Buchholz troubles on the road

Clay here is starting to worry me and probably many of his other fantasy owners as well. As a Red Sox fan myself, I have the feeling of a pit in my stomach multiplied by two when this happens. It's nationally known he's having trouble on the road but this is starting to go into Ervin Santana 2007 waters:

W L ERA G GS CG SHO SV IP H R ER HR HBP BB SO
Home 2 0 1.04 3 3 0 0 0 17.1 14 2 2 0 0 9 15
Away 0 2 7.40 4 4 1 0 0 20.2 27 18 17 3 0 6 24

This doesn't even include tonights start which was just atrocious.

I was curious to see if there was any differences in his pitch F/X data. I mean there has to be. So I got each start and charted the pitch location, the release point, and the break on each start. All of the charts are courtesy of Dan Brooks and his web based tool at BrooksBaseball.net. Each group of charts is a split. The first group of 3 will be home pitch location followed by 5 charts of his games for away pitch location.




When you zoom in on them you can see that his location isn't mind breakingly far off. But looking further and detailing it in, you can see that on many games he had no control of his curveball. His curveball was always in the hitting zone for many of these starts. If his curveball is not biting into the dirt, he will get hit. That curve is his bread and butter pitch and even tonight you could clearly tell he was trying to get the feel of it.

Release point next:



His release point difficulties are even more pronounced. You probably don't even have to click on the image and zoom it to see that his home release points are all nice and central, released at the same height from the ground. His away release points clusters are at many different levels.

Last group of charts, let's look at his home and away pitch break:




Looking at these and evaluating them are a little harder to do. His general trends though are a little steeper away than at home. His horizontal break averages from -7 to a +9 at home. While away it is generally -7 to +7. I'm not sure exactly what this means but to a major league hitter it may mean the difference between a 300 foot fly ball and a 350 foot home run.

Now onto the numbers to see if we can help explain. I love BABIP as a statistic because it regresses to a nice intuitive number that we can instinctively understand. It has also been studied many times over and everyone came to the same conclusion. A normal range is between .270 and .310. Anything over a 3% difference or .03 has been shown to effect a pitchers ERA.

Clay's BABIP at home is a nice .298 almost perfectly in the middle of the range.
Clay's BABIP on the road (not counting tonight) is at .381.

This should come down and regress to normal but the caveat is that the .290 applies if he does not give the hitter an advantage. If he is tipping his pitches by how he hold the ball or by how he releases the ball, the hitter will have a better advantage. Being a right handed pitcher the further he drops down to the side to throw the ball, the left handed hitters will see the whole ball all the way into the zone rather than just one half of the ball if he was coming from overhand.

Summary: I think that Clay is going through his growing pains in the majors right now. Teams are starting to get a book on him. Those teams that faced him twice have done much better against him the second time around. Lately though, even teams who haven't faced him before have hit him well. He doesn't have command of his out pitch, that devastating curveball of his. Once he learns to command that, his season will turn around.

Fatigue may have something to do with it as well. In the games that he has had 5 days of rest he has pitched fairly well and both of those instances occurred at home. Every other start has been occuring with 4 days rest with the lone remaining home game vs TEX. Fatigue doesn't have to be visible, often I consider it a "silent-killer" among pitchers. By the time they realize their arm or legs are fatigued they have usually already have done some minor damage to the tissues.

Fantasy Summary: If you have a keeper league, I would continue to keep him on your bench and wait for him to turn it around. For non-keeper leagues, there may be someone who is more reliable especially in the short term. Clay can turn it around any day or it could be several starts before he gets that feeling back.