As unimpressive as that second half was, Pomeranz still has a really good year overall, and his success wasn’t a total fluke. He had a couple amazing starts while in Boston, with one being a 7.2-inning outing against the Cleveland Indians where the only damage done was a two-run homer by a Rajai Davis – a guy who’s only really notable for playing center field badly and hitting left-handed pitching. There’s some real potential there, and with the Red Sox reeling from several injuries to their rotation, Pomeranz has a chance to take a big step forward in 2017 with his curveball-focused repertoire.

Pomeranz throws six different pitches, but only three of them were seen with any type of consistency: the knuckle-curveball, fastball, and cutter. His slider, changeup and sinker aren’t really relevant, and the results from those pitches are either terrible or form too small of a sample size to really take anything from them. The curveball is his bread and butter pitch. He’s got a lot of spin on it, which makes it very difficult for batters to barrel up, and he gets a ton of whiffs with it. If there’s one pitch that was consistently nasty for Pomeranz last year, it was the hammer. Just look at that yellow bar:

That doesn’t even account for the insane 70 percent groundball rate he gets from that pitch. Filthy.

The curveball is great, there’s no doubt about that. His second-most used pitch, the four-seam fastball, isn’t as prolific in getting swings and misses. Pomeranz still got whiffs on 11 percent of the fastballs he threw, but the problem was when they actually made contact, they were hammered. The fastball registered a .216 average against, but that came with a .441 slugging and a .225 ISO, far and away his worst marks for any pitch. His fastball has a very precarious balance to it – if he can’t get swinging strikes with it, the pitch gets destroyed, and there’s no in-between. You can stand to reason that July and September were his worst months, judging by how many whiffs he got. You’d also be correct.

The reason for the bludgeoning of the fastball is that the pitch is the complete opposite of his curveball in terms of batted ball outcomes. While his curve generates grounders, his fastball gets a lot of fly balls, as over 47 percent of balls in play were of the aerial variety. At that point, home runs become a major issue, and that really showed last year in the second half with a 1.83 HR/9. This is where Pomeranz needs to improve. If he can keep his fastballs from being turned into souvenirs less often, especially against right-handed hitters, there’s no telling what his ceiling could be. All we know is that it goes up substantially.

The cutter is where things get interesting. This pitch is the third in which Pomeranz gets swinging strikes at an 11 percent rate or higher. That’s pretty good! The issue with the cutter is that is also skews strongly toward allowing fly balls. That’s sounds pretty bad, and a lot like the fastball. The difference here is that Pomeranz gets a pop-up on 20 percent of in-play contact, while the fastball induces a pop-up at a rate less than half of that. It’s a jamming pitch to right-handers and something to for lefties to flail at. There’s still the home run issue here, but I’d like to see Pomeranz use this pitch more. The curve and four-seamer were thrown over 1100 times each, which the cutter barely broke 330. He’s got another great weapon here.

With three pitches that can be very tough on opposing hitters, Pomeranz is not going to fail from lack of opportunity. The Red Sox’s pitching depth is getting torn to shreds lately, and Pomeranz will break camp as the team’s fifth starter. His competition for keeping the job isn’t particularly fierce. Steven Wright is probably his most imposing challenger, but he’s a 32-year-old knuckleball pitcher who’s coming back from a shoulder injury, and needs near-perfect weather to have his signature pitch be used effectively. I don’t dislike Wright, but I’m going to be more pessimistic considering the circumstances. Roenis Elias is recovering from an intercostal strain that’ll cost him at least a month, Henry Owens isn’t a real threat, and Kyle Kendrick…well, let’s be honest here: you’re not going to start Kyle Kendrick.

The last thing of note here is Pomeranz’s injury history, which is a tad bit overwhelming. Like Rich Hill – the one and only guy he’s ever compared to – the curveball maven has only surpassed 150 innings once in his career. The Red Sox will need the depth to shore up whatever innings he can’t throw, because you should expect 120 innings, and consider anything past that as gravy. PECOTA sees him as coming up just shy of 150 innings, with a solid 1.9 WARP to go along with it.

There’s an ton to like about Pomeranz in 2017, from his ridiculous curveball to the fact that he’s got two other pitches to go with it. The Red Sox are saddled with him for two more years, and if they can work a mid-rotation starter out of him, the trade won’t look as bad as it has. Twelve months of a southpaw with three plus pitches? The Red Sox might end up seeing a lot more of the pitcher they traded for than they one they got.

He’s been moved back and forth from the bullpen to the rotation so many times that it’s hard to believe that he made two full months worth of starts before being used as a reliever for a while. Then the Red Sox realized that Roenis Elias and Henry Owens weren’t going to cut it, and Sean O’Sullivan and Steven Wright weren’t going to be healthy, so back comes the prodigal son of oscillation. What a wild ride it’s been.

Last night, I joined a lot of people in staring at awe at my TV screen as Buchholz locked down the San Diego Padres’ bats. While that’s not a tall order, it’s still 6.2 innings of one-run ball, with six strikeouts to go with it. If you’re not impressed by Buchholz doing that – and I don’t blame you one bit if you’re not, you have high expectations, I get it – he’s done this 6+ IP, one-run-or-less thing for three straight starts now, and his victims in the last two starts were Detroit and Tampa Bay. It made me come to a realization that apparently resonated with others:

Clay Buchholz is having his 2013 season in reverse

— Brett Cowett (@BACowett) September 7, 2016

Since his last truly bad start on July 2nd, where he allowed six runs to score (but only three were earned! Baseball!) to a terrible Angels lineup, Buchholz has only given up two home runs: one being off the bat of a Red Sox-murdering Evan Longoria in a very bad spot, and the other to Ryan Schimpf last night. He’s only walked eight batters, and five of those walks came in just two of the 15 appearances he’s made.

Back comes Clay Buchholz, the prodigal son of oscillation.

The reason he’s been so good is that he’s cut down on the walks and homers. In the first half, Buchholz had a 10.5% walk rate and a 1.90 HR/9. That’s pretty objectively terrible. If he wasn’t handing out free passes like Owens, he was giving up bombs. Sometimes they both happened in the same inning, and sometimes I turned off the TV. But now, that walk rate is at 5.5% and the HR/9 is now 0.49. So a 50% reduction in walks, and a 75% reduction in homers. Couple that with a slight uptick in his strikeout rate and you’ve got something resembling a useful pitcher. Buchholz is toting a K/BB of 3.13 since the All-Star break, which is second-best on the team in the second half, behind Rick Porcello and his stupidly great 8.14 mark. If it wasn’t for the other starters also being very good, Buchholz would be standing out even more than he already is.

Clay Buchholz looks pretty good right now. And that statement absolutely terrifies me.

Buchholz is nearing the end of his contract, but the Red Sox hold a $13.5 million option for 2017. Thanks to how well he’s doing now, that decision isn’t obvious anymore. But the risks are.

