Andy Sonnanstine PFX breakdown

Andy has been fairly streaky so far this season, which is absolutely killing my fantasy team. Two or three good starts followed by 2-3 bad starts. Is there any reason behind this? Breaking down his PFX was a little more difficult than I thought. First off he’s missing a start from the PFX data. I’ve decided to only look at the home start in order to help keep consistency between the data.

Starting off here is his lines (courtesy of Baseball Musings day-by-day database):

Game Date				GS	CG		GF	W	L	Sv		Sho	IP		H	R	ER	HR		BB	K	HBP	BK	WP
04/09/08				1	0		0	0	1	0		0	6		7	4	4	1		2	3	0	0	0
04/14/08				1	0		0	0	0	0		0	3.3		9	7	7	3		1	2	0	0	0
04/19/08				1	1		0	1	0	0		1	9		3	0	0	0		1	4	0	0	0
04/24/08				1	0		0	1	0	0		0	6.3		6	3	3	0		2	3	0	0	1
05/11/08				1	0		0	0	0	0		0	5		8	5	5	0		2	3	0	0	0
05/27/08				1	0		0	0	1	0		0	5		10	7	2	0		1	7	0	0	0
06/01/08				1	0		0	0	0	0		0	5.6		10	3	3	0		0	3	0	0	0
06/13/08				1	0		0	1	0	0		0	5.3		6	3	3	0		0	5	0	0	0
Totals				8	1		0	3	2	0		1	45.6		59	32	27	4		9	30	0	0	1
ERA	Win Pct.					K per 9					BB per 9			HR per 9					K/BB
5.32	.600					5.9					1.8			.79					3.33

So you can see that his ERA is incredibly high by his peripherals aren’t too bad. His K/B ratio is actually very very good and a k/9 isn’t too bad at all.

Looking at his release points, there is some variation although
not too much inside each start. There are 3 starts in which his release point varies during his start and those are the 5^th, 6^th, and 7^th home starts. These coincide with the games from 5/11, 5/27, 6/1. Of note though is that his other bad home start on 4/14/08 actually was fairly tight. So when you’re evaluating it, it appears that the release point is important but not the end all to the discussion.

The only other thing that I notice is that his fastball release point varied some and this was mostly during the stretch of bad starts. I don’t have any hard definitive evidence of the necessity of having a tight fastball release point in order to be effective, but taking the leap of faith, anecdotally it does.

Let’s look at the pitch location charts next. I broke it down by good starts versus bad starts and to me there really isn’t that great a difference. Just at quick glance, it appears that there is more pitches in the zone at the bad starts, but it’s probably just my eyes playing tricks on me.

We see the expected pitch location chart breakdown by event where balls that were hit in play with no out resulting were centered in the zone, while the strikes were surrounding that and inside, and the balls were generally outside the zone.

Surprisingly, I don’t see much of a difference between the break between his good starts and his bad. Both aren’t very tight in any of his specific areas but there is an ever so slight difference between the two. There is slightly more distinct areas on his breaking pitches in his good starts. There is an ever so slight, distinction of the two breaking pitches on the good versus less distinction on the bad. Could this be enough for MLB hitters to make better contact? More investigation is needed. Other than that, not much else is of note.

For the last chart, I want to look at the vertical movement in each start by Pitch Type. It gave me a different view, but one that I think allows for a quick and dirty comparison between the starts. You can see that his slider had more movement in his first start than later. Also note that his curveball had a lot less vertical movement in his bad starts than his good starts (at first it looks like they’re all the same, but the key is looking what the majority of his pitches are, not just a few outliers)

What does that mean? For real life terms, it means that once he masters the control of the pitch as it leaves his hand, he will be extremely effective. It really appears that he needs movement on his curveball and have a tight release point on all of his pitches in order to be effective.

What does that mean for your fantasy baseball team? It means a lot of the same things. He's still going through the growing pains of pitching in the MLB. He doesn't have true control of his pitches yet and at times he has trouble repeating his mechanics. This makes him more injury prone over the long term and the more he has trouble with his mechanics the more any pitcher will have trouble.