A Tale of Two Changeups

It was the best of pitches, it was the worst of pitches.

Royals pitching has been the subject of plenty of consternation this season, and with good reason. They generally haven’t been very good. As I mentioned yesterday, this is a generally young staff, so the fact that there are some pretty wild swings in what they’ve done probably shouldn’t be too terribly surprising. Other than Mike Minor, current Royals starters are all 26 and younger and only Minor and Brad Keller have more than 152 big league innings among their six starters (I’m including Brady Singer here). Kris Bubic went last night and the game was kind of a microcosm of his entire season.

And even talking about Bubic tells the story of an inconsistent young arm. He has a truly fantastic changeup. It can absolutely flummox hitters with its drop and movement and he does a great job of maintaining his arm speed to make hitters believe it’s a fastball coming. He also has an incredibly hittable changeup. Sometimes it just sits right in the middle of the plate. Here’s a look at the Gameday attack zones:

Of the 11 home runs he’s now allowed on his changeup after last night, 10 of them have either been in zone five or six. The other was in zone 12 from Danny Santana, and if a guy hits a home run in that spot, good for them, I guess.

But the point is that Bubic’s changeup is electric when it hits a spot and absolutely unusable when it doesn’t. Of course, you can’t know where it’s going to be before the ball is released, but that’s something that is going to be a point of emphasis for Bubic moving forward because it really is nasty. Just look at this:

Or even this:

I don’t mean to pick on Moncada, but Bubic had him tied up with his changeup.

Of course, when it does this…

…well that ball will go pretty far.

Now this is just something from one game, but the Royals have made such a big deal about the camera at Fenway with Keller that I wanted to go back and look at Bubic’s start there to see if I could see anything. His changeup wasn’t especially good in that start, but he did have a couple good ones and I noticed one thing. Here’s a strikeout of Santana from that start:

Now look at a home run he allowed to JD Martinez:

I don’t want to be a screenshot warrior here, but this camera angle is excellent for evaluation. Take a look at Bubic’s finishing point and specifically his head position at the end of each pitch.

Santana Strikeout:

Martinez Home Run:

I’m not going to go through every single changeup he’s thrown here, but I did look at a handful more from other starts, trying to compare middle-middle changeups with better ones from the same start to be able to see the same angles. It’s very common to see his head pull a little bit. You can see the follow through isn’t identical there in general, but I do wonder if that’s playing a role in the situation.

And yesterday, again, the changeup wasn’t bad other than when it was. He actually threw it the third most, so maybe he really wasn’t feeling it, but he threw 22 of them and got five whiffs on 16 swings. The 31.3 percent whiff rate was actually a bit above his season average, so that’s a good thing. But again, he left those two out over the plate and it led to three runs. The offense made it not really matter, but you never know how things might differ if they’re not down early as they have been throughout this entire road trip.

The other aspect of Bubic’s outing that really caught my attention, though, was his velocity. And that might be a bit of a key to unlock an ability to miss occasionally. You might recall me talking about Keller missing over the middle a few times in his start in Milwaukee and not being hurt by it because the rest of his pitches allowed a mistake or two. That’s sort of what I’m getting at here. I mentioned this on Twitter, but one of the things that has been so frustrating about Jakob Junis is that we’ve seen him flash much better velocity than he usually does but just can’t sit there enough during games.

Bubic has a bit of that in him too. He came into this game averaging just 90.4 MPH with his fastball. Of the 641 fastballs he’d thrown before last night, just 29 were 93 MPH or faster. He threw exactly 50 fastballs last night. Within his first 24 batters faced, he threw 31 fastballs and three were 93+, so that’s a higher percentage than normal and he was averaging 91.1 MPH on those, which is also obviously higher than normal. I wasn’t sure what happened after those first 31 fastballs while the game was going on, but after the game, he explained a bit.

Bally Sports Kansas City @BallySportsKC

Bubic on the adjustment he made after the third inning: "I kind of lost the feel for the fastball a little bit. To be honest, I kind of just said screw it I'm going to try to throw it as hard as I could. It's kind of crazy what that does." #TogetherRoyal

From the 25th batter on, he faced eight more hitters and threw 19 fastballs. Of those 19, 15 were 93+. He averaged 93.5 MPH on those 19 fastballs. And maybe unsurprisingly, he struck out six of the final eight hitters, all on his fastball. He topped out at 95.6 MPH, which is his fastest fastball of the season by almost a full mile per hour. He threw two pitches harder last year, both to Javier Baez when he was with the Cubs, so maybe he’s amped up for Chicago, but I think this is something worth watching to see if he maintains it. It ended up turning his start from what could have been a disaster to at least a quality start.