For starters, we’ve seen this before. The 2013 season happened, whether Cardinals/Tigers fans believe it or not. Buchholz’s oscillation hit its highest peak and, man, did he dominate. Until he got hurt, of course. And then came back and dealt with all kinds of statistical regression on top of it. Turns out he was getting a ton of called strikes, and subsequently, a ton of strikeouts looking. Jeff Sullivan talked about it back then, and the conclusion was that it wasn’t a step forward, but just a temporary spike. A surge in swinging strikeouts is more representative of a pitcher’s strikeout potential, while called strikeout numbers tend to bounce around and prove to be more fluky. Buchholz’s 2014 confirmed the latter, and he dropped from his apex to his nadir. Almost like a sequel to his 2013 season, Buchholz’s 2015 campaign was very good, and he rose back up once more! His 2016, at least for a few months, was very bad. Rise and fall, ebb and flow. He is the prime example of  what the word “mercurial” means.

No one knows what to make of him if the option is picked up. Looking at trends, you’d expect him to be good, even great. But he’s also been injured in those odd-numbered years, and hasn’t pitched more than 115 innings in any of them. Conversely, he’s been perfectly healthy in his even-numbered years, and apart from 2010, he’s been horrible. Now that’s he’s good currently, what do you make of him? Can he keep this up?

Despite a 3.32 FIP, Buchholz’ batted ball profile doesn’t really portend success.

The peripherals don’t really believe he can. Despite a 3.32 FIP, his batted ball profile doesn’t really portend success. He’s traded in some grounders and fly balls for an increase line drives from 16% to 19%, and he’s allowed harder contact a little more than he did in the first half of the year. The only thing that’s somewhat normalized is his HR/FB, which sits at 4.7%, which is more than 5% lower his career average. Other than the fact that he’s kept it in the park far more, not much has changed with the contact he’s allowing. The lack of walks helps it look better.

So that’s where the Red Sox are currently. Do they pick up the option and hope the lottery ticket has a few good numbers, or do they let the rest of the league gamble instead? If Buchholz keeps this up, it might actually be the former. The market for starting pitching this winter is pretty bad, because as of now, it’s Rich Hill and a bunch of guys that would make you audibly wince if you saw him starting for your team. None of those options would be someone that you could claim to better than Buchholz with complete certainty. Plus, $13.5M might be bearable with what you’d have to work with, and that’s taking into account free agency and whomever is pitching in Triple-A.

It might not be a slam-dunk, this-is-obviously-good-and-not-bad decision, but it’s probably worth picking up the option and trying to roll a hard six with Buchholz’s frustrating inconsistency. All Buchholz has to do is keep pitching like he has, and thank Steven Wright for not knowing how to slide back into second base correctly, because that bum shoulder of his gave Buchholz the chance to hit another high in the sine graph of his career.

Photo by Bob DeChiara/USA Today Sports Images

There’s been a bit of a notion as of late that the Red Sox are a doomed team beyond repair. It’s easy to feel that way after a rough June, but at the end of the day this team is 42-36, tied for second place in the AL East and for first in the Wild Card hunt. They are competitive, and while they have some work to do when it comes to roster construction, they also have a roster that oozes with talent at the top.

With all this understood, the BP Boston staff was picked to identify one area the Red Sox can and should improve in the coming weeks. The idea here isn’t to find the best-case solution — no trades for Jose Fernandez will follow — but rather to find the move that hits the sweet spot between improving the 2016 team, improving the team core and not mortgaging the future. Indeed, instead of asking “what will help the Red Sox most,” we’re more asking “what’s the one smartest move the Red Sox can make,” or “what’s the one area the team should focus on?”

Our answers are as follow:

Trade for Rich Hill
Pitching is hard – just ask any Red Sox starter. The pitching staff has had a month they’d like to forget, and right now, the Sox have roughly two starters that you know what you’ll be getting in every start. Thing is, the Red Sox don’t need another ace, but they do need a competent, mid-rotation pitcher. The A’s have Rich Hill. He checks off every box on the Good Pitcher Checklist – strikeouts, grounders, decent-but-not-stellar peripherals – and he shouldn’t cost you any of the Moncada/Benintendi/Devers/Espinoza prospects. Let David Price sort himself out, have Steven Wright keep doing whatever it is he’s doing, and enjoy the Rick Porcello renaissance. Add Hill to that mix, and you’ve got a rotation again. – Brett Cowett

Trade for Sean Doolittle
I’m just going to come right out and say it: I’m writing about the need for Boston to improve their group of left-handed relievers. I know, they’d be better served to shore up the rotation and get something slightly better than a warm body to play left field, and I have little doubt they’ll go down that route. They also need some help in the bullpen, and Sean Doolittle kills two birds with one stone. The back-end of the relief corps isn’t a disaster — Koji Uehara and Junichi Tazawa are still quite good, just prone to blow-up outings — but it could use some help. The left-handed duo of Tommy Layne isn’t a disaster, but it could use some help. Doolittle gives them a lefty who is just a couple years removed from being one of the elite relievers in the game, who is also pitching extremely well in his return season. Even better, he’s locked up to a team-friendly deal through 2020, making this a long-term fix. Obviously, they shouldn’t empty the farm system to fix this area with the other issues on the roster, but if the price is right, Doolittle would make a huge impact on this Red Sox team. – Matt Collins

Still, it wasn’t all bad, and compared to the Bobby Valentine-led 2012 squad, the 2015 Red Sox were downright enjoyable. With that in mind, the BP Boston staff has assembled our top feel-good Red Sox stories of 2015, with the hope that if we copy this article theme a year from now, the entries will be much easier to pick.

Only 95 days until Opening Day. Have a Happy New Year!

Xander Bogaerts’ Breakout

There are still plenty of questions left unanswered when it comes to Mr. Bogaerts, but he certainly gave us more promising signs than red flags in 2015. The presumptive next face of the franchise proved that he’s a very capable defender at shortstop, that he can thrive in an MLB lineup and that he can make the type of adjustments that largely eluded him in 2014.  Was his .320 average (bolstered by a .372 BABIP) a fluke? Probably. But there’s no reason to think that Xander’s new opposite-field approach isn’t repeatable, and at the very least he profiles as a high-average, doubles-power shortstop, which is valuable in its own right.

