One thing that’s been the subject of much discussion is velocity. Major League Baseball has switched from PITCHf/x to Trackman for in-stadium velocity readings, returning slightly higher numbers (around 1 mph).

The reason this switch has created so much buzz early on is best attributed to two factors:

First, we love overreacting to small sample sizes. The New York Post published a column after the Yankees’ first loss of the season on the possibility that the team’s ‘terrible’ start could out of hand in a hurry. That was after 0.617% of the season elapsed. One game. When our sample of action isn’t big enough to find interesting plots and sub-plots around the league, we analyze and over analyze the juicier bits we have.

Second, it has to do with the wave of statistics encompassing the game of baseball in this era. We drool for data early in the season so we can compare it to past years and project the other 161 games with a feverish hope for accuracy. I’m not afraid to admit I function as a member of those baseball fanatics.

Velocity is the quickest metric to stabilize, meaning it’s the piece of information we can hastily use to gain valuable insight. However, if we’re using incorrect, or merely different data, we’ll be about as successful as Aaron Judge trying to fit into a child’s highchair. 

So let’s see how velocity has found itself sitting with our top three starters this week against the Rays. Keep in mind, we’re not working with information that we have 100% consensus on at the moment, but BrooksBaseball, according multiple articles including this one from Fangraphs, seems to be less if at all impacted by the Trackman switch (notice “From 55ft” on the y-axis of the graphs, this relates to the switch in velocity readings now out of the hand as opposed to closer to the plate). 

Masahiro Tanaka

The first game of the season gets substantial television ratings, regardless of who is playing. Unfortunately, that meant a lot of the country got to see the worst of Tanaka. 67 pitches over 2 2/3 innings, yet even with what we’d normally consider half an outing’s worth of data, we can see how relatively similar Tanaka’s velocity is to the 2016 season. This is a good visualization of velocity stabilizing very quickly. 

Can we infer anything from these numbers? Seeing as the Opening Day start consisted of Tanaka trying, and failing to establish his sinker early in counts, I’m fine with believing in a jump of one mph on his primary pitch. He threw his sinker 38 percent of the time on Opening Day and saw a swinging strike percentage just below 10 percent, which would eclipse the highest swinging strike percentage he had, on average, for any one month last season. 

I have to admit, I’m proud of myself for actually saying something positive about Tanaka’s first start. It was after all, a glorified Spring Training outing, where he tried and failed to command his main pitch. In the process, omitting the opportunity to gain a feel for the depth of his repertoire. 

Tanaka’s start Saturday against the Orioles compared to opening day didn’t really vary much in the result. Lack of command and an inability to establish his sinker, setting up his split and secondary offerings. As the season progresses we’ll have a more data to work with regarding his peripherals and are bound to revisit this open case in due time.

CC Sabathia

Our ageless wonder seems more and more like Bartolo Colon as every outing goes by. Eating innings and spotting pitches, but the main difference is the lack of consistent entertainment with his bat. 

Sabathia has some noticeable upticks in his sinker and cutter velocity, both pitches he threw a combined ~60% of the time  in his start Tuesday. He also substantially limited his changeup used compared to last season, making his slider the even more predominant off speed offering. 

While the results were good through Sabathia’s five innings of clean baseball, it’s always tough to look at a pitcher like Pineda who only generated four swinging strikes on the 85 pitches he threw, and expect this to be the norm. A velocity uptick of any kind seems to only be a positive for a pitcher of Sabathia’s caliber, and if he can generate another batch of 165+ innings with a sub 4 ERA (like he did last year), we should be more than thrilled considering what the pessimistic projections were ballparking.  

Michael Pineda

The toughest thing not to overreact to are the consistencies that we hope can change. Your mind goes through confirmation bias during the spring, seeing and hearing about a Pineda changeup, only to observe very little difference in his pitch selection.

It’s simple. Pineda doesn’t pitch to his peripherals, and after a rough start Wednesday in Tropicana, it’s ever so easy to rolls your eyes and feel a bit of deja vu.

But again, let’s caution our brevity in decision making. Pineda has nearly identical velocity from last year to this year among any of the three starters I highlight here. Even with the changeup work over the Spring, as we’ll always refer back to come the regular season, it really means nothing if he doesn’t have the confidence to throw it in game. 

