Published by Lucas Catuogno (catulm20@wfu.edu)
Last year, in his first (and only) season as a San Francisco Giant, Carlos Rodón pitched to a 2.88 ERA over 178 innings, also posting career-bests in xERA, FIP and xFIP. His efforts earned him a 6 year, $162,000,000 contract with the New York Yankees, and he is now considered by some (myself included) to be one of the best pitchers in the world.
Earlier in his career, though, Rodón was not nearly as dominant as he has been over the past two seasons; in fact, he was just an average pitcher from his debut in 2015 up until the shortened 2020 season. Over this span, he posted a 4.14 ERA and a 1.38 WHIP, on top of unimpressive strikeout, walk, and home run numbers.
This was a decent sample size (536.2 innings over 6 seasons), so why is he so good all of a sudden now? Is this newfound success sustainable? Most importantly, what changed?
The answer, to put it simply, is everything.
The Carlos Rodón that we know and love today might as well be a completely different person than his former self, because he sure is a completely different pitcher. For starters, his pitch mix is totally different; below is a chart that shows his pitch usage by season:
There’s a lot going on here, but the two lines to pay the most attention to are the red and orange ones; his 4-seam fastball and his sinker. You can see that early in his career, he threw them just about equally often, with the sinker actually being more used in 2015. Since then, his sinker usage declined slowly until being completely abandoned going into 2020, while his 4-seam has been on a steady upward trend. The reason for this, as you can probably deduce, is because his 4-seam is a far better pitch than his sinker ever was, and there’s a few reasons why this is. The most important one, in my opinion, is location.
Below is a heat map, which shows where a pitch was located most often on average, for Rodón’s sinker:
In typical fashion for sinkers, Rodón threw his near the bottom of the zone most often. As you might expect, this resulted in a lot of ground balls; from 2015-2017, the seasons in which Rodón threw his sinker most often, he had a cumulative 45.1 ground ball percentage. However, he seriously struggled to generate swings-and-misses with this pitch; in 2017, his sinker only had a whiff rate of 14.7%. That is not very good at all.
The development of Rodón’s 4-seam fastball has been the biggest contributor to his recent success. Below, we can see another heatmap, this one of his 4-seam fastball in 2022:
Today, Rodón throws a whole lot of fastballs at the top of the zone, and batters completely fail to catch up to this high heat. This brings us to another important change in Rodón’s career: over the past two seasons, the years in which Rodón has enjoyed the most success, his average fastball velocity was 95.5 miles an hour, which placed him approximately in the 80th percentile of pitchers. Meanwhile, his average fastball velocity over the rest of his career was 93.5, a full 2 miles per hour slower. Those two ticks in velocity make it substantially harder for hitters to wait on an off-speed pitch from Rodón, and as a result, he has become a much more effective strikeout pitcher.
Saying that Rodón developed a good 4-seam doesn’t really do it much justice; over the past two seasons combined, his fastball is the best 4-seam in the majors, posting a combined run value of -48 over these two seasons. For reference, the next best 4-seam was that of his new rotation mate Nestor Cortes Jr., who posted a cumulative -34 run value. This essentially means that Rodón’s fastball prevented 14 runs more than the next best fastball in the league over these two seasons; that’s ridiculous.
Not only has his shift towards high fastballs helped him generate more swings-and-misses, but it’s also totally changed his archetype even when he’s not striking people out. Early in his career as a sinkerballer, despite producing a ton of ground balls he wasn’t getting the results he wanted. Now, most of the soft contact that he induces goes up in the air since he’s causing batters to swing late and under his 4-seam; below is a graph of both his ground ball percent and fly ball percent, by season:
With the impending ban of the shift, I would argue that a fly ball might be a more desirable outcome than a grounder; a poorly hit grounder can get through the gaps in the infield fairly often, while pop-ups and fly balls are usually easy outs so long as the ball doesn’t fly all the way to (or over) the wall. Luckily, Rodón has also become better at keeping the ball in the park; over the past two seasons, his home run to fly ball ratio has been 7.8%, as opposed to 12.2% over the first 6 seasons of his career (league average hovers around 10% year to year, so he went from below average to above). This statistic is generally used to add context to small samples; for example, if a player has hit 60% of their fly balls out of the park so far, that’s certainly not a sustainable number. However, over larger samples this number can be a good measure of a hitter’s in-game power, or in this case, a pitcher’s ability to limit a hitter’s power. A vast majority of the time that Rodón coaxes a fly ball, which we have determined is very often, it’ll fall harmlessly into an outfielder’s glove since he makes it so difficult for a batter to square up the pitch.