Of course that’s not quite what we were promised when Xander was coming up through the minors. We want to see him use his beautiful, easy right-handed swing to generate some more loft and we want to see him take the occasional walk, just as he did at the end of 2013 and throughout the postseason. He just turned 23, so I bet we do see some steps forward in the power and patience departments next year. But really, we’re now nitpicking whether Xander will be franchise-altering or just really good, and that’s a pretty nice issue to be debating. So yes, 2015 stunk, but be still my heart — Xander arrived. – Ben Carsley

Brock Holt’s All-Star Appearance

On the whole, 2015 was another disappointing year in Red Sox history. It ended with a bang, welcoming David Price and Craig Kimbrel into the fold. It also started with eternal optimism and dreams of a murderer’s row featuring Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez. In between, however, it was just another losing season — the second in a row and third in four years. When the All-Star break started approaching, we knew Boston had to send at least once representative, but it was tough to decide who it’d be. Xander Bogaerts was having the best year. Mookie Betts was playing well, too. Despite all that, I was rooting for Brock Holt to get the nod.

There’s something special about the Brock Holt Story, something that I can’t quite articulate. His style of play combined with the fact that he doesn’t really look or play like a superstar makes his production that much more satisfying. Over the two supremely disappointing seasons that were 2014 and 2015, Holt was the only constant source of joy on the team. Between his versatility and his hair, there’s always something to smile about. He was never the best player on the roster, but he was the lone bright spot in an otherwise dark time. Bogaerts and Betts will get their chances, but it was so great to see Holt get his recognition in 2015. – Matt Collins

Eduardo Rodriguez’s Ascension

“The Red Sox entered 2015 with a rotation devoid of a top-flight starting pitcher and a poor recent track record of developing young arms. Since Clay Buchholz made his big league debut in 2007, Boston’s pitching prospects had largely floundered upon reaching the majors. From Kyle Weiland to Felix Doubront to the triumvirate of Allen Webster, Anthony Ranaudo and Rubby De La Rosa, the Red Sox consistently struggled getting their homegrown arms over that final hurdle, and their rotation paid the price in 2015.

Yet the trade deadline deal that sent Andrew Miller to the Orioles in 2014 netted in return the club’s most promising pitching prospect since Buchholz in Eduardo Rodriguez. When their rotation problems became painfully clear this season, Rodriguez earned his first opportunity, and his performances throughout his rookie campaign ensured his spot in the team’s rotation, hopefully for years to come. The 22-year-old lefty finished with a 3.85 ERA, a 3.89 FIP, and 2.3 WARP over 121.2 innings pitched. He allowed three earned runs or fewer in 17 of his 21 starts. The 94.9 mph he averaged on his fastballranked fourth among all MLB left-handers in 2015 (min. 500 pitches).

The best part about Rodriguez is all that lies ahead, that alluring potential which is still waiting to be unlocked. He has the brightest future of any Red Sox pitching prospect in recent memory and could form a dominant duo with David Price atop Boston’s rotation in the coming years. A young, hard-throwing lefty with a top-of-the-rotation ceiling and room to grow? That’s just about the best gift a team could ask for.” – Alex Skillin

Blake Swihart’s Second Half

Few things as a fan are more rewarding than watching the kids grow up to become major contributors on the big league club you follow.  We got to see this first hand last year as Blake Aubry Swihart got the early call to the major leagues.  Swihart was drafted with much pedigree in 2011 with the 26th overall pick.  This first-rounder had all of the tools but had a long way to go before his defense would have him ready for major league catching duties.

Due to injuries to Christian Vasquez and Ryan Hanigan he was thrust into the starters’ role a year early when he should have been toiling away in Triple-A Pawtucket.  During the first half of the season things did not go well.  Swihart slashed .241/.279/.323 making him one of the least productive catchers in the league.  

In the second half a switch was flipped, he began to walk a bit more and strikeout a bit less but maybe most importantly he stopped trying to pull the ball so much.  His pull rate dropped from 45.9% all the way to 33.9%, along with this his ISO rose from .083 to .148.  Swihart started to put the ball in the air more as well swapping grounders for fly balls and he saw his slash line improve to .303/.353/.452.  This is the Swihart I knew was in there.  

With prospects we look to see progress in all facets of the game and we saw this in spades from Swihart last year.  Doubters will remain but witnessing this important cogs development last year was one of the joys of the season.  – Jake Devereaux

Rich Hill’s Resurgence

Try not thinking about Rich Hill’s September the next time a veteran comes up and dominates unexpectedly. Hill’s downright ridiculous 1.49 DRA in his four starts (29 innings) had him ending the season with 1.22 WARP, making Hill the team’s fourth most valuable pitcher in 2015. His shutout of the Orioles at Fenway was the best Red Sox start in 2015, pulling in with a 92 Bill James Game Score — and his 7-inning first start in Tampa Bay was the team’s second best of the year. Seeing a Boston native fight back like that was an enormous thrill. In baseball terms, it all happened at once, right before our eyes — and then there washow he did it. You knew the curve was coming. At the plate, did seeing a curveball feel like watching a car crash in slow motion? – Ryan Morrison

David Ortiz Going Out on His Own Terms

Signing David Price

After running down the positional side last Tuesday, it’s time to examine the pitching staff. Scary? Maybe. Any cause for hope? A little. Let’s dive into the numbers.

Starting Pitchers

So, uh, how about that Rick Porcello, everyone? We knew going into the season that the notably ace-free Red Sox weren’t exactly going to set ERA records in 2015. Sure enough, they didn’t. But, believe it or not, the starting rotation isn’t what tanked the Red Sox in 2015.

That’s the major league leaderboard for starting pitchers, sorted by BP’s Deserved Run Average. And that’s Boston at #5 in the big leagues. Sure enough, the Red Sox starters performed pretty admirably as a unit. So how’d that happen? Well, it probably has to start with two pitchers who were pretty awesome for half a season each: Clay Buchholz and Eduardo Rodriguez.

Clay and Ed were the yin and yang of the Sox 2015 rotation, slanted reflections of each other. Buchholz was the closest thing to an ace that the Sox had coming into 2015, but couldn’t be counted on to stay healthy. True to form, Buchholz started strong, but his elbow failed him as the season went on. In the end, he logged 113 quality innings, posting a DRA of 3.36 (pretty great!) and an FIP of 2.66 (really great!). Of course, as is Clay’s wont to do when pitching well, he was injured. He can’t seem to make it through a full season, and he closed up shop in mid-July.

At the end of May, Eduardo Rodriguez made his major-league debut and held Red Sox Nation in the palm of his hand. His stellar first couple of starts pushed expectations sky-high. We’ve made covering #Ed kind of a cottage industry here at BP Boston, from comps to Alex Skillin’s continuing “continuing education” series. Perhaps Eduardo wasn’t quite the dominator that Clay was on a consistent basis, but his DRA of 3.46 and FIP of 3.90 were just fine, thank you very much. While the team would love to see his strikeout rate improve, as well as stay whole and healthy, he’s established himself as a perfectly-good middle-of-the-rotation starter, even in the challenging American League.