There is some very humorous logic with Pineda and his expectations. We all want him to be consistent. Girardi even wants him to be consistent. But what kind of consistency can we reasonably expect? If he’s consistently good, with a strikeout percentage north of 25 percent, he’s an ace caliber pitcher. At this point, that’s an outcome we can’t factor in meaningful odds for. 

What we’re really asking for is toned down consistency. Fewer strikeouts, better command, fewer homers, and fewer blow up starts. That’s not nearly as attractive as the imaginable ceiling on a pitcher with this level of bat missing ability, but it’s the reality. 

Pienda’s results are oddly consistent with last year, yet still bring increasing levels of disappointment. The velocity looks fine, and hopes can once again change colors quickly with a few eight-plus strikeout outings. What’s the definition of insanity again? Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. 

Off into the Sunset…

So what’s the moral of the story with all this velocity talk?

If everybody looks like they’re throwing a few miles per hour harder than they were at the end of 2016, there may be an issue with the data as a whole. As the old adage goes, if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck. It’s probably a duck. 

We look at velocity early over other metrics because of this stabilization. It gives us concrete evidence of any alarming or encouraging change. This is why so many have been perplexed early in the season by the full switch to Trackman and the adjustment of velocity measurement. We simply want one of the most widely referenced stats for a pitcher to be consistent, without having to dive in and understand the decision to start tracking pitches at a different point on their path to home plate.

With Tanaka, Sabathia and Pineda, I strongly believe in focusing on stats like velocity early and gradually stitching in the underlying peripherals (swinging strike %, hard contact %, zone %, etc.). If velocity looks relatively stable, then we can bring in the fun stuff to intricately pick away at what may have improved or faded.

It may be very ineffective to tell anybody prone to overreacting not to overreact, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Maybe we can also tell the Post to ‘chill’ with the talk of a disastrous start lingering, even with the injury concerns that seems to pour in every game.

Or at least we can wait a few more starts for the ‘disastrous’ metric to stabilize. 

But we’re here to look at the present, not the past, and expectations of the former Cy Young award winner are not nearly as high. This year, we saw Sabathia in a spring training battle for the last spot in the Yankees’ rotation, and the Yankees enter the season with doubts surrounding who their ace was.

The results from Sabathia’s first two starts this season have been mixed. During the winter, Sabathia worked with both Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera on throwing a cutter, a pitch he hadn’t thrown at all before 2014. Now, Sabathia throws his cutter more frequently than his regular four-seam fastball. His cutter usage is at 39.46 percent so far this year, up from three percent in 2015 and higher than his 33.52 combined four-seam/two-seam rates. Additionally, the cutter has been Sabathia’s go-to pitch in two-strike counts, throwing it almost 50 percent of the time in payoff situations, and resulting in ground balls more than three times as much as line drives in such situations.

In his first start against the Tigers, Sabathia set down Detroit in order their first time through the lineup and utilized his cutter to great effect. One of Sabathia’s best early cutters came against Justin Upton in the first inning.

Out of the 38 cutters that Sabathia tossed two Saturdays ago, 19 induced swings. The cutter above to Upton was the first of 4 whiffs on the pitch and was set up by a 3-1 fastball that Upton fouled off on the previous offering. Sabathia continued mowing down Detroit hitters, needing only 34 pitches — 23 of which were for strikes — to navigate the first three innings, but the fourth inning brought a much different story.

To start, Sabathia nearly doubled his pitch count in the fourth, slinging 33 to bring his total to 67 once the inning finally ended. He walked the bases loaded and with two outs, James McCann and Jose Iglesias both hit line drive singles.

The most noticeable difference between these and the put-away cutter to Upton in the first inning is that neither pitch was on the outside third of the plate. Sabathia tried to come inside to McCann, (left GIF) but instead the ball flattened out and McCann turned on the 3-1 offering for a single to left field. Against Iglesias, (right GIF) Sabathia tried the same strategy as he did against Upton — a two-strike, high and away cutter — but left it too close to the middle of the plate and Iglesias lined it up the middle. Naturally, if Sabathia hadn’t walked three of the previous batters this jam would never have happened, but Sabathia may have been able to get away with pitches like these a couple years ago. However, in his current form he can’t blow by hitters anymore and generate a ton of swings and misses. He needed to be more accurate against McCann and Iglesias and missing by even a few inches, as seen above, ended up haunting him in the end.