Now, starting with his six-inning relief performance against the Orioles, here are his numbers since the break:

24 IP
16 H
7 R
7 ER
9 BB (9.7% BB Rate)
20 K (21.5% K Rate)
2.63 ERA

The Royals could have lost 212-1 last night and, along the lines of what I wrote about yesterday, the game would have been a success with the way Bubic finished. Like Lynch’s start in Toronto, Bubic got hit around a bit by a team on their home field that does damage to lefties. And like Lynch, he got up and dusted himself off to keep the Royals in the game and end up with a pretty solid line.

The nuts and bolts of the situation are that if Bubic is throwing 90-91, he’s probably topping out as a back of the rotation starter. Maybe he’s a three in a good year. We already talked about the issues he can have with his changeup. But if there’s just a bit more separation in velocity and his opponent’s bat is sped up just a bit from a harder fastball, maybe he can get away with a changeup down the middle, which is sort of what he’s saying in the post-game interview above. He definitely shouldn’t pull his head off on the changeup, but when he does, it might not be as detrimental if he’s throwing a little bit harder.

I know that it’s tough to top out when you’re trying to throw 90-100 pitches, but I have confidence in Bubic with his aptitude for making changes and analytical mind to find a way to add some velocity and carry it through games. It might not show up consistently in the final couple months this season, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes out in 2022 and is averaging a tick or two more on that fastball. It'd be a good thing because he absolutely needs it.

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Crown Jewels

Missing the Sticky Stuff?

We can go back and forth for however long you want about whether the Royals actually had a chance to come back last night, but they were down by just two entering the bottom of the seventh when Mike Matheny brought in Kyle Zimmer to face the bottom of the White Sox order. Zimmer threw 15 pitches to three batters. He threw three strikes. Unfortunately, they were spread out so he walked all three, which put Richard Lovelady in a truly miserable situation, having to come in with the bases loaded and nobody out. Lovelady let all three of the runners score, which closed the book on Zimmer’s 17th game since MLB decided to check for sticky stuff.

Prior to that, Zimmer was really good. He’d thrown 27.2 innings in 24 games with just 15 hits allowed and 11 walks. He’d struck out 28 and had a 1.95 ERA. And honestly, even that was a little misleading because four runs on five hits were allowed in one inning in that absolutely miserably cold game against Tampa Bay in April. Anyway, since that first game with umpires checking pitchers, Zimmer has thrown 13.1 innings, allowed 16 hits, walked 13, struck out 12 and has a 10.80 ERA. It’s easy to look at spin rate and not see any changes, and I don’t know if the sticky stuff is an issue for him or not, but the timing is extremely curious. Not everyone is impacting through spin rate, but one of the things many pitchers have mentioned is that they have a harder time controlling the ball. My guess is that it’s playing a role in this. But whatever it is, he’s basically unusable right now.

Update: Zimmer is now on the IL with neck/trap spasms. Seems convenient. But it allows them to do what I mention in the second paragraph below without putting Benny on the IL.

Benny Hurting

Oof, that Andrew Benintendi injury looked pretty bad. The reports just called it a strain during the game, but players who look like they’re in that much pain don’t tend to come back terribly quickly. Hopefully I’m wrong, but I’m already looking ahead to how they might fill the spot on the roster. Of course, being the Royals, they’ll probably leave him on the bench for four days before they put him on the IL, thus even burning one of the retroactive days they can use. But if they do put him on the IL today, I really see two options for them. One is that they can call up Kyle Isbel and give him a second big league chance. Isbel started slow in AAA, but he’s been good since the start of July with a .279/.400/.498 with 18 walks and 17 strikeouts in 105 plate appearances.

The other option is they can go ahead and activate Emmanuel Rivera from the injured list. I think that’s probably a bit aggressive, but he did go 2 for 5 last night in Omaha’s extra inning loss and hit a home run. Those hamate injuries can be really tough to come back from with power lagging behind a bit, but he did flash some power last night in Omaha and he’s now played five total rehab games. I would probably lean toward Isbel, but if they want to bring Rivera back and then I guess play Hunter Dozier in left field, that could work as well. While it stinks for Benintendi and the Royals for losing him, it does open up a bit of an opportunity for someone if Benintendi needs to go on the injured list.