Back in 2014 I started to do a thing. I decided I would target a pitcher, a guy no one was talking about much, and proclaim him to be my Breakout Pitcher of The Year. It worked, and now that call, my B.P.O.T.Y., is apparently my calling card with folks continually asking me about it. Honestly, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given that the “call” has basically been a home run in four of five seasons. Here’s the role call.
2014: Corey Kluber (ADP: 234.8)
His first season of more than 150-innings led to a massive breakout of 18-9, 2.44 ERA, 1.09 WHIP and 269 strikeouts. Oh yeah, he won the Cy Young award too.
2015: Shane Greene (ADP: 422.6)
The lone miss. He threw just 78.2 innings in 2014 but he was still the 2015 call. He was amazing to start the year, throwing 22 innings while allowing one run over three starts before he started to have some problems that included some numbness in his pitching hand that eventually led to surgery. Ultimately, he flamed out going 4-8 with a 6.88 ERA over 18 outings.
2016: Kyle Hendricks (ADP: 214.1)
Had an 8-7 record with a 3.95 ERA in 2015, but the predicted breakout was massive as he went 16-8 with a league leading 2.13 ERA and his 0.98 WHIP was pretty darn impressive too.
2017: Aaron Nola (ADP: 192.2)
Nola had a 4.78 ERA and 1.31 WHIP in 2016 while throwing only 111 innings. In 2017 he took the next step with 12 wins, a 3.54 ERA, a 1.21 WHIP and 184 punchouts in 168 innings.
2018: Jameson Taillon (ADP 192.9)
Taillon finished the year on an amazing hot stretch, and overall, he won 14 games with a 3.20 ERA, 1.18 WHIP and 179 punchouts in 191 innings for the Pirates. By the way, one of the finalists last year was also Patrick Corbin (ADP of 235.1).
So, who is the call this season? Here are some of the names I considered but ultimately didn’t choose.
*ADP from February 1st through the day this was written at the NFBC.
Nick Pivetta (150.4) was my choice on November 1st when I started writing for the 2019 season. Alas, everyone is talking about him, so it seems like a bit of cheating to use him. Plus, his ADP is too high.
Tyler Glasnow (157.9) great arm, but the ADP has simply climbed too high.
Joey Lucchesi (204.9) at 25 years of age with swing and miss stuff, he fits the mold pretty well of a potential breakout arm.
Shane Bieber (150.4) was already broken down by Draft Cheat.
Collin McHugh (222.7) would be kinda cheating since he’s already broken out going 19-7 with 171 strikeouts in 203.2 innings in 2015.
In the end, it came down to two names.
Anthony DeSclafani (434.0) has a lot of injuries in his background, and though he was a strong strikeout arm in the second half, there’s just so many homers here. Still, he was the runner up, and I’m a huge fan of his given the non-existent cost in traditional mixed league setups, and he pitches in the NL whereas my choice is in the Junior Circuit.
And the drumroll please…
Marco Gonzales
27 years old
Bats/Throws: Left/Left
Height/Weight: 6’1”, 195 lbs.
Position: Starting Pitcher
THE NUMBERS
|
|
Level |
IP |
W-L |
ERA |
WHIP |
K/9 |
BB/9 |
HR/9 |
GB/FB |
|
2013 |
RK, A |
23.1 |
0-0 |
2.70 |
1.11 |
8.90 |
3.10 |
0.40 |
|
|
2014 |
A+, AA, AAA |
122 |
9-5 |
2.43 |
1.12 |
8.60 |
2.00 |
0.70 |
|
|
2015 |
A+, AA, AAA |
80.2 |
1-5 |
4.69 |
1.56 |
6.80 |
2.70 |
1.10 |
|
|
2017 |
A+, AAA |
86.1 |
8-4 |
3.02 |
1.00 |
7.60 |
2.30 |
0.70 |
|
|
Minors |
|
312.1 |
18-14 |
3.20 |
1.02 |
7.90 |
2.30 |
0.80 |
|
|
2014 |
MLB |
34.2 |
4-2 |
4.15 |
1.53 |
8.05 |
5.45 |
1.04 |
0.88 |
|
2015 |
MLB |
2.2 |
0-0 |
13.50 |
3.00 |
3.38 |
3.38 |
3.38 |
1.25 |
|
2017 |
MLB |
40 |
1-1 |
6.08 |
1.75 |
7.20 |
2.48 |
1.80 |
1.42 |
|
2018 |
MLB |
166.2 |
13-9 |
4.00 |
1.22 |
7.83 |
1.73 |
0.92 |
1.49 |
|
Career |
|
244 |
18-12 |
4.46 |
1.37 |
7.71 |
2.40 |
1.11 |
1.37 |
He was drafted 19th overall in the 2013 MLB Entry Draft.
|
|
Baseball America |
Baseball Prospectus |
MLB.com |
|
2015 |
50th |
52nd |
|
Gonzales made his debut in the majors in 2014, but in 2016 he required Tommy John surgery in April that caused him to miss the entire season. He was subsequently dealt to the Mariners.
