Phillies number five starter, Kyle Gibson, hits milestone

Does anybody like number five starters? Number fours? They’re both a bit annoying, right? Once, a team only had to worry about four of them, but that ended years ago. Now a team has to find a number five, at a reasonable price, who can keep them in a game for at least six innings, ideally. And the Philadelphia Phillies seemingly have one of the best — Kyle Gibson.

The 34-year-old right-hander was definitely Philadelphia’s fifth starter as the season began although he is now, more than arguably, the number three (or at worst the number 3A). An injury has taken the Phillies preseason number three or four starter, Zach Eflin, out of the picture for the moment.

The Phillies’ Kyle Gibson is making the best of a couple of adjustments, some his, one MLB’s.

But the point here is that, on August 27, an otherwise non-definitive day for many MLB players, Kyle Gibson evened his career record at 88-88.

That sentence might rate a couple of eye-rolls in some quarters, especially in Philly, where doom is always lurking, but this was an interesting occurrence.

Gibson is 34, nearly 35 years old now, and has never had a .500 career won-lost record at the end of any of the nine MLB seasons he has pitched. The closest he got was in 2019, when his career tally was 67-68.

Of course, the end of August is not the end of the current season, but the tall right-hander definitely has a shot at finishing this campaign with a career won-lost mark of at least .500. He is currently 9-5.

There’s also a very decent chance that Kyle Gibson will match or better his 13-7 won-lost record in 2019, as well as push his ERA, currently at 4.08, below 4.00. In other words, as the pitcher has been an innings-eater, he may well finish this season for the Phillies as baseball’s best number five starter.

How has this happened?

A couple of things have occurred as Gibson has moved into his middle-30s. First, in 2020, he began to throw a cutter, but threw it only very sparingly, 0.4 percent of the time. This season, thus far, that rate has jumped to 21.7 percent, and the average speed on the cutter has risen 1.6 mph in the two more years Gibson has used the pitch.

The use rate of the cutter has also risen 6.6 percent from just last season. At the same time, Gibson has pushed his slider use up 3.8 percent, and his straight fastball use down 6.0 percent. All of these figures are courtesy of FanGraphs.com, and the most important result of all these adjustments has been, weirdly, a drop in the number of groundballs Kyle Gibson is getting – from 51.7 to 46.1 percent since last year.

But that’s not good in hitter-friendly Citizens Bank Park, is it? Or anywhere but the largest parks the Phillies would visit, right?

Maybe yes, maybe no. By hitting his spots well, as he did August 27 against the Pirates in shutting them out, Gibson has increased his infield pop-up rate by 2.1 percent. More balls hit off him are in the air, but more of them are near-total-misses. And some of those balls are dying before they reach outfield walls.

Remember, this is the season that MLB has standardized the dampness of the baseballs being put into play. Baseballs dry out in hot weather and putting all the game balls into humidors gives all pitchers better grips on those balls. This should enable all of them to hit their ideal spots on the corners better.

The overall result for veteran Kyle Gibson is an increase in his general effectiveness, to the Phillies’ benefit this season, and perhaps beyond. The hurler will be a free agent at the end of this season.