One More Against the Tribe - Jeremy Sowers PITCHf/x

It's Sunday, and the Cubs will try and sweep the Indians and 26 year old lefty Jeremy Sowers. Today was supposed to be an extra night at home with a day off Monday, but the rain laden Cubs will jet to Atlanta for one game before making their way back to interleague play in Detroit Tuesday.

Hello, Mr. Sowers

Sowers was one of several candidates for the back of the Cleveland rotation heading into 2009:

Jeremy Sowers might be the most familiar name on this list, though his chances of cracking the starting rotation appear quite grim. The finesse lefty has posted a FIP in excess of five in the big leagues in ‘07 and ‘08, and even his 2006 showing that got people talking (3.57 ERA) produced just a 4.57 FIP. Sowers is basically Aaron Laffey without the groundballs. At best, he’s an adequate fifth starter in the majors.

David Golebiewski on Sowers' shot at the Indians' rotation (2/15/09 Fangraphs)

While he didn't make the cut out of camp, Sowers got his second call-up of the season on May 25. Facing the Rays at home, Sowers only threw 57 pitches in 5 innings (source.

Next four starts:

21 IP
1  HR
10 BB
12 SO

Just the last three:

16 IP
1  HR
5  BB
9  SO

Sowers is stretching out, and threw 99 pitches the last two times out. His performance is fair, but he's sitting at a 5.03 FIP for 2009, which matches his career number.

While he has been impressive during his minor league career, Sowers has never been overpowering with his stuff:

AAA (Int'l League)
291 IP (6.32 per start)
26  HR (0.4 per 9IP)
78  BB (2.4)
187 SO (5.8)

PITCHf/x Profile

Type	MPH	PFX_X	PFX_Z	DEG	RPM
Change	83.1	6.4	4.5	124.2	1,513.4
2-seam FB	90.5	8.2	5.8	124.6	2,054.6
4-seam FB	90.1	5.0	7.7	147.4	1,870.0
Slider	80.9	-2.4	-0.2	259.4	587.1

Sowers' two-seam fastball (F2) adds more tail than sink off his fastball (F4), and matches up (spin-wise) with his change-up (CH). His slider (SL) gets slurvey and usually has good horizontal movement. It's the sink on the breaking pitch that tends to vary.

So, to summarize, blah blah blah and now the graphs. For each pitch, clockwise from the top-left ... "Strikes" pitches in the "wide" zone, which is two-feet across and set to the top/bottom values for each hitter in PITCHf/x (averaged out over all games), charted against whiff rate (misses/swings) ... Batted Ball types are marked by the MLB stringers ... Run Value Above Average ("rvaa") is a linear weight based stat (0=average) based on each pitch's result, and is the counting version .... "rv100" is the rate version, simply the run value of the pitch per 100 times thrown. Negative numbers are better, so you'll notice (for the run values) the y-axis is upside-down.











It's as if the slider and the change can't co-exist peacefully. And that four-seam fastball isn't really a quality pitch, although Sowers is having more success with it in 2009.