So with half a great pitcher, and probably one whole good one, that leaves an average guy: Wade Miley. Miley did, well, almost exactly what he should’ve been expected to do. Miley ate innings, and posted good-but-not-great numbers doing so. It’s almost funny; his ERA was 4% worse than league-average and his FIP was 4% better. He posted numbers almost entirely in line with his past two seasons in Arizona, and stuck to an average level of performance like he was glued there.

There were also some small wins in terms of performance here and there. Henry Owens debuted, and he’s looked pretty good over his first 10 starts. He could certainly stick for next season. And I’d write up Rich Hill here, but he’s a goddamned unicorn. All I can say is that he deserves a shot in the rotation during Spring Training, and that I have absolutely no faith that he’ll be any good. But he might be. To be continued.

So not only were there some bright spots in terms of specific 2015 performance, but there’s some hope for the future. Miley should stay Miley. Eduardo Rodriguez looks real, and between Clay Buchholz and/or Henry Owens, another slot in the rotation might be pretty good.

Buuuut … then there’s Rick Porcello. Porcello was an unmitigated disaster in Boston, a failure in the first degree. He needs another chance to prove he’s at least the pitcher he was in Detroit, if not the pitcher the Sox want him to be. According to cFIP, which is a pretty good true talent measure, Porcello was roughly similar to last year as he was last in terms of peripherals. His cFIP in ‘14 was 99, his cFIP in ‘15 was 99.

Porcello went wildly wrong, Joe Kelly went pretty wrong (but he has great stuff!), and the simple fact that the Sox needed to cycle through a fair number of starters is something that went wrong. Beyond that? The rotation is pretty okay.

There is room for improvement here … be it from Porcello, from an improving Owens / Rodriguez combo or, most likely, from a new addition in the last available rotation slot. Dollars to donuts, I’d bet that Dave Dombrowski would be interested in adding another higher-end rotation piece, and likely by trade. Improvement would be good — very good — but things don’t look quite so dire here.

Relief Pitching

Welcome to the danger zone. Here is a comprehensive list of all the Red Sox’ good relievers in 2015:

• Koji Uehara, who is 40
• nope

This isn’t the most fair: Tommy Layne was a bit above-average, and Robbie Ross and Junichi Tazawa were about average. But really, in an era where relievers strike out batters like it’s going out of style (it’s not), the bullpen should be an asset that makes Red Sox starters breathe a bit of a sigh of relief as they hand over the keys. In 2015 it wasn’t, and there’s no reason to think 2016 should be markedly different.

Those four pitchers I mentioned, Uehara, Layne, Ross, and Tazawa, all very well could come back next year, but banking on improvement isn’t really a great plan. The rest of the bullpen? It might be better if they disappear. The only guy with real potential out of the bunch is Matt Barnes, and I think you might be tired of waiting on Matt Barnes’s potential by now.

No, this bullpen needs a complete overhaul. As a unit, the ‘pen had a 4.56 FIP, dead last in baseball. The team’s 4.31 ERA only surpassed the Braves, Rockies, Tigers, and Athletics. These teams all have something in common: futility.

Adding average-or-better relievers could be the ticket to improving this team by wins right from the jump. Though a great bullpen only gives a team a handful of wins above replacement (four to six, if you’re both good and lucky), the Red Sox were either replacement-level or worse, depending on how you pick your poison.

So, it’ll be up to Dave Dombrowski to build a new bullpen, with hardly any exist-

… Oh no.

Well, the good news is that there’s a lot of room for improvement here. Adding two or three people who aren’t Craig Breslow or Alexi Ogando might be a good start. The bad news is, well, you know what the bad news is. It could take some luck to make this work, if not skill.

So after running through all the holes and the weaknesses, after looking back on everything that went wrong, here’s my primary takeaway: the Red Sox have a fair number of holes to fill, but they’re ones that can be filled. No, they can’t be filled internally — the team will have to go out and find these players on other rosters — but the hard work of adding new pieces to complement the existing ones can be done. It’s not likely that everything will break down, and with a couple of savvy acquisitions and some luck, the team could be back in it again within a year or so.

That’s a bit easier said than done, of course. Look at the Padres and the White Sox if you want examples of how reaching out and grabbing external players to serve as all your missing pieces can go sour. But the Sox have resources: money, prospects, and intellectual capital. They’ll be okay. Probably. Maybe. But chances are that 2016 will certainly be more exciting than 2015.

Photo by Dan Hamilton/USA Today Sports Images

As is the case with a lot of fringy lefties who at least flirt with 90 mph, Breslow has been used as a matchups guy for some time, with somewhat limited success. He was quite good in 2013, quite bad in 2014 and somewhat less bad in 2015, including his surprisingly decent showing in his two “starts” as the lead man in “bullpen days” designed to save the arms of Eduardo Rodriguez, Henry Owens and others. It may seem far-fetched, but has Breslow pulled a Rich Hill and improved his impending free-agent outlook through his two decent outings?

Here, the answer is yes and no because it depends on which southpaw we’re talking about. Hill probably has changed his market, in that he might not have had one, and now he probably does. But that’s the thing about having one unhittable pitch that, even when throwing it more than a third of the time, hasn’t seemed to get more hittable. There’s a ceiling there, maybe, that just hasn’t been reached before. It’s hard to throw a changeup more than 20% or 25% of the time, but Hill’s curve hasn’t necessarily been about deception (well, maybe in one way). And there’s the small matter of finishing four starts with a Deserved Run Average of 1.50.

Breslow may not have the same shadow of unreached ceiling following him around, and he doesn’t have the same recent history of success. Breslow finished the year with a 4.15 ERA, possibly with more than a little luck, as he’s also finished with a 4.95 DRA. Not nearly as bad as his 2014 (5.96 ERA, 6.80 DRA), far and away his worst season in MLB, but not necessarily a guy for whom you work hard to find space on your roster. I’m not sure what replacement level is for a bullpen lefty who averages well over an inning per outing, but we can take his -0.2 WARP this season as an indication that it’s not too far away from the somewhat-improved Breslow of 2015.

In this second, longer go-round with the team, Breslow has gotten by throwing his four-seam a lot less, mixing in a sinker, cutter, and curve a whole lot more.

As for his quasi-rebound this season, we probably don’t have too far to look. In this second, longer go-round with the team, Breslow has gotten by throwing his four-seam a lot less, mixing in a sinker, cutter, and curve a whole lot more. But although opponents had their highest slugging percentage against his four-seam in 2015, it may have been a more helpful part of his repertoire this year with more of a velocity difference between it and his other pitches. His four-seam velocity did take a step back toward the range that he held while he was so successful from 2009 through 2013:

With only two career starts to his name, a sparkling 1.93 ERA in 9.1 innings of work in these last two outings at least raises some questions. Considering he wasn’t really in a matchups role anyway, has Breslow been miscast as a reliever? It’s not like a swarm of scouts had all pegged him for that role at the outset of his professional career; Breslow was a 26th rounder for the Brewers in 2002, and after his release in 2004 out of Single-A ball, he was picked up by the Padres out of a tryout camp. And while we always have to be careful with relievers who may have been kept away from the most difficult competition when hitters would have the platoon advantage, over his (fairly lengthy) career, right-handed hitters have hit just .238 against him to lefties’ .240 average, although he’s walked righties at a slightly higher clip.

