31-year-old knuckleballer Steven Wright has been an unexpected key part of the Boston Red Sox rotation.
Coming off the heels of his third complete game of the 2016 season, Boston Red Sox starting pitcher Steven Wright has placed himself squarely in the land of giants. Clayton Kershaw, Chris Sale and Johnny Cueto have reached three complete games as well, but the fact that Wright, a soft-tossing knuckleballer is sharing the same stat line as the aforementioned trio of hurlers is nothing short of amazing.
Monday’s victory over Baltimore was Wright’s fifth quality start in his last six outings and he’s gone at least seven innings in four of his last five starts. Durability has long been a trademark of pitchers who specialize or feature a knuckleball, but what Wright is doing with his vertical and horizontal movement is pretty special.
He’s inducing plenty of weak contact and swing and miss strikes by making the baseball almost dance to its desired location. Here’s a graph (courtesy of Brooks Baseball) that details the movement in inches of his vertical and horizontal movement:
It’s easy to see why the top half of the Baltimore order (Adam Jones, Hyun Soo Kim, Manny Machado, Chris Davis and Mark Trumbo) went 0-for-17 last night including six strikeouts. Wright mixed speeds between his pitches Monday night, ranging from 59 MPH on his slowest knuckleball to 79 MPH on his fastball.
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The plan coming out of Spring Training was for Wright to be the long man out of the bullpen, but injuries and need forced him into a starting role and the 31-year-old former University of Hawaii at Manoa ace has never looked back.
Currently, Wright ranks ninth in the American League in WAR for pitchers at 1.8 and he’s fifth for innings pitched, tossing 69.7 through 10 starts.
If those numbers weren’t enough to impress you, then here’s a few more to help you process what a fantastic start to the season Wright has had. He’s only allowing 6.45 hits per nine innings and owns a fantastic 0.38 HR/9 rate. Perhaps the key factor in both of those statistics is the lack of hard contact he allows. Wright has held batters to just a 25 percent hard contact rate and he’s inducing groundballs at a 44 percent clip.
I perused the numbers and charts over at Baseball Savant and discovered that left-handed batters are averaging just 80.8 MPH when the ball leaves the bat, while right-handers have fared much better with a 96.7 MPH exit velocity. Again, his command has been paramount to his success this year and his strategic placement of pitches has allowed him to survive the occasional mistakes.
To give an even better example of how difficult it’s been to barrel up a Steven Wright offering in 2016, consider this contact percentage chart from our friends at Fangraphs:
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Keep in mind that Wright has never pitched more than 148 innings in any season as a professional so there remains the risk of uncharted waters as we progress deeper into the season. The good news is the Red Sox have no plans to limit his usage per Boston Globe reports.
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It’s possible that the combination of his age (31) and his style of pitching have put to rest the fears of injury and over-usage that have become so prevalent in today’s game.