After reading Chip’s article on Daisuke Matsuzaka last week I wanted to take one more look at Dice-K. There had to be a reason his numbers before reaching Boston looked so good, but did not translate. There has been more and more Japanese players making the switch to the MLB and our comparisons should be getting better.
Matsuzaka had 4 dominant years to finish in the NPB with great K/BB numbers to offset his fly ball tendencies. His final season in Japan included a K/BB of 5.88 and a FIP of 2.56. Even with regression and expecting NPB to be equivalent of Double_A baseball he should have been an above average pitcher.
The first problem appears to be the power numbers when switching leagues. In his last four seasons in Japan his HR/9 was 0.56, but that has nearly doubled to 0.92 in Boston. In Japan he could get away with his low ground ball totals, but not in the MLB.
It looks like Matsuzaka is going to have to rely on his strikeouts and hop to keep the ball from getting in the air. That has not happened and he has lost strikeouts every season. We also know all about the walk problems and there have been plenty of theories: smaller ball in Japan, more movement with forkball previously, more agressive hitters in Japan, etc.
Something I noticed while looking at the numbers is Matsuzaka has a fairly average K/BB splits between right handed hitters and left. He had a 2.95 K/BB against right handers in 2010 and a 1.31 against lefties. The AL average for right handed pitchers was 2.64 against righties and 1.77 against lefties. He is a bit worse, but in his career he has 2.73/1.56 which is right near the 2010 average.
It doesn’t look like he has any issues here and I can’t tell how this compares to his NPB numbers, but I decided to look a bit deeper. According to TexasLeaguers.com pitch f/x Matsuzaka only uses his change up against lefties. Using all available data from 2007 through 2010 he has thrown 397 change ups against lefties, but only 31 against righties. That is 10% of his pitches when he faces lefties and it has continued at 10.9% in 2010 alone.
None of this is all that interesting until you look at the effectiveness of his change up. In 2010 Matsuzaka’s change up resulted in a strike only 50 percent of the time. By far his worst rate and the league average change up was a strike 60.68 percent of the time. It’s also below league average in swing rate, whiff rate, and in play rate.To put it simply this pitch is at best below average and at worst bad.
If you look at the pitch location graph here you can see that against lefties every pitch averages to in the zone, but the change up is clearly outside of the zone. He seems to recognize this as he throws it over 15 percent of the time in most pitchers counts, but in a hitters count it almost disappears. in all counts with 3 balls he throws it less than 5 percent of the time.
The change up isn’t his only trouble pitch against lefties as his strike rate for his curve ball is also below the league average. If he only threw one of these pitches you could arge they keep the hitter honest, but using both results in nearly 17 percent of his pitches being bad pitches and likely to result in a ball.
Over the past 4 seasons Matsuzaka has totalled a BB/9 of 5.54. That is third worst among pitchers over that time behind only Miguel Batista and Daniel Cabrera. He is better than those two by the fact that he still ranks eleventh in that time in K/9, but imagine what he could do if his control against lefties was improved.
The Red Sox have had enough trouble getting Matsuzka to change his pitching regimen, so I can’t see them being able to change his pitch selection, but if they could I think the change up needs to go. He’s giving left handed batters a pitch that has a 50/50 chance of being a ball and pushing the count in their favor.
Just a small swing in that could push him from the league average pitcher he has become to more of a pitcher the Sox can count on throughout the season. On the other hand you can wait for teams like Detroit who sent out a starting lineup to face Daisuke with 7 right handers. Suddenly it’s not so surprising Detroit was his best start of the spring.