For his part, Breslow offered at least two reasons for why his brief experience as a starter may have gone better. Here’s one: pitching out of the windup, Breslow felt like he had a “better rhythm.” He has often entered the game with a runner on, so that doesn’t sound like the craziest thing in the world. The problem? Breslow faced 141 batters this year with the bases empty, and 139 with at least one runner on; and it looks like Breslow was actually far better in the latter situation. Bases empty, Breslow had a 1.74 WHIP; with at least one runner, his 1.15 WHIP was as sterling as his earlier series of fine MLB seasons. That’s probably not it.

Breslow also suggested in the wake of his second strong start that the change in role helped him “keep hitters off-balance,” noting that it was common for him to have to go his “best pitch right away” when coming on with runners. Although Breslow has said that he gets in trouble when he thinks too much and starts to try to trick people, this is the same guy who calculated pitch spin by hand to help Josh Beckett win a bet before PITCHf/x was a thing. With the necessary small sample caveats, Breslow’s first pitch percentages from Brooks Baseball as a reliever and a starter this season:

Breslow did tweak his approach to forego all those first-pitch sinkers, but I’m not sure that comports with the idea that as a reliever he had to lead with his best pitch; opponents slugged .964 off of his sinker this year, and the weighted average slugging percentage on all of his other pitches combined was just .423.

In the end, what Craig Breslow has to teach us may be that we know nothing about this game, or that for two games, what we do know might not have a whole lot to do with the outcome. Did Breslow raise his stock with these two starts? Probably, but maybe not in a meaningful way. He did stick on the roster all year despite the closest thing to a pitching armageddon that we’ve seen at Fenway in a long while. But that may be exactly why we won’t see him return. One of Dave Dombrowski’s virtues may be impatience. And if you have to stock the staff with some replacement-level pitchers, you may be better off with pitchers who yet may be optioned — and actually replaced.

Photo by Anthony Gruppuso/USA Today Sports Images

Top Play (WPA): Despite the loss, the Red Sox grabbed the honors here with Mookie Betts’ 5th-inning single (+.124), which scored Deven Marrero from second and left Boston with runners on first and second with one down. C.C. Sabathia got out of that jam unscathed, however, getting Jackie Bradley Jr. to ground out and Travis Shaw to fly out — with a Xander Bogaerts intentional pass mixed in between — to preserve the 2-1 lead.

New York’s top two plays were both solo home runs: A Carlos Beltran homer (+.117) off Rich Hill in the second and a Greg Bird round-tripper (+.106) off Jean Machi in the seventh.

Bottom Play (WPA): Shaw’s fly-out to center (-.107), the one we just mentioned, cost the Red Sox a chance to break things open in the fifth, an inning that would be Sabathia’s last. Instead, Sabathia threw a 2-1 slider down in the zone to Shaw, who popped it up harmlessly into right-center.

Key Moment: Ohh, those sacrifice bunts. When they work, they often don’t do much to increase your team’s win probability, but at least they don’t significantly hurt it either. Plus, as MGL would tell you, a perfectly placed sac bunt attempt has the chance to turn into a clean hit or an error, which is all the better. There’s also the opposite end of the spectrum.

In the fifth inning, the Red Sox asked Josh Rutledge to get down a sac bunt following back-to-back singles by Marrero and Sandy Leon to lead off the inning. Rutledge took a couple of balls, fouled off one bunt attempt, then, on the the fourth pitch of the at-bat, he awkwardly lunged at an 89 mile-per-hour fastball down in the zone from Sabathia and popped it straight up to the catcher.

Rutledge, who has posted an 83 OPS+ in over 1,000 major league innings, should know how to get down a bunt. He’s okay with the the bat for a versatile middle infielder, but his best shot at sticking in the bigs for a while probably involves him being a guy who does The Little Things well, and there’s really no excuse to go for that reckless of a bunt attempt in a key situation.

Trends to Watch: Keep an eye on Rutledge’s batting practice bunting regimen. Alright, just kidding. The default here is always the young guys. Betts had another two-hit night, and he narrowly missed hitting a two-run home that would have given the Red Sox the lead in the seventh. Bogaerts and Bradley went hitless on the night, but they did combine for three walks. Rusney Castillo also logged an 0-for, but he uncorked a strike throw early in the game that let you know why he’s a right fielder.

There’s also Rich Hill, who, barring a 22-inning marathon in Cleveland, won’t pitch again this season. He had a sensational, improbable, (insert-superlative-of-choice-here) four-start run with the Red Sox down the stretch, and he capped it off with another gem last night. Hill struggled early, losing his control at times and failing to put away Yankees hitters. For instance, he threw 37 pitches in the second and nine alone to John Ryan Murphy, who fouled off three consecutive curve balls before drawing a walk. Hill settled down after the second, however, and fittingly ended his outing (and season) with a three strikeout sixth inning, where he got A-Rod, Carlos Beltran, and Chris Young in order.

It’s unclear where Hill, a free agent, will end up next year. You’d have to think the Red Sox would like to bring him back, but a 7.2 strikeout-to-walk ratio, even in just 29 innings, will likely do wonders for Hill’s popularity around the league.

Coming Next: Cleveland, and that’s it. For a team with such high expectations, one that was expected to compete for a division title — heck, a World Series title — it’s been an oddly entertaining season, at least of late, despite the losing record. From Hill to Betts to Bogaerts (to Orsillo and Remy, as always), to almost sweeping the Yankees on the road while postponing their playoff celebration, it’s been fun. Here’s to more winning in 2016.

Photo by Jeff Griffith/USA Today Sports Images

Coming off a series win against the juggernaut Blue Jays on the weekend, the Red Sox faltered a bit this week against the Rays. The good news is that Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts are still looking like top-level players late in the season, and Jackie Bradley Jr. is still getting an opportunity to work through his most recent spat of offensive ineptitude. The bullpen is a high-wire act every night, but I suspect most of the guys in the current ‘pen won’t be part of next year’s crew, although a few of them could be. The games don’t matter for this year, but they do in a future development sense. The Sox winning has pushed them up to being the 11^th worst team in the game, which moves them out of a protected pick spot in next year’s draft and affects the money they are allocated for the draft and for signing international players. While the surge for third place in the division is fun, it is probably better that the boys lose a little more often so that the organization has a better chance at acquiring impact talent for the future. This sort of thing affects a large market team like the Red Sox differently than a small market team like the Rays, but it is still worth considering.