In case it wasn’t apparent, this is not normal; below is a graph I created using every qualified pitching season since the beginning of the Statcast era (2015) showing the correlation between average launch angle and expected slugging percentage; in English, that’s the amount of total bases we’d expect per at bat compared to the average angle that a pitcher allows off the bat:
As you can see, pitchers who allow hitters to lift the ball tend to not fare so well, but Rodón just doesn’t seem to care. He’s in the bottom right corner with only a few other guys in his stratosphere: 2017 Max Scherzer (NL Cy Young winner), 2018 Max Scherzer (NL Cy Young runner-up), and 2018 Justin Verlander (AL Cy Young runner-up). In case you were wondering, the next closest dot was another Scherzer season (2016) in which he won another Cy Young. That’s some pretty solid company.
So, what does this mean? For starters, it tells us that Carlos Rodón is very good at his job. On a more general level, it tells us that if a pitcher can get the ball hit into the air without those fly balls turning into doubles or homers, they’ll be a damn good pitcher. There is nobody better at doing this right now than Carlos Rodón.
It’s worth mentioning that Rodón’s arsenal outside of fastballs has also changed quite a bit over the years. His slider is undoubtedly his best secondary pitch, posting a .107 and .193 batting average against in 2021 and 2022 respectively (not to mention the 52% and 39.7% strikeout rates). One possible reason for this increased effectiveness is that he’s gotten less predictable with when he throws it; 2021 and 2022 were the first two seasons of his career in which he threw his fastball more often than his slider in 2 strike counts, which is unlike a majority of hurlers who use their breaking balls as their putaway pitches.
The sinker wasn’t the only pitch that Rodón abandoned over the course of his career. If you look back at the chart showing his pitch frequency, you can see that he threw his changeup around 10-15 percent of the time for the majority of his career. However, in 2022, that number plummeted to 2%. This was likely a good decision; of the 6 seasons for which we have available data (his whole career besides 2015), his changeup was his worst pitch (or tied for his worst pitch) by run value in 4 of those 6 years.
Although he mainly is a two-pitch pitcher at this point in his career, he did offset the drop in usage of his changeup by adding a curveball; after introducing it in 2021, throwing it 1.7% of the time and not getting particularly great results, he seemed to become more comfortable with it in 2022, upping the usage to 5.7% and getting great results. Rodón threw 171 curveballs in 2022; only 17 of them were put in play, and only one resulted in a hit – a ground-ball single through the hole from William Contreras. If he ever develops his hook into a truly great pitch that he can throw more often, it could tunnel well with his high fastball and make him into the single best pitcher in the universe.
Before I shut up about Rodón, I thought I’d leave you with some rapid-fire stats to try to reiterate just how good this guy has been:
- In 2022, he had the second highest WAR among all pitchers in the MLB per Fangraphs. In 2021, he placed 8th in this same metric.
- On top of having the league’s best fastball over the past two seasons, his slider has a combined run value of -21, which is a better mark than the sliders belonging to Gerrit Cole, Shane Bieber, Luis Castillo, and many more of your favorite elite pitchers.
- In 2022, Rodón’s whiff percentage was in the 86th percentile, while his strikeout percentage was in the 95th percentile. It’s simply impossible to put a bat on his ball.
- Despite posting a career high in innings pitched in 2022, he also set a career high in fastball velocity. His biggest knock in the past has been injury concerns, but this is a very promising sign.
- He’s producing at this level despite getting very little help; the Giants defense in 2022 was 28th in MLB in Outs Above Average, allowing an estimated 29 extra runs over the course of the season. He’s also had below average framing catchers in each of the past two seasons.
So, the next time somebody tells you that Carlos Rodón got overpaid for his career production, kindly remind them that he is not at all the same pitcher he once was. Advanced projection models like Steamer like him to continue his run of dominance, projecting him a 3.14 ERA and 2.99 FIP with a 31.8% K rate and 6.8% walk rate over 181 IP, which would be a career high. The only area in which he’s expected to regress is his home run numbers, which is definitely reasonable considering just how low they’ve been over these past two seasons. Regardless, he’s currently in his athletic prime, and with the changes he’s made over the past few seasons he’s given us every reason to believe that he will not only live up to his lucrative deal with the Yankees, but he just might outperform it.
All stats referenced taken from Baseball Savant and Fangraphs, with the first 3 pictures also coming from Savant
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