Time For Optimism: Tyler Chatwood
Tyler Chatwood has been a statcast darling for a few years. Specifically, his fastball and curve ball spin rates have been placed in the 92nd percentile or higher for major league pitchers over the past three years. But statcast doesn’t make players into stars, because they still need to harness that data to improve performance.
Chatwood was signed by the Cubs because of his pitch data, but he also showed a significant home/road split when pitching away from Coors Field with the Colorado Rockies. It turned out that Chatwood wasn’t as much a diamond in the rough as he was just plain rough.
The main culprit has been Chatwood’s ability to throw strikes. Chatwood’s F-Strike% (first pitch strike rate) was 54% in 2019, an increase from 50% in his first year with the Cubs but still below the league average of 60.9%. Chatwood also remains below average at swinging strike rate, sitting at just 9.3% below the major league average of 11.2%.
The swinging strike% is a little misleading, as Chatwood leans heavily on his sinker and has posted a GB% greater than 50% for the last four years. In fact, his GB% with the Cubs over the last two years is lower than the last two years he spent with the Rockies. In contrast, his K% in 2019 was the highest of his career at 22.8%. Chatwood has constantly tinkered with his repertoire in his career:
The big change in 2019 was the increased use of his sinker with a slight decrease in his four-seam fastball and a huge drop in the use of his cutter. He also steadily increased the use of his change-up. Though he has five pitches, he only uses three consistently against both right-handed batters and left-handed batters: his four-seam, sinker and curveball. The cutter is generally deployed against right-handed batters and the change against left-handed batters.
I still believe Chatwood has a valuable skill set. He was used mostly as a reliever last year, with some occasional spot starts after a horrid 2018 as a starter. You may not realize that Chatwood’s second half was very good. As both a starter and reliever after the all-star game, Chatwood posted a 2.84 ERA and 2.55 FIP. He also shot his K% up from 18.6% to 29.2%, while slashing his BB% from 13.4% to 8.5%. Did anything change?
Chatwood started increasing the usage of his curve, especially in September, while steadily throwing less four-seam fastballs. The results in terms of Swing & Miss % was noticeable, since we can look below and see a spike in July and even with a slight decrease, August and September were still above pre-all-star break levels for all pitches.
I didn’t see any evidence that Chatwood had changed much in terms of where he was locating his pitches. What I did find from Brooks Baseball was that on top of just general pitch usage, Chatwood was switching his pitch usage in certain counts, shown below:
There’s a lot to unpack above and I’ll do my best to walk through what I think helped Chatwood in the second half. First, to both left and right handed batters, Chatwood not only used his four seam fastball less, but specifically used it less in first pitch of at-bats. He instead started using his sinker as a first pitch offering to left and right handed batters. After that, it’s best to break it down by handedness.
Lefties have long given Chatwood issues, and 2019 was no different. However, he did improve slightly in the second half. When he was behind, he still used majority four-seam and sinkers. The big difference was in even counts, counts where Chatwood was ahead and counts with two strikes.
He became a lot more comfortable throwing his off-speed and breaking pitches in even counts, though he still relied heavily on his sinker. In counts where he was ahead, Chatwood started throwing more change-ups instead of four-seam fastballs. Finally, in two strike counts against lefties, Chatwood upped his curveball and even his cutter usage. With his four-seam, sinker, curve and change-up all within about four to five percentage points of each other, no left-handed batter could sit on any particular pitch.
With right handed batters, Chatwood again upped his sinker usage overall but also threw his cutter and curve more, instead of his four-seam fastball. Chatwood became comfortable throwing the cutter and curve in situations where the count was even or he was ahead. He also really leaned on the cutter and curve in two strike counts, again making it so that he threw his sinker, curve and cutter close to the same percentage, so the batter couldn’t sit on any particular pitch.
Chatwood also seemed to like throwing his curveball as the first pitch to right handed batters or even when he was behind in counts during the second half. By decreasing his four-seam usage and replacing it with a combination of sinkers, curves, cutters and change-ups, Chatwood saw a jump in his whiffs:
While the samples were smaller in the second half, we can see a substantial increase in his Whiff/Swing with all pitches except for his sinker, which was really used to generate ground balls. Chatwood threw more curves in the second half and in turn generated more whiffs, with a 53.1% whiff/swing in the second half compared to just 39.3% in the first. Chatwood produced significantly more ground balls in the second half as well. It’s interesting that while many pitchers in the majors are avoiding sinkers, Chatwood is doubling down on his usage of it.
What does this all mean? Well, I think Chatwood was able to make himself less predictable by changing his pitch usage, but specifically in what counts he threw those pitches. I will admit that Chatwood generally faced weaker teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, San Francisco Giants and the Cincinnati Reds. But, he performed well in a spot start against the Milwaukee Brewers, along with relief appearances against the Brewers. You can also point at these numbers and say it was a small sample size and whether these changes hold in 2020.
Chatwood will be given the opportunity to win the fifth starter spot in the spring. I think he might be better suited as a long reliever, but maybe the changes mentioned above lead to some gains as a starter. He still gets crushed by lefties, but his numbers in the second half of 2019 were better than his career numbers (.337 wOBA in 2nd half of 2019 vs. .357 wOBA for his career).
Chatwood could help himself in his walk year by building off his second half of 2019 and lessen the blow of losing Cole Hamels to the Atlanta Braves. His formula seems simple: get ahead with the sinker, and deploy the secondary offerings depending on the count or the handedness of the batter. If it works, he could become the reliable back-of-the-rotation starter the Cubs were hoping for. I’m optimistic that it will work.
