Best of BP: For Framber Valdez, Less Could Be More

This article was originally published August 29, 2023.

---

On June 21st 2023, Framber Valdez was at the peak of his powers. Following an eight-inning, two-run gem for a win against the Mets, his ERA for the season sat at 2.27 through 15 starts, and he was making the Astros’ decision to let Justin Verlander walk and make him the de facto ace of the team look brilliant. Coming off his first All-Star selection, an AL-leading 201 ⅓ innings, a top-five Cy Young finish in 2022, and a tremendous postseason run in which he allowed just four earned runs across 25 innings (and a 3-0 record, which never hurts), the 29-year-old sinkerballer with the vicious curveball appeared to be well on his way to his best season yet.

Then, he hit summer solstice, and things got rough.

Date	GS	IP	H	R	ER	BB	K	HR	ERA	FIP
Before June 21st	15	99	78	30	25	21	104	6	2.27	2.71
June 21st-August 24th	9	55.2	58	37	36	17	49	10	5.82	4.92

Even with his August 1st no-no sandwiched in this stretch, his ERA jumped by well over a run. It’s easily his worst extended stretch of pitching since becoming a full-time member of Houston’s rotation in 2020, and there’s something about this series of starts that sticks out like a sore thumb; he allowed 10 home runs in just under 56 innings, after allowing all of 34 long balls in his previous 505 ⅔  innings as a starter since the start of 2020.

This might be a stunning development, but it was foreshadowed even during his run of dominance early in the season, and it’s no fluke: Framber Valdez is no longer an outlier groundball pitcher. Let’s talk about who Valdez is as a hurler, the value of outlier movement, why he’s lost his, and why less could be more in this particular case.

WHO FRAMBER VALDEZ IS (OR RATHER, WHO HE WAS)

Valdez has always been a fascinating pitcher for a wide variety of reasons, chief among them being that what made him great was not his ability to rack up strikeouts in bunches, his ability to suppress walks, nor was it an above-average combination of both K’s and control.

From 2020-22, there were 201 starters who tossed at least 100 innings. Here are Valdez’s rankings in a few key pitching stats:

• K%: 80th
• BB%: 136th
• Average Exit Velo: 186th
• K-BB%: 93rd

If you didn’t know anything else about a pitcher with those rankings, would you assume they’re good, let alone great? Probably not. After all, this is a pitcher with an above-average but unspectacular strikeout rate and subpar walk prevention who gets hit hard about as often as anyone. Most of the pitchers surrounding Valdez’s placement in the K-BB% leaderboard had ERAs that begin with a four, and the lefty’s 3.20 xFIP and 3.39 SIERA really stand out compared to his strikeout-minus-walk rate peers.

So what’s his deal? Well, in that leaderboard, Valdez ranked fifth-best in home run prevention, with a sterling 0.63 dingers allowed per 9 innings. And if you take out Spencers Turnbull and Strider, both of whom barely qualified for the 100 IP threshold, he ranks third, behind only Logan Webb and José Quintana.

That undersells just how good Valdez was at keeping the ball on the ground. Let’s look at it in another way: in that very same leaderboard, Valdez ranked first in average launch angle against, with a stunning -3.9º mark. The next best starters were Alex Cobb and the aforementioned Webb, at 2.5º on average, and the difference between Cobb/Webb and Valdez was just about the same as the difference between second and 37th place (Corbin Burnes, 9.0º).

In other words, Framber is in another galaxy when it comes to forcing batters to hit the ball straight into the ground. Or rather, he was, because he hasn’t been the same in 2023. As the season has progressed, he’s been allowing more and more fly balls, and the home runs are starting to become a problem. After averaging a launch angle against of -3.9º in the past three seasons combined, it has jumped to 4.3 in 2023—good, but not outlandish.

This change creates an imbalance in Valdez’s house of cards, because he depends on being outlandish. That negative average launch angle was the reason he was able to thrive despite unimpressive strikeout and walk rates and hard contact. This not only allowed him to to eliminate walks and baserunners through double plays (Valdez induced 45 double play balls in 64 starts between 2020-22), but it also enabled him to attack the zone more aggressively, knowing that even if he threw a meatball, the worst outcome would be a single more often than not. For a pitcher with unspectacular command, this ability to suppress contact quality can be of massive safety valve.

Without his outlier ground ball-inducing capabilities, Valdez is now a pitcher without sterling command who gets hit hard and doesn’t strike out an eye-popping number of batters. But why is this happening to a pitcher who used to be historically good at keeping his infielders busy?

THE LOSS OF OUTLIER MOVEMENT

Valdez’s repertoire is built around his sinker. Around half of all pitches he’s thrown since becoming a member of Houston’s rotation have been sinkers, and for good reason. That sinking fastball has been a reliable strike-and-groundball getter for him for most of his career, but it looks very different this year:

Year	MPH	EV	LA	ISO	xwOBA	IVB	V drop	H mov
2020-22	93.3	91.9	-6.2	.104	.353	6.1	25.5	13.6
2023	95.4	92.1	4.9º	.154	.371	9.8	20.5	15.9

A lot of things might jump out at you here. The Astros lefty is throwing noticeably harder in 2023, and the movement profile of his sinker has really changed. Batters are, for the first time in his career, able to elevate his sinker more than once in a blue moon. This a sinker from 2021:

And this is his sinker in 2023:

You see it? Whereas his fastball used to be a heavy, bowling ball-looking sinker, in 2023 it looks much more like your standard running two-seamer. And the cause of this alteration to Valdez’s pitch movement lies in his velocity increase and the way he’s spinning the ball. In essence, Valdez is putting more backspin on the ball than he used to. This is directly correlated to, but not just a result of throwing harder, which almost always means less drop on a pitch, since gravity has less time to impact the ball’s flight. His tailing pitches simply don’t have as much time to tail.

