Marcus Stroman's Slurve Struggles. Cole Ragans is Human?!
Marcus Stroman, Cole Ragans
Cubs Marcus Stroman’s slurve hasn’t been the same since late June. From Opening Day through late June, the pitch averaged 85 mph with 1” vertical break and 14” sweep. Although it’s called a slurve, this is a pretty standard sweeper, FanGraphs Stuff+ of 141. In July before his IL stint, the xwOBA on the pitched jumped from sub-.300 to .408 as the pitch lost 2” sweep (Stuff+ down marginally). Since his return from the IL, the pitch is down 2-3 mph, has gone from 1” vertical break to -3” vertical break (more drop) and added 1” sweep (Stuff+ of 130). To me, it appears like he’s getting to the front of the ball too much and turning the pitch into more of a curveball, hence the added drop, which is generally a byproduct of topspin. With the swing-miss of the pitch basically cut in half, it’s eliminated his primary right-handed swing-miss option. Hard to tell if something physical is still going on. His release height was up ~1-2” yesterday along with his extension being up 1-2”, which suggests some raising of his arm angle. In theory, makes sense that with a higher arm angle, he wouldn’t be on the side of a slurve as much.
Royals Cole Ragans last 4 outings have proved to us that he is in fact, human. 6 BB/9 over these last 4 starts is a strong deviation from where he’d been in August. The oddity is that nothing is dramatically different in terms of his zone rates or underlying batted ball quality to right-handed hitters. His cutter usage has come up about 9 percentage points and his slider lost some velo as he’s turned it into a true bullet ball (>1” vertical with >1” sweep). He’s still generating >30% swing-miss on everything in his repertoire in September to righties as well, xwOBA sits below 300 as well. His fastball did drop 2” arm-side movement, but the velo is actually up, so the Stuff+ grade remains strong. I’d guess the loss of arm-side is connected to a slightly lower release height in September compared to August. He hasn’t had as much success versus left-handed hitters of late, but I think that boils down to Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez, two of the better hitters in baseball. Scratching my head on this one, weird to see an increase in walks without a noticeable difference in zone rates.