This seemed to be the state of the Boston Red Sox's starting rotation at the outset of 2016: a true ace in David Price, a few guys they hoped could be his co-ace, and a knuckleballer who figured to be neither.
This is yet another reason there's a file marked "Can't Predict Baseball."
That knuckleballer is Steven Wright, who's blurred the line between merely being Boston's co-ace and being Boston's true ace. He took a 2.22 ERA into his Monday start against the Chicago White Sox at Fenway Park, and he lowered it even further with nine innings of one-run ball.
Had the Red Sox scored enough runs to avoid a 3-1 loss, that would have been a league-leading fourth complete game for Wright. But his performance still kept Boston's bad rotation ERA of 4.49 from getting worse.
Wright's own ERA, meanwhile, is now the best in the American League by a comfortable margin:
- Steven Wright: 2.01
- Danny Salazar: 2.23
If this feels familiar, that's because it sort of is. As the folks at Inside Edge noted, Wright's start to 2016 closely resembles that of the last knuckleballer to win a Cy Young:
Mind you, Wright's knuckler is not an exact replica of the one R.A. Dickey had in 2012. It was known for velocity that sat in the high 70s and could climb higher. Wright's knuckleball is more of a traditional floater, sitting in the low- to mid-70s and occasionally going slower.
Likewise, Wright's results are not identical to those Dickey had at the same point in 2012. Wright boasts inferior walk and strikeout rates, meaning he's needed more good fortune on balls in play. Because his .246 batting average on balls in play is well below the major league average of .295, a certain set of eyes could see him as a prime candidate for regression.
Another set of eyes, however, sees Wright as a guy whose knuckleball won't get any easier to hit.
To a couple of extents, Wright's knuckleball has been harder to hit than the one Dickey had in 2012. Per Brooks Baseball, the 31-year-old is holding opposing batters to just a .210 average and a .275 slugging percentage with his knuckleball. Both are better than what Dickey's knuckleball did to opposing batters (.219 AVG, .348 SLUG) in 2012.
That this is happening despite the fact that Wright has had more balls put in play suggests either a great amount of luck or a great amount of soft contact. Today's fancy-pants stats point toward the latter.
According to Baseball Savant, Wright's batted balls average 87.5 miles per hour. That is safely below the MLB average of 89.2 miles per hour and close to the average exit velocity boasted by Jake Arrieta (87.2), who's otherwise known as the Contact Management Supreme Leader.
Courtesy of Daren Willman, MLB.com's director of baseball research and development, we know lower exit velocities tend to lead to more outs. This leads to a classic "Well, duh!" conclusion: If hitters want to do better against Wright, they should hit his knuckleball harder.
But, yeah. This will be easier said than done.
As Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs noted a few weeks ago, Wright gets a good chunk of his contact on pitches outside the strike zone. That's still true, as he has one of the AL's highest out-of-zone contact rates at 70.7 percent (No. 11).
Regarding Wright's exit velocity, prior to Monday, that's had exactly the kind of effect that league-wide figures suggest it would:
Knowing this, the obvious advice to give hitters is that they not go fishing when Wright's knuckleballs dance outside the strike zone. But that would essentially be asking them to do better at anticipating the movement of his knucklers. That's like asking party-goers to anticipate where Bill Murray will show up next.
What looks a lot flukier is the .229 BABIP Wright is holding hitters to on pitches inside the strike zone. That's far below the MLB average of .314, and therefore suspect.
But though that figure probably will come up, it may not be very far. Wright's exit velocity on in-zone pitches is 90.0 mph, which is below the average of 91.8. His BABIP may be a little too low, but he is earning his better-than-average BABIP on his in-zone pitches.
Besides which, hitters have to put Wright's in-zone pitches in play to raise his in-zone BABIP. That might be the biggest challenge of all. Among all qualified AL pitchers, nobody has a lower rate of contact in the strike zone than Wright's mark of 76.8 percent. Even when his pitches are good to hit, they're not so easy to target.
That's because Wright's knuckleball can do things like this:
As well as things like this:
It's hard to describe in words what makes a knuckleball good. Images like these are a reminder that a good knuckleball is something that can really only be seen. And when Wright pitches, you're going to see a lot of good knuckleballs.
And not just you, for that matter.
“Oh, my God, the hitters, the umpires—all of them, every game,” Red Sox catcher Ryan Hanigan said of the reactions he hears to Wright's knuckleball, via Evan Drellich of the Boston Herald. “It’s unbelievable the stuff you hear.”
This offers a fair bit of hope that Wright's knuckleball won't go the way of Dickey's, which hasn't been the same since it started leaking velocity after 2012. Wright's dominance is based not on velocity, but on good, ol' fashioned ball-on-silly-string movement.
The Red Sox don't have to call Wright their best ace. He's new to this whole dominance thing. Price, on the other hand, has been playing the part for the better part of a decade now. And with a 2.47 ERA over his last eight outings, he's playing the part again now after a slow start.
But the way he's going, Wright is at least a co-ace alongside Price. And with his knuckleball, he should be able to keep that label.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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