Rookie Southpaw Sean Newcomb Reminds Me of Yu Darvish
The highly touted lefty could be a front line pitcher for an Atlanta team desperately seeking one
On June 10, left-handed pitcher Sean Newcomb made his Major League debut for the Atlanta Braves. A quick background on Sean Newcomb: he attended the University of Hartford and was drafted 15th overall in 2014 by the Angels. After reaching pro ball, he quickly developed into a consensus top 100 prospect and was traded to Atlanta in the Andrelton Simmons deal. After ascending to AAA this year, he was called up to make the start last Saturday against the New York Mets. In his first big league start, he threw 6.1 innings, allowed no earned runs, struck out seven, and walked two batters. I watched the game with great interest and was very impressed by Newcomb’s performance. His fastball looked strong and he flashed a big curveball. Naturally, I decided to peruse Newcomb’s statistics in the minor leagues to gauge his performance there. He was dominant, but I found something interesting about him:
The one knock against Newcomb is that he walked a ton of guys in the minors, as shown by the 12.5% mark in this chart. While I was impressed by everything else, including his astounding 27.8% strikeout rate, I found myself bewildered at his Home Runs per 9 Innings (HR/9) rate; it’s really low for someone who walks that many batters. Conventional wisdom says that a pitcher with bad walk rate has bad control, and that a pitcher with bad control would have to pay for his mistakes in the middle of the zone. Newcomb, not giving up many home runs at all, seemed to buck that conventional wisdom, which was odd to me. Of course, I wanted to verify that my conventional wisdom was correct by using data, so I made this scatterplot:
These are all the pitchers from 2016 with at least 150 innings pitched (IP), and there is definitely a correlation between walk rate and home run rate. Every pitcher with a walk rate lower than 6% also had a HR/9 lower than 1.4, with the exception/outlier being Michael Pineda, who is represented by the dot in the extreme bottom right quadrant (he will come up again later). On the other hand, every pitcher with a walk rate of approximately 10% or higher had at least a 1.0 HR/9 rate, with two exceptions/outliers in the top left quadrant. These two outliers are Jake Arrieta and Tyler Chatwood, and their dots are marked red. This is the quadrant Sean Newcomb would find himself in if he were a Major League pitcher, and he doesn’t keep a lot of company.
From there, I wanted to see what Sean Newcomb might have in common with Jake Arrieta and Tyler Chatwood. Unfortunately, there was not much to go on from there; Arrieta was a ground-ball specialist, featuring a lethal sinker and changeup combo, so he did not give up many homers by design. Chatwood, also a ground-ball specialist, did not compare to Newcomb because he posted a mediocre strikeout rate. It became quite clear that I would have to dig deeper to find a better comp for someone as unique as Sean Newcomb.
Using the FanGraphs Splits Tool, I made a search for pitchers since 2002 that posted a walk rate of at least 10%, a HR/9 rate of at least 1.0, and a strikeout rate of at least 26% in a single season. The search came up with three individuals:
Clayton Kershaw, Scott Kazmir, and Yu Darvish are all interesting comparisons for Sean Newcomb. None are ground-ball specialists, so I did not run into the same problem that I did with Jake Arrieta. Off the bat, I probably wouldn’t use Clayton Kershaw as a projection for Newcomb because 2009 was Kershaw’s first full season, and he has since developed into one of the best control artists and best pitchers of all time (in fact, he is represented by the dot in the extreme bottom left quadrant of our scatter plot). With Kazmir and Darvish, however, we may be onto something. To further examine Newcomb and these comps, I made this chart with their batted ball rates (Newcomb’s, of course, were recorded in the minors).
Here, we can further distinguish which comparisons we can make for Newcomb. As you can see by their batted ball differences, Kershaw continues to distance himself from Newcomb. Scott Kazmir doesn’t seem quite right either, because he has a lower line-drive rate and higher fly-ball rate. Darvish, on the other hand, looks to have a very similar profile. Darvish is unique in his own right, as he throws different types of fastballs rather than having a standard three or four pitch repertoire like Newcomb, but his results have checked out to be very similar thus far.
Of course, one category from this chart stands out from the rest, as each pitcher posted an above average infield fly-ball (IFFB) rate. Infield fly-balls are the most desirable result for a pitcher because they are generally automatic outs and are more efficient than strikeouts (which require at least three pitches). Newcomb’s 19.7% mark in particular is off the charts, as the Major League average has hovered below 10% in recent years. This raises the question, “what have Darvish and Newcomb done to induce so many weak pop-ups?” The answer to these numbers, as is often the case in baseball, comes through logic. Here’s Yu Darvish in 2014, inducing an infield fly-ball from Giancarlo Stanton:
Stanton, known for timing pitches well and hitting them to Cancun, was completely off-balance there. The more important point was that Darvish used his cut-fastball, which was tracked as having an average velocity of 88.6 MPH in 2014; the one he threw to Stanton was recorded at 91 MPH. In short, Darvish is so successful at inducing infield fly-balls because he effectively keeps hitters off-balance by mixing speeds. To prove the point further with data, here is an in game velocity line chart from one of Darvish’s starts in that 2012 season; if our hypothesis is correct, the lines (pitches) should be jagged, or anything but linear:
Thanks to Baseball Savant, we can verify that the visual observation indeed holds up. Darvish throws his pitches at varying speeds, and that level of sequencing leads to his penchant for inducing infield fly-balls. To give this line chart some perspective, let’s examine another velocity line chart, one by a pitcher who has an extremely low IFFB% (without being a ground-ball specialist, of course). I came up with this start by Michael Pineda, who posted an IFFB rate of only 3.8% in 2016:
Clearly, Pineda’s velocity sequence is extremely linear, and it is probable cause for his low IFFB%; his lack of deception leads to fewer batters being off-balance. This stands in direct contrast to Yu Darvish. Of course, this article is about Sean Newcomb, and the only question left is whether he mixes speeds enough to resemble Darvish. This is what his velocity line chart looked like in his first big league start against the Mets:
The answer is a resounding yes. Newcomb’s fastball velocity was anywhere between 90 and 96 MPH, and when he did incorporate his secondary and offspeed pitches, they too fluctuated in velocity. While his IFFB% was astronomically high in the minors, he did record it over a healthy sample size, and the rate at which he mixes speeds is conducive to inducing infield fly-balls. Additionally, there is reason to believe that his sequencing skills are the cause for his low home run rate, which is what sparked my curiosity about him in the first place.
Clearly, Sean Newcomb has been on the Major League radar for quite some time. Scouts love him, the Atlanta Braves seem to think highly of him, and after this analysis, I am excited by him too. Through his unique peripherals, batted ball rates, and velocity sequencing, I believe Yu Darvish is a great comp for Sean Newcomb. Darvish has produced 4.5 fWAR on a 200 inning basis in his six year Major League career, and it’s quite possible Newcomb can pitch his way into that elite territory. Before reaching my lofty projections for him, he will have to make his second start in the big leagues this Friday against the Miami Marlins. Maybe he will get Giancarlo Stanton off balance enough to hit an infield pop-up, but at the very least, Newcomb will be happy to avoid Stanton homering against him.
