Don’t Forget About Eduardo Rodriguez

Lefty in Boston has been overseen with the addition of Chris Sale — let’s take a look at Rodriguez

Sporting News

I’ll admit, this article (my first here at The Unbalanced) was not supposed to be written about Eduardo Rodriguez. I wanted to sing the praises of Seattle southpaw James Paxton, but he is quickly becoming widely covered.

In this Jeff Sullivan article on FanGraphs, Paxton is commended for flashing elite peripherals dating back to last July 22. When I looked into the league leaders going back to that point in time, Paxton was indeed among all of the brand names. However there was one other pitcher I noticed who kept pace as well, and he is the namesake of this article. Consider this graphic:

You can see two pitchers who were really effective in the second half of the season. Player A is the aforementioned James Paxton, whom we know is great. Player B, however, is one Eduardo Rodriguez. In this chart, he looks even better because he is 12th and 3rd out of 154 qualified starters in Hard% and Soft% respectively. In fact, Rodriguez’ ability to prevent hard contact and induce soft contact is why he can get away with such a high FB% (45.5%) and low GB% (32.1%) in Fenway Park; his HR/FB% is a more than reasonable 7.4%.

If you are wondering if there was a Paxton-esque adjustment that made things click for Rodriguez, it wasn’t anything to do with his arm slot or velocity. The problem for Rodriguez going into his July 16th start last year was giving up homers on the fastball, which has been responsible for 15 of the 32 jacks he has let up in his career. This is the heatmap of the ISO against that four seamer, which he threw nearly 70% of the time up to that point.

There they are, locking into the fastballs in that bottom right quadrant. Baseball is an eternal game of adjustments, and Rodriguez adjusted in two major ways. He first began to elevate that four seamer from the middle of the zone to the top right quadrant, a decision that might make you raise your eyebrows. You would think that an elevated fastball from a fly ball pitcher would lead to more meatballs, but Rodriguez followed that up with something major. Instead of throwing the four seamer ~70% of the time, he cut it down to about 50% and began throwing a two seamer 17.5% of the time (supplanting most of the difference). So, in a series of heatmaps, Rodriguez went from this location with his four seamer up until July 16th:

To this location with his four seamer since July 16th:

And finally, the implementation of his two seamer in this location as well:

In a way, it’s beautiful. It’s almost like fastball surgery. It becomes so much more unpredictable, and Rodriguez’ HR/9 for the rest of the season was 0.81, compared to 1.31 in his career up to that point. In fact, he didn’t give up more than one in any given start from that point on.

To be clear, Rodriguez is not a burgeoning Cy Young candidate in the way that James Paxton is. He still has control issues, as his walk rate in our sample size only increased from his career norms (which are still well below average). Luckily for Eduardo Rodriguez, he is not being counted on or paid to be an ace, and he is only 24-years-old. He also has enough ability to make drastic location adjustments with his fastball, so maybe there is room for upside down the road. Either way he made a big improvement already, and if he can carry that into 2017 he’ll be a mainstay in the Red Sox rotation. Let’s be sure to keep an eye on him this season.