Boom or Bust: Homer Bailey

Boom or Bust: Homer Bailey

            Last year was such a great season for Homer Bailey and many people, including myself, thought that he was finally ready to take that next step towards stardom.  Sadly this season has been just a profound disappointment for the young starter, to be fair though he’s in good company with many Reds struggling this year.  Since I was so high on Bailey this season why not take a look at him and see what’s been different for him.

            To start out lets take a look at the basics and see what he’s been up to before going to the advanced stats.

	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	K%	BB%	BAA	WHIP	BABIP	ERA	FIP	ERA-	FIP-
2014	8.06	3.16	1.58	20.1%	7.9%	.300	1.58	.348	5.44	4.67	148	124
2013	8.57	2.33	1.13	23.4%	6.4%	.231	1.12	.284	3.49	3.31	92	87
Career	7.47	2.93	1.06	19.5%	7.6%	.258	1.33	.301	4.32	4.04	107	100

            To say that Bailey has been struggling would be quite the understatement.  Bailey took a huge leap forward last season; which his numbers were trending in the right direction.  He was lowering his BAA, WHIP, BB% and BB/9 while his K/9 and K% were going up.  Sadly this season seems to be regressing in all these areas and more, but there is some good news to all of this.  The way the stats look it seems that Bailey might be struggling with some bad luck.  A BABIP so high and so far above the career level screams bad luck and look at that FIP and FIP-, he’s sitting at 24% lower that league average.  With this in mind lets take a look at some more advanced statistics to see if anything shows why this is happening.

Batted Ball

            So we saw that Bailey is struggling mightily but maybe the quality of the hits is the key.  Lets see if there is any abnormalities to explain what is happening to Bailey by looking at what kind of balls are being put into play.

	GB/FB	LD%	GB%	FB%	HR/FB	tERA
2014	1.67	18.6%	50.9%	30.4%	18.4%	4.85
2013	1.34	19.5%	46.1%	34.4%	10.2	3.66
Career	1.24	20.5%	44.0%	35.5%	11.1%	4.50

            So right off the bat we see two things that stand out: The rates aren’t that far off from each other and are in fact better than last year.  The second thing we notice is the fact that his HR/FB ratio took off like a rocket to the highest point since 2006 and that seems odd when you see his FB% is actually pretty low.  His tERA is even higher than normal, though given how many HR’s he’s been giving up that makes a lot of sense.  Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut reason here and were going to have to look deeper to see if the numbers were seeing here can be explained by looking at his pitches themselves.

Pitch Type

	Fastball	Slider	Curveball	Change-up/Spliter
2014	60.4%	21.5%	8.7%	9.3%
2013	60.2%	15.1%	11.9%	11.1%
Career	63.9%	15.2%	11.0%	9.5%

            This is more of a frame of reference to show how often Bailey throws his pitches.  The first oddity we see is the over reliance on the SL this year and less of a focus on the CB and SF.  If that’s a good thing or not were going to have to look at how many runs were saved by the pitches themselves.  The only thing we can say is maybe people are now sitting on the SL and it makes him more predictable.  But lets take a look at a very complicated name of a stat.

PITCHf/x Pitch Values/100:

            I’ve never really gone to deep into this one so lets start by what this means.  This stat calculates the runs that the pitchers saved with that pitch over 100 pitches thrown.  That is 100 pitches per pitch so 100 FB or 100 CB not 100 pitches all together to make sure that’s clear.

	Fastball	Slider	Curveball	Change-up/Spliter
2014	-3.17	2.32	0	0.08
2013	2.13	-0.07	-1.10	0.49
Total	0.12	0.99	-0.93	-4.39

            Well we can see why he’s been leaning on that SL so far; it’s actually his most effective pitch in his career to this point.  More importantly we see that the FB has taken a massive hit and now is actually costing him runs while in the past it’s been one of his more effective pitches.  Bailey actually throws a 2-Seamer and a regular 4-Seamer and the 2-Seamer is by far been less effective this year while it was actually a better pitch than his 4-Seamer.  The CB has never been one of his better pitches but that 0 is misleading since he hasn’t even thrown it 100 times yet so it doesn’t have a value.

Swing Rate:

            So this obviously works differently with pitchers than it does with hitter since this charts how hitters are swinging against the pitcher, what kind of pitches are being swung at and how often do they make contact.

	O-Swing%	Z-Swing%	Swing%	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%	Contact %	F-Strike%	SwStr
2014	29.9%	65.2%	46.9%	63.3%	89.2%	79.0%	43.9%	9.7%
2013	34.9%	66.0%	48.6%	64.3%	86.5%	77.5%	64.6%	10.7%
Career	30.0%	67.5%	47.7%	64.2%	88.2%	80.3%	61.9%	9.2%

            First thing that stands out, and this could be the biggest clue we’ve seen, is the fact that hitters aren’t swinging as much as they were in previous season.  In and out of the zone the hitters are becoming more selective, which could add to my assumption earlier about hitters waiting more for the slider since they know its coming.  The other thing that is noticeable is the increased contact rate in general.  Up almost 2% from last season, like I’ve said many times before this may seem like nothing but that 2% adds up fast.  To me the most important information comes at the end of the chart.  Way less first strikes and less swinging strikes, that means he’s pitching in the hole more often and less swings means he’s working harder to get K’s or strikes in general.

Pitch Charts:

            Much like hitters pitchers have Hot/Cold charts as well and in this case could show us why Bailey is struggling.

	0-1	.000		0-1
1-3	.571	.571	.500	2-4
0-1	.273	.417	.500	.231
2-3	.000	.300	.280	.500
0-2	.000	.000	.167

            That’s a very red strike zone; notice that all but 1 quadrant in the strike zone is less than .270, which is considered an above average BA.  Right here is the major issue and made worse is the fact that his most throw locations is the four bottom right of the chart where he has some of the highest BAA.  This is a bad sign moving forward; unless he starts getting some missed bats or can force the hitters to start hitting some softer hits this could be a lost season for Bailey already.

            So what did we gather from the stats about Bailey?  He’s throwing the ball just as hard as always but relying on the slider more, which seems to make hitter wait on him.  He’s throwing fewer strikes at the beginning of at-bats forcing him to throw pitches more in the zone, which hitters are lighting up.  He’s missing fewer bats than normal and the reliance on the SL may be leading to more BB’s than normal.  Bailey is a good pitcher and I honestly thought this was the year he was going to break out.  The numbers were trending up and he was prime for a break out but it seems we shall have to wait another year for it to happen.