Doug Fister’s Breakout Year

It was Doug Fister, not Justin Verlander, who spun a gem to capture the Tigers’ first AL Central title since 1987. To put that into perspective, Rakim and Eric B were the kings of rap. Today, we have to deal with “rappers” such as Lil Wayne and Drake. Back to baseball, Fister was a vintage Dave Dombrowski trade; give nothing, get productive players. Most people think of Fister’s 2011 season as being merely solid, but that isn’t really the case when you take a deeper look at his production.

Only 11 other starting pitchers have a higher WAR than Fister in 2011, which basically means that he has performed at an ace-level (5.0 WAR). Just a quick aside, I always use FanGraphs WAR unless if I specify that it is rWAR (Baseball-Reference WAR).

In my last post, I talked about the limitations of xFIP because it takes into account HR/FB%. That’s all good and fair in most instances, but xFIP is a misleading statistic when looking at groundball pitchers such as Fister.  Although you could argue that fly balls have as much of a chance as going out of the park regardless of the type of pitcher on the mound, a good portion of Fister’s fly balls have been infield flies. Such is the case for groundball pitchers, because they are more likely to keep the ball in the yard. However, pitchers like Doug Fister are prone to giving up their fair share of line drives, but Fister has been around the league average in this regard. One thing to note is that his GB% has gone up with his LD% and IFFB%, but his FB% and HR/FB% have gone down. All of these patterns have been this way for his three full seasons.

For an explanation to these rates, we must turn to pitching data. An interesting pattern over the years is that Fister is throwing his fastball less, and his changeup usage has been dramatically cut down each season. To make up for that, he has turned to a slider/curveball combination. Fister is also throwing the ball harder than he ever has, but he is mainly a control pitcher who gets the outs.

Another interesting thing to note is that his curveball has significantly improved, and he is racking up outs with his fastball. Most importantly, however, he is getting hitters to chase his pitches more often, and that’s definitely a product of his curveball. He’s been throwing more first strikes- we all know how important that is for pitchers- and far less of his pitches are in the zone. In short, his breakout season can be attributed to his curveball, and the fact that he isn’t giving hitters anything good to hit.

While Fister’s strikeout rate is underwhelming, a key thing to note is that 78.4% of the pitches he has thrown out of the zone have been hit. This means that he is tricking hitters into getting easy outs, and that’s actually more valuable than getting strikeouts. Fister’s control and ability to trick batters into getting easy outs are two clear reasons as to why he has been one of the top 15 pitchers in the Majors this season.