Many popular opinions of pitching prospects are formed from general scouting reports. While these reports are invaluable resources, they can’t always be trusted. Hundreds of minor league hurlers are credited with “mid-90′s velocity,” but very few MLB starters actually have that grade of heat, for example. It’s incredibly frustrating to hear about a pitcher with “a mid-90′s heater and plus curve,” only to have him come up to the big leagues and show a fastball that averages 90.5 mph and a slider.
When a pitcher come up to the majors, we can finally get a foolproof reading on what exactly his arsenal is comprised of, thanks to the great Pitch F/X system. In this series, I analyze just that–the “stuff” of recently-promoted MLB pitchers. Now that they’ve achieved their big league dreams and thus factor directly into the MLB picture, it’s high time that we know exactly what these guys are providing.
This time, I’m taking a look at Padres reliever Erik Hamren.
Like Rays reliever Dane De La Rosa, whom I profiled last week, Padres reliever Erik Hamren is an independent league refugee who sped to the majors in 2011. In fact, Hamren’s rise is even more impressive than De La Rosa’s, as he’s 3 1/2 years younger and opened 2011 as an extra arm in the High-A bullpen.
A 21/2 K/BB in 16 2/3 innings there got the righthander to Double-A, where he struck out 48 and walked just 12 in 49 innings; he was shuttled between the big leagues and Triple-A thereafter.
Of course, “former independent leaguer” conjures up images of a pitcher with basically no stuff, simply relying on a changeup and patterning to get by. Hamren, though, doesn’t fall into that stereotype. He’s no flamethrower on the hill, but he works with a 90-93 mph sinker with lots of movement, brought on by a low-three-quarters release.
However, Hamren had lots of trouble keeping the fastball in the zone in his 12 1/3 big league innings. Just 64 of his 129 heaters (49.6%) went for strikes, and only two of those were swinging strikes. The pitch played down mainly because Hamren failed to keep the ball low in the zone:
That’s an awful lot of pitches up in the zone and right down the heart of the plate, and sinkers don’t play well if they’re spotted there.
Hamren’s second pitch is a slurvy breaking ball that comes in at 77-80 mph. Interestingly, he gets far more strikes (68.7%) with it than with the fastball. I’d guess that the difference in strike percentage between the pitches–19.1%–has to be at or very near the top of the list of fastball/primary breaking ball strike percentages. The slurve didn’t miss a ton of bats (10.8% whiff rate, which is fringe-average for a breaking ball), but compared to the sinker’s ineptitude, it was a godsend.
The righthander also tosses an occasional slow splitter, but it’s not much more than a show pitch.
There are a couple of ways to look at Hamren’s prognosis. The first one is to look at his original MLB performance and be very pessimistic. It’s basically impossible to have results this poor from the fastball–which comprises nearly 60% of Hamren’s pitches–and survive, and his 6.19 FIP in his MLB stint seems to reflect that. Yes, the slurve plays, and he has deception to righthanders (against whom he throws more of those slurves, as well), but that’s just not enough to excuse the fastball’s woes.
The second, and more optimistic, way to view Hamren’s first MLB turn is to regard his struggles as just adjustment problems. After all, the guy walked 2.00 batters per nine innings in Double-A–it would seem unlikely that that same pitcher’s true-talent level is to only get strikes on half his fastballs, right? Perhaps it’s just a small-sample fluke, or that he got overly wound up in his first few appearances and wasn’t as precise as he was in the minor leagues. After all, he throws 90-93 mph with deception and movement–on paper, that should work, right?
It’s probable that bad luck and adjustment issues played some role in Hamren’s initial struggles, but at the same time, I’ve now looked at several dozen pitchers who were called up late in the season, and I can’t recall one, and certainly not many, who had these sort of problems locating his fastball, even in a small sample. Sure, he’ll probably get that rate over 50% if you let him settle in, but even if he goes to 53-56% and leaves slightly fewer pitches up and out over the plate, that’s just going to make him marginally less problematic, not good.
Hamren is a pitcher who seems to be less than the sum of his parts, which is odd, because his minor league numbers and backstory would seem to indicate the opposite. He could probably use some more time in Triple-A to really prove he’s mastered the minors before he gets another look.
For more on the Padres, check out Chicken Friars.
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