Here’s the latest in my series of player previews as the Cardinals near the start of the 2016 season …
Today: RH starting pitcher Michael Wacha, who turns 25 on July 1. He’s been a part of the big-league staff since the 2013 season.
Wacha has a record of 26-14 with a 3.38 ERA in three seasons with the Cardinals.
Career overview: drafted in 2012 with a compensation pick coming from Albert Pujols‘ free-agent signing with the Angels, Wacha got to the majors on a fast track, promoted from Class AAA Memphis during the 2013 season. Wacha has made 58 starts for the Cardinals and will always be remembered for his epic performance during the Cards’ postseason run to the NL pennant in ‘13. Wacha went 4-1 with a 2.64 in five postseason starts that October. In the NL playoffs, Wacha won all three starts and allowed one run in 21 innings for an 0.43 ERA. Wacha kept the Cardinals alive in Game 4 of the NLDS at Pittsburgh with a 2-1 victory at PNC Park, then won two duels vs. Dodgers’ ace Clayton Kershaw in the NLDS. Winning the NLCS MVP, Wacha pitched 13.2 shutout innings and allowed nine base runners and allowed only nine of 49 Dodgers’ hitters to reach base.
Wacha’s 2014 season was interrupted by weakness in his right shoulder blade, and after spending more than two months on the DL he never regained form after returning in early September. Wacha, who didn’t make the Cards’ 2014 postseason rotation, came out of the bullpen in NLCS Game 5 and surrendered the Giants’ walk-off, series-clinching homer.
Wacha rebounded impressively in 2015 until tiring late in the season.
Let’s talk about that 2015 season: If you look at the body of work, it was a very good year. Wacha made 30 starts, pitching a career-high 181.1 innings. He went 17-7 with a 3.38 ERA and in the NL only Jake Arrieta, Gerrit Cole, Zack Greinke and Madison Bumgarner were credited with more regular-season wins than Wacha last year. But as noted, Wacha struggled late in the season and tumbled into a decline.
The late fade: Through the end of August 2015, Wacha stood with a 15-4 record and 2.69 ERA and had turned in 18 quality starts in 25 outings. But after exceeding his innings-pitched total for a MLB regular season, Wacha ran out of gas in September. His final six starts, including the loss in NLDS Game 4, were a mess.
Here’s side by side comparison of Wacha’s numbers before and after Aug. 30, and it includes his one postseason start:
ERA: 2.69 before … 7.94 after.
Home runs per 9 IP: 0.69 … 3.18
Walks per 9 IP: 2.29 … 6.67
Ground ball rate: 46.3 … 42.2
Opponents’ batting average: .230 … .284
Opponents’ onbase percentage: .282 … .406
Opponents’ slugging percentage: .344 …. .624
Opponents’ OPS: .616 … 1.030
Strikeout/walk ratio: 3.35 … 1.14
Walks/hits per inning: 1.13 … 1.84
Big difference, eh?
Hitters had a booming hard-contact rate of 38.4 percent vs. Wacha in September-October. And his Sept-Oct walk rate of 16% was almost incomprehensible. He seemed helpless at times, and it had to be difficult for Wacha to go out there late in the season knowing that he did’t have his best stuff. But pitchers who lack command will stray into big trouble.
OK, so what happened? Wacha wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t pitching with an injury that the team kept hush-hush. This was just a classic case of a pitcher running out of fuel. The numbers make that perfectly clear. Wacha’s delivery is demanding, because he needs full extension on his pitches for maximum effectiveness. Wacha is tall at 6-6, and when he comes at hitters with that high-elevation overhand delivery, they have a terrible time seeing the pitch and picking up on it as it comes out of his hand. And when a pitcher gets tired, it isn’t easy to reach the full extension. And with Wacha’s arm dropping a bit, it flattened out his pitches and dramatically reduced his command. That was the No. 1 problem with his late-season form: way too many walks, not controlling counts, and leaving himself vulnerable, which led to a thunder crack of homers against him. According to the data at Brooks Baseball, Wacha’s four-seam velocity didn’t collapse; he was still hitting 95 mph in September. But Wacha had turned to the cutter as an important secondary pitch in 2015, and late last season it lacked bite. Wacha began using it less and turning to the four-seam fastball more frequently. In the first five months he threw four-seamers in 54 percent of his pitches; in Sept-Oct that four-seam rate increased to 63 pct. And Wacha threw about half as many cutters (on a percentage) bases in Sept-Oct compared to April through August.
The changeup: The change was a devastating weapon for Wacha in 2013. But when he returned from shoulder difficulties late in the 2014 season, he didn’t have the feel for the changeup. This certainly had something to do with the necessary alterations made to his pitching mechanics during his recovery from the shoulder-blade weakness. But after throwing the change 27 percent of the time in 2013, the reliance on the pitch dropped to 18 percent in 2014 and 16.3 percent last season. In 2013 hitters batted .171 against the Wacha change; struck out 47 times in the 117 at-bats that ended with the change. It’s still a solid pitch for him, but not as nasty. In 2013 and 2014 combined, Wacha gave up only one homer on a changeup. But last year, hitters bombed his changeup for six homers. The fatigue made the pitch less deceptive and more hittable; last September hitters simply crushed Wacha’s change — with four homers and an .875 slugging percentage in 24 at-bats. What will become of the Wacha changeup in 2016? Will he use it more, less, or about the same? And will it confound hitters as it did in 2013?
The 2016 projection: ZiPS is sort of “blah” on Wacha. Not that the forecast is bad; it just isn’t as positive as you’d think. On the plus side, ZiPS has Wacha maintaining his overall strikeout (21%) and walk (7.5%) rate. (And his HR rate normalizing for the most part.) But based on 154 innings, ZiPS has Wacha with a 3.51 ERA and an adjusted ERA that’s nine percent better than the league average. For context, Wacha was 35% above the league average in 2013, 14 pct. above the average in ’14, and 17% above the average in 2015. ZiPS sees Wacha as being worth around 2.5 wins above replacement level; that’s about the same as last season.
General season outlook: Wacha has something to prove — can he make it through the entire season with full pitching health and effectiveness? That’s a fair question. But it’s important to point out some of the positives here. Two points: (1) after the injury scare in 2014, it was reassuring for Wacha to bounce back with a strong performance. Which he did if you just look at his season from a bottom-line perspective. And (2) Wacha’s volume of innings — while reasonable — was a new challenge for him. He’d worked 42 innings after being drafted in 2012, 179 innings (including the postseason) in 2013, and only 107 innings in 2014. But Wacha was also given some built-in breaks in 2013, which alleviated the innings strain and kept him fresh into October. Wacha didn’t have much down time in 2015. It would probably help Wacha if manager Mike Matheny can schedule a few missed starts to keep Wacha fresh. But internally the Cardinals believe that Wacha will benefit from going past the 180-inning barrier last season. They view it as a stamina-building season. And they could be right; Wacha was only 23 years old through the first half of last season. This is about the time in a young pitcher’s career that endurance takes hold.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Read all of Bernie’s 2016 Cardinals player previews here.
The post 2016 Cardinals Preview: Michael Wacha, and a Question of Endurance appeared first on 101Sports.com.