braves highlights, mlb season 2023, baseball news, mlb season, mlb baseball, major league baseball, braves 2023, 2023 mlb season predictions, atlanta braves baseball, braves 2023 predictions, mlb 2023 predictions, bryce elder highlights, bryce elder 2023, braves baseball, 2023 mlb predictions, bryce elder baseball, mlb predictions

Id: uJQZjiJhOMg

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023