The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Steve Delabar

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 Mariners reliever Steve Delabar.

Steve Delabar has to be one of the most unlikely pitchers to reach the majors in 2011. Originally a 29th-round pick of the Padres back in 2003, he washed out of organized baseball after five mostly unproductive years in which he failed to escape A-ball. He was good-not-great there before blowing out his elbow in 2009, so he ultimately gave up on pitching and became a high school assistant coach. Apparently, a story not unlike that of the movie The Rookie ensued, and the then-27-year-old got a second chance with the Mariners organization in 2011.

A big, imposing righthanded pitcher, Delabar always had one big problem in the minors–walks. Splitting time between three minor league levels in 2011, he walked 40 batters in 56 innings, which immediately dampens the now-28-year-old’s comeback story. Still, though, he did manage to strike out 68 batters, and he didn’t allow a home run all season.

In seven major league innings, Delabar did finally surrender one home run, but he also managed seven strikeouts while walking four.

As you might expect from the high-strikeout, high-walk profile, Delabar is a hard thrower who doesn’t always locate. However, his fastball looks like it will play in the majors immediately–he worked consistently at 93-95 with decent life and a bit of deception, and 56 of his 81 (69.1%) of his fastballs in the big leagues went for strikes. That included a healthy seven (8.6%) swinging strikes. Batters also struggled to square the pitch up, fouling it off twice as often as they put it into play.

Delabar relies very heavily on his fastball, as he threw it over three-quarters of the time in his brief MLB exposure. As you might expect from a power four-seam pitcher, he tends to try to blow it by batters up in the zone:

That probably means the low homer rate is unsustainable in the big leagues, but the high foul/in play rate speaks well to the deception and late life on the pitch.

It probably seems odd that a pitcher who throws a ton of fastballs, and gets a ton of strikes with his fastball, has a walk problem. However, that’s quite easily explained–Delabar is purely a two-pitch pitcher, and his other offering is a splitter, a pitch notorious for rarely being in the strike zone.

Pitch F/X had no idea what to classify the split as, as Delabar didn’t seem to have a feel for the pitch consistently, so it wound up getting classified as no fewer than five different pitches (ironically, none of which were actually a splitter; the splitter classification comes from Baseball Info Solutions’ data, and the movement on the pitch is uniquely splitter-like). He did manage to get strikes with 16 of the 24 he threw, mainly because six went for swinging strikes. The pitch, which mostly comes in at 85-88 mph, has impressive late drop–sometimes as much as a foot compared to the fastball–and looks like a nice asset when Delabar is ahead in the count.

To me, there’s little question that Delabar’s fastball/splitter combination is enough to do some serious damage–his minor league strikeout rates, major league swinging strike numbers, and just the simple attributes of the pitches attest to that. Therefore, it’s all going to come down to how many strikes he throws. If he walks 26 batters in 30 2/3 innings like he did in Double-A this season, he won’t last for long, but if he can keep his strike percentages near their major league levels, he should find some success. I wonder if Delabar could be a Derrick Turnbow-type arm who has a couple of huge years before being undone by control woes as soon as his stuff takes the slightest step backward; we’ll have to wait and see where the next year takes this interesting comeback story.

For more on the Mariners, check out SoDo Mojo!

Follow us on Twitter: Nathaniel (@stoltz_baseball), Wally (@thebaseballfish) and James (@JAYRC_MCB). You can also keep up to date with all things S2S by liking our Facebook page.