THE SKILLS
As discussed in Pitching Targets: The Ideal Hurler, Gonzales was slotted in numerous categories pointing to an obvious level of interest. From that piece.
1 – He was one of 54 hurlers who had a DRA, xFIP and Triple ERA all under 4.25.
2 – He was one of 29 hurlers who had a DRA, xFIP and Triple ERA under 3.75.
3 – He was one of nine hurlers who had a HR/FB ratio under 13.0, a fly ball rate under 35 percent and a hard-hit ball rate under 35 percent.
That’s a pretty solid start.
Now let’s dig in further.
Marco had a 9.3 percent swinging strike rate last season, which is a point below the league average. It was also a direct match for his career mark. I bring that up because the one aspect of Marco’s game, and frankly the main reason I considered not naming him my Breakout guy this season, is that it’s unlikely his K/9 rate improves much over the 7.83 rate we saw last season, though as I will note below that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the mark reach eight per nine with a new pitch mix in place. Still, back in 2016 I predicted a breakout with a pitcher whose skills pretty closely match those of Gonzales in Hendricks, so I’ve been here before.
While his strikeout will not be elite, his control just might be. Marco had a 1.73 BB/9 rate last season which was the fifth best mark in baseball (Mikolas, Kluber, Verlander and Leake were the only ones better). He’s basically a dart thrower.
As a pitcher, the number one thing to do is to get ahead 0-1. Getting ahead in the count allows you to start to expand the strike zone, as well as opening up the other pitchers in your repertoire behind your fastball. Not surprisingly, Gonzales was on top of his game in this aspect last season as he was 9th in baseball in first pitch strike rate at 66.3 percent. Obviously, that’s excellent work, and it was a huge key to his success.
Since I mentioned repertoire, let’s dig into his pitch mix a bit.
The best pitch the guy owns is his changeup. According to Statcast last season his 2,206-spin rate on his changeup was 5th best in baseball out of the men who threw at least 2,000 pitches (there were 114 such men). He gets a lot of run with the pitch leading to an 11.9 percent swinging strike rate. Yes, this is appreciably higher, more than two and a half points, from his season long mark last season, and his career mark is even higher at 14.6 percent on the pitch. If he can push that mark back up to his career rate in 2019, his performance could start to take off (hence the rocket photo at the top of the piece).
As for his curveball, Pitch Values ranked the pitch 12th best amongst the 57 men who qualified for the ERA title. He really generates grounders with the pitch with its downward darting movement, and he also misses a good deal of bats with the pitch. The swinging strike rate on his pitch was 10.9 percent, another mark well above his season long mark. Batters produced a mere .647 OPS on the curve last season as he generated a whopping 67 percent ground ball rate.
So, you might ask, why does he throw his fastball, which is his case is classified as his sinker, so frequently when it must be the pitch that killed his swinging strike rate (indeed it did at about five percent)? Good question, and it seems like Gonzales started to ask himself the same thing last season as he moved away from it a bit as the season wore. Instead of throwing that sinking fastball, he used a variation of the pitch in the cutter. In fact, his cutter usage doubled from April to September, and the result was a greatly increased swinging strike rate of 10.7 percent on the pitch (basically double the mark on the sinker). The results on the cutter were also impressive as batters posted a mere .281 wOBA and 89 wRC+ on the pitch. If he continues to rely more heavily on his cutter, he was throwing it more than a quarter of the time the final two months of the season, at the expense of his sinker, the results should be even more positive than they were last season.
All this talk of downward movement and off-speed pitches would likely lead you to posit that Gonzales was unlikely to be allowing big fly ball totals. Gold star if you thought that. Gonzalez has a career fly ball rate of 31.9 percent, more than three percent below the league average last season, and the mark was slightly lower last season at 30.1 percent. Like most guys who throw 90-91 mph, location on the pitches is key. When he doesn’t hit his spot he can be taken deep as his 12.3 HR/FB and 1.11 homer per nine rates attest. Realize that the marks were 11.3 percent and 0.92 last season and that all those marks were better than the 2018 league averages of 12.7 and 1.16, so we are hardly in a Dylan Bundy here.