Baltimore Orioles – Record (76 – 76) – Projected Record (82 – 82)

The Orioles currently sit third in the American League East, which is right around where preseason projections had them. Their offense has hit for power but been hampered by on-base issues, making them below average as a unit (96 wCR+ … more on that below). On the pitching and defense side of things they have been middle of the pack, and, like the offense, around league average (98 ERA-, 99 FIP-). Being around average on offense and average on defense is not necessarily a bad thing, but it won’t lead to a great record. The Orioles have been a middling team for most of the season and, like the Red Sox, they are in look-to-next-year mode. With several key parts of their team heading to free agency this offseason (e.g., Chris Davis, Wei-Yin Chen, Darren O’Day, Matt Wieters, Steve Pearce), what they do this winter will have important implications for whether the run of success they’ve experienced over the last four seasons will continue.

Probables:

Game 1: Rich Hill vs. Kevin Gausman, Friday, 7:10pm EDT

The 35-year old New Englander, Rich Hill, will make his first home start this weekend after carving up the Blue Jays and Rays on the road. Hill has been a wonderful surprise this September. In his two outings he has only allowed three runs and eight hits in 14.0 total innings pitched. Oh, and he has a ridiculous 20:1 strikeout to walk ratio. The extent to which Hill’s performance is sustainable going forward is not clear, but he represents an interesting option to consider for the 2016 team. Ryan Morrison wrote an excellent article looking at Hill’s loopy, high-spin curveball and how effective it can be when paired with a well-located fastball. The Orioles’ offense pairs the ugly combination of striking out a lot (22.4% strikeout rate is third highest in the game), with not walking a lot (6.8% walk rate is sixth lowest in the game) so Hill has a good opportunity to maintain his already impressive K/BB ratio.

The development of the much heralded Gausman has been bumpy. He was rushed to the big leagues last season, then spent April and the start of May as a reliever before being sent down to Triple-A to get stretched out into a starter. He returned to the Orioles in late June and has been used as a starter ever since. Over 15 starts the results have not been all that great. He has a 4.43 RA9, 4.30 FIP and 4.55 DRA. He throws a four-seam fastball that sits in the mid-90s, a forkball/split-change and a slider. The slider will be critical to his development as a starter but so far its lacking in effectiveness. He pitched against the Red Sox ten days ago, holding them scoreless over six innings, but struggled with control and walked four batters. He struck out seven, but four walks is too many.

Game 2: Bullpen Day vs. Wei-Yin Chen, Saturday, 4:05pm EDT

A stream of relievers will take the hill on Saturday. Who will start the game is not known, but it will reportedly be the reliever that is most rested. The bullpen day is an interesting concept, and something that the Tampa Bay Rays have been doing throughout the season. The Red Sox are likely implementing it because Steven Wright is still on the disabled list with a concussion and they want to limit the innings of Eduardo Rodriguez. In any case, going with a bullpen day makes things a little more difficult for the opposition, as they cannot stack things in a way to consistently gain a platoon advantage, and will not get the full benefit of the times through the order penalty. I expect the starter, whoever it may be, to go two or three innings, facing 15-20 batters before handing things off to the next guy in the chain.

Chen is one of those pitchers who does a decent job each season without much fanfare. Over his four seasons in the majors he has always thrown at least 130 innings, and been worth at least one win above a replacement player. Having someone in the rotation who can do that year-in and year-out is quite nice. This season has been his best if you go by ERA (3.36), but his peripheral numbers (4.24 FIP, 4.35 DRA) suggest that he has had some good fortune along the way to keep that ERA down. This weekend will be Chen’s fourth outing against the Red Sox this season. In his previous three, he mixed one really good start around a mediocre one and a pretty bad one. Hopefully the Sox can add another negative outing to Chen’s ledger.

Game 3: Henry Owens vs. Ubaldo Jimenez, Sunday, 1:35pm EDT

Last time out, Owens continued his tendency to follow great starts with rough ones, as he allowed five runs in 7.1 innings against the Rays. He got 21 swings and misses, but ultimately allowed too many runs. That start came after an outing in which he held the Orioles he will face this weekend scoreless over 7.2 innings, getting 14 swings and misses. The whiff totals are a positive sign that his stuff will work at the major league level, and these ups and downs are to be expected from a young starter, but he needs to start piling up positive outings if he is going to be a part of the 2016 rotation. Sunday’s start will be Owens’ sixth start at Fenway, and unfortunately the previous five have not been great. At home he has a 6.99 RA9 (6.04 FIP), while on the road he has posted a 2.38 RA9 (2.83 FIP). This pronounced split is largely a result of all seven home runs he has allowed having come in Fenway. Ideally, Owens can build on his successful outing against the Orioles that came earlier this month in Camden Yards, and improve his standing while pitching at home in the process.

Ubaldo Jimenez has followed up an excellent first half (3.08 RA9, 3.27 FIP in 99.1 innings pitched) with a real clunker second half (6.28 RA9, 5.14 FIP in 71.2 innings). In the first half Jimenez had a 98:32 K:BB, and only allowed eight home runs. In the second half he has walked the same number of batters, struck out 41 fewer, and allowed 11 home runs. Ah, the sweet, sweetness of regression toward a mean. Jimenez is essentially a league-average pitcher who walks too many batters. He has not fared well in his three outings against the Red Sox this season, having yet to get into the sixth inning in any start.

Opposing Lineup:

The Baltimore offense has been underwhelming as a group. They have scored 4.4 runs per game, which is average for the American League but ahead of only the Tampa Bay Rays in the East division. Their .255 TAv ranks 23^rd in the game, which is simply not enough in the AL. With that said, they still have some boppers in the lineup. Manny Machado has a deserved reputation as a defensive whiz at third base, but he is also a consistent contributor at the plate: 132 wRC+, 29 home runs, 9.7% walk rate. Along with Machado, free agent-to-be Chris Davis has been mashing all year (43 home runs, 27 doubles), likely earning himself a nice contract this offseason, and team-leader Adam Jones has continued his free-swinging ways (61.2 Swing% is 2^nd highest in the game, min. 200 plate appearances) and produced at an above average level (110 wRC+). The problem with the Orioles offense is that after those three, only one other player (Jonathan Schoop, 114 wRC+) has accumulated at least 200 plate appearances and posted a wRC+ better than average. While the Orioles can slug the ball (.421 SLG is 5^th best in the game), their on-base issues (.307 is 26^th) – only two players have an OBP over .320 (min. 200 PA) – have really limited them from piling up the runs scored totals.

With rosters expanding and the season winding into the last 10 or so games, the lineup that I have given could look quite different, as Buck Showalter may want to let some of his regulars have time off. We will likely see Jimmy Paredes (.256 TAv) get a game in the outfield, Nolan Reimold (.256) take the designated hitter spot one day, and Caleb Joseph (.251) do the catching, sparing the oft-injured Weiters.

