Tim Lincecum Aims To Get Back To Basics
By Matt Musico
Baseball is such a great game; mostly because it can be both intricate, yet very simple at the same time. I’ve been asked countless times what I think the most important pitch in baseball is. Since I was never much of a pitcher, I felt it was a complicated answer. It only took one time for me to see how simple the answer to that question was. My boss, a former college pitcher, asked me that question, so I said, “A well-placed fastball.” Seems logical, right? It sounded good to me because I heard Greg Maddux say that a well-placed fastball is the toughest pitch for a batter to hit. However, I was wrong.
My boss countered my answer with a very simple one: strike one. It hit me like a ton of bricks…duh! Why did I think it was more complicated than it really is? We all do that sometimes; fresh off his two-year, $40.5 million contract that he agreed to over the winter with the Giants, Tim Lincecum‘s main focus this spring is to get ahead of hitters more often with strike one, and he’s planning on doing so by using his fastball.
Even though it’s easy to say that Lincecum is still one of the elite pitchers in the game today, it was tough to argue with some of the statistics that I found in an article on Baseball Analytics. From 2009 to 2011, the San Francisco ace has been experiencing some downward trends in many areas. What are those particular areas, you ask? The percentage of hitters he walks, his overall fastball strike zone percentage, and his first pitch strike percentage with his heater.
When Lincecum won his second consecutive Cy Young award in 2009, he experienced his best BB/9IP in his career (2.7), and he only walked 7.5% of the batters that he faced. Each year since 2009, both of these statistics have been on the rise, with his BB/9IP rate in 2011 raising to 3.6 and the percentage of batters he walked to to 9.6%. These don’t seem like huge increases and he is still by far one of the best pitchers around, but that’s a trend that even he said needs to stop, and the best way to do so is to get his fastball under control.
Over the past three seasons, starting pitchers have been throwing fastballs in the strike zone at an average rate of 51.5%. In 2009, Lincecum was comfortably above the average at 53.5%. After finishing up his age 27 season in 2011, he has now dipped below the league average with a rate of 49.4%. First pitch strikes show an even steeper decline, with the three-year league average being 61%. Over that same three-year period, Lincecum went from putting his fastball over the plate to start off an at-bat 59% of the time to 53% of time.
What exactly do all of these numbers mean? Has Tim Lincecum already hit his prime and is slowly going on a downward trend toward the end of his career? His pending free agency is coming sooner than we think with the winter of 2013 right around the corner, and the Giants certainly don’t want to overpay for another under-performing pitcher (cough, Barry Zito, cough). I don’t think his delivery or his stature has anything to do with this very small decline. At the end of the day, he still recorded a 2.74 ERA and 1.2 WHIP in 2011, which is pretty darn good.
A sign of an elite athlete is when, despite outperforming their peers, they’re able to find imperfections in their game and have the willingness to refocus and tighten up that particular weakness to become even better. That’s exactly what Tim Lincecum is doing and I applaud him for not sitting back on his laurels and finding a way to make himself a better pitcher during the spring, which could pay dividends in a pennant race in a few months.
Do you think this downward trend is something to be worried about for Tim Lincecum, or is it just a small bump in the road?
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