The good news is that batters don’t exactly pound the ball against Marco. Last season the league average hard-hit rate was 35.3 percent. In four seasons, Marco has never had a mark that high, and last season his personal rate was 34.0 percent (career 33.2). Amongst the 139 men who had at least 300 batted ball events last season, Gonzales was 86th in exit velocity. That’s not heart-warming in the least, but it’s not a scary level by any means. Some folks that came in below Gonzales in exit velocity last season included such luminaries as Luis Severino, Mike Foltynewicz, David Price, Stephen Strasburg and Gerrit Cole. Further, Gonzales had the 35th best mark in barrels per plate appearance at 3.9 percent in ‘18. In terms of launch angle, Gonzales’ mark of 10.1 percent was 50th out of the 139, easily putting him in the top half of the league.
As you can tell, he’s able to avoid the fat part of the bat pretty darn well in 2018.
Given all that, it’s surprising to see his saddled with a .318 BABIP last season, a mark that was the fourth worst in baseball last year. Given everything we saw above, there’s just no way to look at the .318 mark and think that it isn’t likely to come down (and yes, I know his career mark is .328, but that’s stupid high as well). As discussed in BABIP and Its Importance, pitchers have relatively little control over BABIP and there is a high likelihood that the mark regresses to the league average if given enough time (the league was at .293 last season). Defense plays a part no doubt, but there’s still a lot to be said for the number evening out over time.
An extra couple data points that are worth noting.
Marco is starting to find his groove against righties. Last season he posted better than career numbers against them in K/9 (8.34), BB/9 (1.91), HR/9 (0.85), hard-hit rate (32.8), GB/FB (1.54) and wOBA (.313). Growth like that, to those stated levels, supports the ‘he’s gonna improve this season’ angle we’re taking here.
Let’s look at some advanced measures for analysis. Though his ERA was a flat 4.00 last season, the advanced measures speak to him actually pitching batter than that: DIPS (3.43), DRA (3.58), xFIP (3.59), TERA (3.69) and SIERA (3.81). All suggest a similar effort to last season would lead to a significant ERA drop this season, and with just some minor growth, it wouldn’t be shocking to see his raw ERA drop half a run.
One final note. Omar Narvaez is more about his bat than his glove at this point, but he’s been working extensively to improve his pitch framing. That would go a long way to aiding all the Mariners arm, that is, if Omar can improve.
PLAYING TIME
Since returning from Tommy John, Gonzales has been relatively healthy though he did miss a couple weeks last year with a neck strain.
In 2017 he returned to throw 126.1 innings.
In 2018 he threw 166.2 innings.
The 27 year old should easily be able to throw 180-innings this season, and that’s pretty much the target these days after the elites of the position are taken.
He will be one of the top-3 starters this season for the Mariners and might even make the Opening Day start.
AVERAGE DRAFT POSITION DATA
As of this writing, here is the ADP data for Gonzales (since February 1st).
|
|
Overall |
Position Rank |
|
283.9 |
107th |
The Fantasy Guru Rankings can be found by clicking on the link.
CONCLUSION
Will Marco Gonzales end 2019 as an SP1 in fantasy? Plainly, no chance. However, look at that ADP of his. In a 12-team league with 23 starters, the result is 276 active players at any one time. Obviously, Marco’s ADP is outside that total speaking to the fact that on one is really at all excited about his prospects this season. I believe those folks are missing a tremendous buy low opportunity with Gonzales. With health, I find it hard to believe he doesn’t better his overall results from last season. At his current cost, that means you will be able to swoop in late and grab a guy that could perform at a level that will cut his ADP in half. The strikeouts, the lack of them, could hold him back from outright starring this season, but Marco Gonzales will be a staple of many championship level clubs as a “depth” draft selection that greatly exceeds his draft day cost.
10-Team Mixed: He can be grabbed in the reserve rounds here. You can thank me later.
12-15 Team Mixed: Only the astute will be looking at him as anything other than the last guy on their staff type. I think he’s appreciably better than that, and you can safely draft him as your fifth starting pitcher.
AL-Only League: I put my money where my mouth is, as they say, as I spent $12 on him in LABR. Most folks didn’t seem to think it was worth that price. We know better.
Ray Flowers can be heard Monday-Friday, 8-10 PM EDT on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio (Sirius 210, XM 87). Follow Ray’s work on Twitter (@baseballguys) and be sure to listen to his podcast work too.