Recap

The Red Sox have been playing really well since the trade deadline, and the Orioles are sluggishly making their way to the finish line. The Orioles have dominated the season series to date, taking 11 of the first 16 match-ups. The head-to-head results is one aspect of this weekend’s series to watch, but of larger significance (maybe?) is that it will play an important role in determining who finishes in the basement of the division.

Photo by Jeff Griffith/USA Today Sports Images

Going Deep

The question of whether or not David Ortiz would reach the 500-home run mark no longer needs answering; he accomplished that earlier this month. The next question is how much time is left in his storied career. WEEI.com’s Rob Bradford touched on Ortiz’s shelf life last week in a column that noted that although the slugger is aware the end is near, he certainly hasn’t thought or played like someone close to retirement. At 39, Ortiz boasts a .298 true average, a .370 wOBA and 35 home runs — his second-straight 35-homer season — in 2015. He will enter his age 40 season still among the most feared hitters in baseball. But will he keep playing like it? Recent history tells us that it’s possible. Chipper Jones sported a .360 wOBA at 40 years old before retiring in 2012. If you think Jones is a bad comparison, look at what Alex Rodriguez has done at 40 years old this year. His .298 TAv and 32 home runs is no drop-off from what Ortiz has done this season. And as a DH there’s far less of an injury concern. Not until Ortiz hits the end-of-the-line Derek Jeter territory will there be reason for him to consider retirement. At 40, Jeter’s final major league season was an overlooked disaster as he sported a 79 wRC+ and his everyday presence in the Yankees lineup made him a liability. But Jeter was coming off an injury the year before. Ortiz has remained healthy and therefore should be primed for another productive season.

MassLive.com’s Christopher Smith raises a question we’ve all probably asked ourselves at one time this year: Could Travis Shaw be the Red Sox’s first baseman in 2016 if Hanley Ramirez is traded? It’s certainly not ideal, but, looking strictly at the numbers, it could be worse. First off, Shaw already seems like the better of the two right now. Although he’s played in half as many games, his TAv (.293), wOBA (.371) and wRC+ (133) all far exceed Ramirez’s, and we don’t need numbers to tell you who the better defensive player is (Ramirez isn’t just bad at left field, either). But how does Shaw stack up against the rest of the majors? The 25-year-old rookie’s wOBA puts him right between Mark Teixeira (.381) and Jose Abreu (.370) for No. 8 among qualified first baseman. The flaw with that comparison, of course, is that Shaw’s 195 plate appearances far from qualify him in any statistical category. As Smith points out, it’s important to be aware of Shaw’s .304 BABIP, especially as a player who slashed .249/.318/.356 in 322 Triple-A plate appearances this season. Perhaps it’s not the best-case scenario to make Shaw Boston’s starting first baseman in 2016, but it looks likely they’ve unearthed a decent player here. 

Quick Hits

The Red Sox have suffered one of the worst bullpens in baseball this season, sporting a 4.41 ERA as a unit. It’s one of the biggest reasons Boston is a last-place team, and is an issue Dave Dombrowski will need to address in the offseason. Brian MacPherson of the Providence Journal offered a potential solution to these woes, using the Blue Jays’ pen as a rebuilding model. Toronto has gone from one of baseball’s worst bullpens to one of the best not by bringing in high-priced relievers last offseason, but by converting middling starters such as Liam Hendricks, Brett Cecil and Aaron Sanchez into hard-throwing relievers who can work with a small repertoire and find success. The Blue Jays own an AL-best 2.94 bullpen ERA since the All-Star break, a key reason for its surge to the division lead.

Xander Bogaerts’ sophomore season has been special. The Boston Herald’s Scott Lauber explains how it also has a chance to be historic. Bogaerts, who has 182 hits — good for second in the AL — with 13 games left entering Tuesday night, has a realistic shot at becoming the 19th player since 1901 record 200 hits in a season at age 22 or younger. That would put him on a list that includes Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio and Cal Ripken Jr. Bogaerts also has a chance to become the first Red Sox player since Dustin Pedroia in 2008 to lead the league in hits as he trails Jose Altuve by three.

There are many reasons to be frustrated with Pablo Sandoval this season. Chief among them are his .229 TAv and his -21.5 UZR/150 — good for worst among qualified third baseman. CSNNE.com’s Sean McAdam resurrected another issue that was especially relevant for the 255-pound Sandoval in spring training: his conditioning. Sandoval left Sunday’s game in the ninth due to “lightheadedness” after scoring from third on a sacrifice fly. McAdam writes that this is an example of why Boston needs to revisit this issue with the third baseman, who the Red Sox still owe roughly $76 million over the next four years, in the winter.

MacPherson wrote another worthwhile piece this weekend. This one was about how Mike Napoli has embraced the transition to left field with the Rangers since being traded to Texas in August. Although Napoli has endured his growing pains, it’s allowed the Rangers to keep him in the lineup and has helped them overtake the Astros atop the AL West. Napoli has a .308 TAv through 26 games with Texas.

Three Good Game Stories

ESPNBoston.com’s Gordon Edes highlights the Red Sox’s 500-home run celebration for Ortiz at Fenway Park before their 8-7 win over the Rays on Monday.

The Rich Hill comeback tour continued on Saturday. The 35-year-old lefty allowed three runs and struck out 10 batters for the second straight game to lead Boston to a 4-3 win over the Blue Jays. Nick Cafardo of The Boston Globe writes how these impressive outings could prove beneficial for Hill as he enters free agency this offseason.

Jackie Bradley Jr. was in an ugly, 1-for-30 slump over his last nine games entering Saturday, but, as the Boston Herald’s Jason Mastrodonato writes, he broke out in a big way with a pair of hits, including a game-tying home run in the ninth, to help the Red Sox to a 7-6 win over Toronto.

Photo by Mark L. Baer/USA Today Sports Images

Hill’s September dominance would look a whole lot different if he were, say, 25 years old instead of 35. With a baseball lifetime’s worth of baseball executives betting that Hill had some untapped potential, there’s some temptation to hope that maybe Hill’s electric September starts is more “lightning in a bottle” and less “fork in an outlet.” Career numbers like a 4.63 ERA, 4.33 FIP and 4.47 DRA point toward enjoying the show while it lasts.

And yet, high-spin curveballs like Hill’s are in vogue now, with teams enjoying access to Statcast data that provides more information about pitch spin. As Jeff Long explained when looking at “useful spin” and a Statcast data set earlier this season, the spin numbers we get from PITCHf/x aren’t so much measured as they are calculated, using information from the ball five feet in front of the mound and at the plate. Statcast would help the Red Sox determine how much spin Hill is putting on all those curveballs, and how much of that spin was moving in such a way as to generate break.