McCann’s single drove in two runs for the Tigers, cutting the Yankees’ lead to 6-2. Iglesias’s single didn’t hurt New York though, as Mike Aviles followed with a lineout to end the threat. Sabathia departed after six innings and was charged with three runs on four hits and four walks with 3 strikeouts. Below is a chart of Sabathia’s pitch selection from his start against the Tigers and the outcome rates of each pitch, which illustrates Sabathia’s heavy use of his new cutter right out of the gate and its effectiveness in inducing swings.

In his next start against Seattle, Sabathia continued using his cutter but was much less efficient overall. He was able to get through the first four innings unscathed, scattering three hits and a walk, before he unraveled in the fifth. Sabathia was able to utilize his cutter more frequently against lefties in this start because of the composition of the Mariners’ lineup. Unfortunately for the Mariners, Nori Aoki fell victim to Sabathia’s new-found craftiness.

Aoki’s first at-bat (left GIF) ended with a weak ground ball back to the mound, coming on a low-and-away cutter. His second at-bat (right GIF) concluded with an up-and-in cutter that he swung through. Against a lefty like Aoki, who is normally a contact hitter, Sabathia was able to move his cutter anywhere around the strike zone. Both of these pitches came with two strikes, similar to the usage against the Tigers, indicating Sabathia has quickly become comfortable using his cutter to try to finish hitters off. And although lefties are easier for a left-hander like Sabathia to fool, it’s still a positive sign that he is able to handle them without much issue.

Sabathia continued to use his cutter very effectively to righties as well, as evidenced by this strikeout to Ketel Marte that’s almost identical to the Upton strikeout.

This is what Sabathia needs to keep doing if he wants to succeed as a finesse pitcher — entice opposing hitters with pitches that look like fastballs but break just a bit at the last second. However, Seattle’s best hitter is a lefty like Aoki, much to the chagrin of Yankees fans everywhere. Robinson Cano, the ex-Yankee who bolted to the Pacific Northwest for $240 million, came up to face Sabathia in the third inning, the only time Sabathia retired him. First, let’s see what Sabathia did well.

The first pitch to Cano is a cutter inside that completely fools him. Instead of saving the cutter for the pay-off pitch, Sabathia unleashes it right away and ties up Cano. When he can locate his cutter, Sabathia can easily be a top-tier back rotation pitcher, which is what the Yankees are hoping he’d be after he reinvented himself in the offseason. When he can’t locate his cutter though…

Sabathia left that cutter right over the heart of the plate and Cano made him pay, ripping a single through the middle even though Didi Gregorius nearly reached the ball when he was covering second base. You can see Austin Romine set up outside, on the black, but Sabathia’s pitch couldn’t quite get there. Again, Sabathia can’t afford to miss on two-strike pitches like this because he simply isn’t the same pitcher that he was a couple years ago. The life on his fastballs just isn’t the same. After Nelson Cruz doubled in Cano, Sabathia’s day ended at just 4 2/3 innings and 95 pitches. He was charged with three runs on seven hits with a walk and five strikeouts.

The bottom line for Sabathia and the Yankees is that he needs to continue honing command of his cut-fastball. Against right-handed batters it has already become his weapon of choice, as Sabathia has thrown the pitch 43 percent of the time and 65 percent of the time in two-strike counts so far in 2016. He has found some early success already with this, as shown by his strikeouts of Justin Upton and Ketel Marte on perfectly placed pitches. But his cutter is still a work in progress.

Sabathia could additionally benefit from going deeper into games, as his early pitch counts have been pretty high, though the excellence of the Yankees’ bullpen doesn’t necessitate this. The most important thing is to become completely comfortable with the cutter because over the course of his career, right-handed batters have a batting average against more than 90 points higher than lefties do. If he wants to regain some of the success he found early in his career, Sabathia should keep improving his cutter to the point where their advantage is relatively neutralized.

Lead photo: Noah K. Murray / USA Today Sports