However, it also has to do with a change in the kind of spin he’s putting on the ball. The raw spin rates of his sinker have remained in the same 2150-2200 RPMs area, but he’s spinning it in a different way. Whereas before Valdez’s spin efficiency used to be around 70%, in 2023 it’s been around 83-84%, which means more of the raw spin is contributing to movement. This is closely tied to a slight uptick in release point height, something you might’ve noticed in the two videos we saw just now, and which is causing the spin axis of his sinker to move up ever so slightly (from 10:45 to 11:00 on a clock).

Framber is getting behind the ball a lot more than he used to, and inducing more vertical movement on a pitch meant to stay low in the zone. As the chart from earlier demonstrated, the southpaw is inducing almost four more inches of lift on his sinker than he used to, and this isn’t just about throwing harder, but a subtle (but crucial) change in spin characteristics. The end result is that Valdez has lost the one thing that made his sinker stand out—its vertical movement has gone from outlier to firmly average:

His sinker isn’t the only offering of his that has lost outlier drop. His changeup has also gained lift through added backspin and velo, and lost virtually the same amount of movement as his sinker. So have his excellent curveball and good cutter. As his velo has increased, everything in his repertoire is staying up more than in previous years, and Valdez has lost his once-in-a-generation (for a starter) groundballer skills in the process. The heir apparent to Brandon Webb is no longer.

And yet, the conversation isn’t a simple one. Because, again, even though he’s lost movement, the Astros lefty is also throwing much harder than before. In fact, he’s now one of the hardest-throwing southpaw starters in all of baseball, at the level of Blake Snell and Carlos Rodón. Only Cole Ragans, Jesús Luzardo and Shane McClanahan are clearly above him. And velocity is very important!

So what’s the answer here?

COULD LESS BE MORE?

This is a layered topic to tackle, in no small measure because the battle between movement and velocity can often lend itself to a lot of discussions where individual beliefs and/or preferences tend to clash. More than a few people (not without reason) lament the velocity-obsessed game baseball has become over the past few decades, and just as many others embrace the intensity and let-it-rip mindset of today’s game. But at the end of the day it’s important to remember that this is not a philosophical debate; it’s about a pitcher’s performance, which is directly tied to the success and stability of a human being’s career.

Because of that, I tend to approach this topic with an individual-focused approach. There aren’t two identical athletes, just as there aren’t two identical human beings on the face of the planet. Universal answers don’t exist for any pitching-related question. Some pitchers don’t naturally excel at creating outlier movement and as such can be reliant on velocity, like Noah Syndergaard or Hunter Greene, whereas other hurlers are capable of imparting plus-plus movement on their pitches and don’t necessarily require elite velo to succeed.

Giants righty Logan Webb is a great example of the latter mold. Since the start of 2021, he’s put up a 3.15 ERA and 12.3 WARP (and counting) over 500+ innings with a fastball that’s averaged 92.3 MPH, well below the 93.9 MPH mark MLB pitchers have averaged as a whole in that time frame. Like Valdez used to, he’s done it with an outlier sinker, groundballs, and fantastic swing-and-miss secondaries. As Giants director of pitching Brian Bannister said in this excellent interview with Tread Athletics (46:38, paraphrased):

“Logan Webb was trying to be a 97 MPH four-seam pitcher, but he found peace in knowing he could throw 93 MPH while also making it sink as much as any human on planet Earth.”

That comment has always resonated with me, since it came when Bannister was making a point about helping athletes pitch to their strengths. What I’ve always taken from it is that finding what makes a pitcher great and/or different and expanding upon it is the right approach to pitching development, instead of trying to make everyone follow the same path or applying the same particular wisdom to every single athlete.

From 2020-22, there were 189 starters who tossed at least 500 pitches over what Statcast describes as the “heart” of the plate. Out of the 189, Valdez ranked as elite in preventing damage on middle-middle offerings: opposing hitters slugged a mere .444 (ranked 8th) and ISO’d just .151 (ranked 4th) against him. In 2023, hitters are slugging .572 and ISO’ing .246 against middle-middle Framber Valdez pitches.

In my opinion, for Framber Valdez, trading outlier sink for velocity isn’t worth it. No matter how good his breaking stuff is, Valdez is a sinkerballer at his core. As such, his fastball shape is going to find wood more often than not no matter how hard it’s thrown, and it is in Valdez’s best interest to make sure those batted balls are hit on the ground. Without his outlier groundballer talent, Valdez becomes a pitcher who simply can’t miss bats with the best of them due to his fastball’s shape, and he gets hit too hard and walks a few batters too many in order to get away with that while still being the upper-echelon pitcher he’s become.

Outliers make baseball fun. As fans, we love the extremes—we’re captivated by flamethrowers, but we also love the hurlers who get outs while throwing 88 MPH. And just as there’s beauty in overpowering batters with velocity, there’s a certain elegance in allowing batters to hit the ball, but never exactly how they wish to hit it. Over the past few years Framber Valdez has been just that; an incredibly unique pitcher who makes for fun, fast-paced games filled with infield action and wicked curveballs. In other words, he’s been appointment viewing. I believe baseball—and Framber himself—would be better with such a pitcher on display.