We don’t have that Statcast information yet — and neither did the Red Sox when they promoted Hill to the rotation last week, as he hadn’t yet pitched in the majors this season. Whether Hill was a promotion of convenience or a deliberate experiment to get that information, we can only guess. “Useful spin” is still about break. And while looking at break doesn’t tell us if Hill is putting an especially high percentage of his curves’ spin to work, it does tell us how much it’s working. From the BP PITCHf/x leaderboards for curveballs this season, as of yesterday morning:

Only one guy on both of those lists, which include every pitcher to throw a curveball this season (several on these lists have fewer than 20 curves thrown, like Murata, Mills, Thomas, Lee, and Beachy). For what it’s worth, of the 16 pitchers to have thrown at least 500 curveballs this season, tops in average horizontal movement was Collin McHugh’s 7.68 inches, and tops for vertical movement — probably the direction that matters most, and for which context matters least — Clayton Kershaw’s -9.48 inches is far and away the best. You get the idea, though: Hill’s movement, at least in his Rays start, was near the top of the charts. And while his career doesn’t show the same extremes year in and out, break numbers from PITCHf/x still show Hill’s curve to be superlative since measurements began in 2007.

Among 217 pitchers with at least 500 total curveballs tracked by PITCHf/x, Hill ranks 14th in horizontal movement and 20th in vertical movement. That’s a subset of pitchers who throw curveballs, tending to represent pitchers who rely on one; and Hill still stands out. In fact, on that list of 217, only he and Adam Wainwright fit within the top 20 in horizontal movement and in vertical movement. The most similar movement might be McHugh’s:

It looks like the Astros were the ones ahead of this high-spin curveball thing, plucking McHugh off waivers and seeing him power through 336.2 innings of 3.44 ERA ball to date. Word getting out about the idea still didn’t stop them from picking up Mike Fiers in the Carlos Gomez trade with the Brewers — and Fiers has held a 3.06 ERA with the team in 8 games, one of which was one of those things where a pitcher handles an entire game without giving up a hit. Fiers, by the way, has the most significant vertical movement of any pitcher among those 217 with 500+ curves tracked by PITCHf/x (-11.33).

The Astros were front and center in Long’s article at BP for a reason, and some of the other notes he referenced on McHugh can also be relevant for the Red Sox and Hill. McHugh has hovered in the 90-91 mph range with his four-seam fastball, per PITCHf/x — a bit below average for a RHP. In his first start against the Rays, Hill averaged 90.0 mph on the nose, a more respectable number from a lefty but still average at best.

I haven’t seen numbers specific to lefties, but others have found that slower fastballs tend to be effective low and away from righties to righties (here, and here). Down and away, the majors’ slower fastballs are just about as effective as the game’s higher velocity versions. It’s working for the Astros. If the Red Sox were making a deliberate effort to add someone in the same mold and change him in the same way, maybe we’d expect something similar — even if Hill does throw left-handed.

And yet, that’s exactly not what we’ve seen from Hill. In the Rays start, Hill threw a four-seam fastball to a lefty just once (high and away off the zone). Against righties, Hill threw 56 four-seamers, primarily up and in. It’s the same spot, and it’s the exact opposite part of the zone from what we might expect based on McHugh. And yet, in our small sample, it’s working — extremely well. Hill made 10 Rays look pretty dumb, and got some pretty tremendous whiffs against the Blue Jays yesterday. Many of those were on the curveball that looked all but unhittable at times, but nearly as many were on the four-seamer.

Curveballs probably fit into two camps. It’s the rare curve that is particularly hard to pick up fairly quickly; some get thrown because they’re still hard to hit even if the batter has time to react, and some get thrown as a change-of-pace pitch, banking on the hitter not looking for it. Although I think some pitchers might benefit from throwing curves high in the zone, I’m not sure location on curveballs is all that important; what matters is whether they’re a strike or a ball, and whether they induce a swing or not.

Even if curveballs are not necessarily hard to pick up, they can still help with deception.

Even if curveballs are not necessarily hard to pick up, they can still help with deception. McHugh is living off of the same part of the plate for both fastball and curve and finding success; Hill’s two primary pitches are ending in very different places, but they’re starting similarly. By aiming high in the zone with his fastball, the pitch is coming in on the same plane as the curve. That’s exactly how Ted Lilly did a lot of his damage, with an eminently hittable fastball up in the zone that paired exceptionally well with his curveball.

By throwing high with his fastball, the high “hump” of Lilly’s curveball stayed in the same general plane for a longer period of time; had he thrown fastballs primarily at the bottom of the zone, they would have been distinguishable right away — and his fastball and his curve would both look like they had flashing lights on them. Hill seems to be doing the same thing, throwing high and to his glove side with his fastball just like he always has, and like he did in the first season of PITCHf/x in 2007, when Hill enjoyed a 3.92 ERA over 195 innings with the Cubs (the only season in which he’s topped 100 IP in the majors). See what I mean here, with these 3D trajectories from Baseball Savant — a Steven Souza plate appearance against Hill is on the left, a Logan Forsythe plate appearance against McHugh on the right. On the right, the pitches keep going where they look like they’ll keep going. on the left, even with three fewer pitches, it’s a lot more difficult to tell what’s going on at the beginning of the flight, even for us.

In his brief stint this year, Hill has thrown his curveball more than 40% of the time, as he did in some of his best months in 2007. That sets him apart from other pitchers — even guys like McHugh and Fiers barely top 20% of the time, for the most part — and if the curve is a big part of his fastball’s success, it may really ratchet up the volume that way. In his first stint with the Red Sox in relief, Hill threw the curve almost 75% of the time, which is pretty incredible, but something less likely to work in a starting role.

Hill has tweaked the rest of his repertoire over time; the sinker he tried mixing back in in 2013 and 2014 may have taken a big wet bite out of his four-seam’s effectiveness, and Hill is now reliant on a slider instead of a changeup as his change-of-pace pitch. That still makes sense; he can do with the slider what he does with his four-seam, but while changeups don’t rise as much as a fastball, they still break up instead of down. If Hill has benefited from this Lilly thing (and they were teammates in Chicago), the change wouldn’t fit the model; he’d have to throw it up to stay in the same plane as the curve, and if he did that, he’d end up right over the plate with it.

Maybe all that’s really changed, though, is an appreciation for what Hill brings to the table. There’s no violent change in his mechanics, tools or approach that would make us suddenly think he’s capable of repeating these 10-strikeouts-per-start performances with regularity. But it’s possible he always had this potential to repeat what he did in 2007, and simply didn’t get the opportunity. Yesterday, Hill seemed to keep Toronto guessing, with guys like Edwin Encarnacion and Josh Donaldson splitting the gap between his fastball and curve and hitting nothing but air. With time only for two or maybe three more starts for Hill this season, we might be left guessing at what Hill can do, as well.

Photo by Jeff Griffith/USA Today Sports Images