Antonio Senzatela and the Soft Contact Boys Try to Climb An Unclimbable Mountain

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Through 13 games, the Rockies are predictably very bad, so there is no point in yammering on about it. However, through all of this Godawful baseball there has been a space for something weird to pop through. It may not be good, it may not be bad, but it is worth exploring. Of course, I’m talking about the 14 innings of Antonio Senzatela.

Senzatela was very good in 2020’s shortened season and the Rockies were very noisy about all the work he was doing to stay good as the calendar turned onto this year. Through the first three starts, Senza is sporting a 7.07 ERA but all 11 earned runs he’s surrendered have been in the 6 total innings he’s pitched against the Dodgers, so based on the hypothesis that the Dodgers are just very good, we can reasonably not jump to any conclusions about his season being a failure or success yet. We can explore with an open mind, for the most part.

Beyond the “runs allowing” portion of Senzatela’s starts we can start to see a very different profile of a pitcher than one usually succeeding in the modern game and it’s (for better or worse) the profile the Rockies are starting to use for a lot of pitchers currently in the organization. Senzatela has never had strikeout stuff but through his fourteen 2021 innings he has only seven (!) Ks and his whiff% (how many times he gets swings and misses) is in the bottom five percent of all pitchers in baseball.

Senza has completely focused on driving soft contact and getting outs on the diamond. In this era of Three True Outcomes, Antonio and the Rockies have decided to focus on coaxing swings that don’t get hit very hard. Is it working? Well, it’s hard to say.

Against the Dodgers, it is most definitely not working. Not that that is surprising as the Dodgers are very good at making hard contact on just about anything you throw. Senzatela’s strategy is chemically crafted to be the worst possible strategy to try against LA. This leads to Senza’s nine hits and seven runs allowed in his first three and a third innings of the year and then allowing three home runs in two and two thirds in his start on Tuesday night. It’s early in the season so process is often the key over results at the moment, but I think with our past knowledge on LA at our disposal we can safely say Antonio Senzatela should not face the Dodgers anymore. But Connor, you say, is this just bad pitching? Is Antonio Senzatela just not good? Well, again, it’s hard to say. But looking at Senza’s pitch usage that may not be the case.

Senza has cut down his fastball use from last season from 55% to just over 48%, this follows a trend of 2019 to 2020 where he went from a peak of 61% and dropped it to 55. This is a pretty clear sign that Senza is attributing his success to fewer fastballs being thrown and a pretty clear sign he’s not really looking to get batters out with it. When he’s ahead in the count and able to dictate the AB, Antonio is only throwing his fastball 34% of the time. Almost half the time when he’s got a lead in the count, he’s throwing the slider. Senza has got a pretty clear script for the majority of the batters that face him, open with a fastball and then pound sliders hoping to get weak contact. Not out of the ordinary, especially since Senza had a .165 average against on his slider a year ago. So, this is a clear strategy, not just bad pitching and further, it CAN work. In Senza’s start against Arizona, it did work. He worked with hard fastballs and low sliders to a very intriguing four hit shutout performance. He drove soft contact and kept the ball on the ground as often as possible.

Senzatela represents something both good and bad in player analysis and game strategy for the Rockies. He represents that the Rockies can succeed pitching in multiple ways but also that they still continue to employ strategies that have very little potential for winning against the league’s elite teams like the Dodgers.

It’s GOOD that the Rockies realized Antonio’s success was going to have to come from driving weak contact and not from pitching for the strikeout. This may sound simple, but the Rockies have a history of overthinking success. They’ve quite famously acquired pitchers and asked them to stop throwing their best pitches in the past so this is a new found development that the Rockies are leaning into what makes a pitcher good instead of trying to reshape them into what they think is good. After all, the point of acquiring players is you’re looking for guys who already do things well that will fit into your environment, right? Well, even in recent history with the Rockies, that has absolutely not been the case. They acquire players seemingly at random and then try to push them through a Very Exact Fit device trying to make them into the player they wanted. It has failed pretty much every time.

With Senzatela, they seem to have recognized that his best chance to get outs is to induce contact, not the other way around. A lot of people fret about this profile since it is so astonishingly different than what succeeds in the modern game, but credit where it is due, the Rockies have given Antonio the runway to succeed his way.

Buuuuuuuut, it’s also becoming something that the Rockies have begun to adapt to their other pitchers, attempting to create a rotation of Soft Contact Boys. Jon Gray’s first three starts haven’t been strikeout limited (he’s still on a 9 K/9 rate), but he’s not missing bats either. His whiff rate and chase rate both sit in the 28th percentile in baseball. Further, if you look at his pitch usage, it’s pretty obvious that Gray is doing the Senzatela Shuffle. His fastball use rate dropped six percent and his slider use rate has shot up.

Austin Gomber is another example. Though he’s only been in Colorado for a few months, Gomber has seen his fastball usage decrease, his slider usage increase, and his whiff % sit near the bottom of the league. Gomber’s control has been his Achilles heel so far but he’s been one of the best at generating soft contact in the league.

Once Kyle Freeland returns, the Rockies will have a fourth pitcher that has thrived in the soft contact lifestyle. Basically making 4/5ths of a rotation out of Soft Contact Boys. In Coors Field, where contact gets punished at a higher rate than any other park, this may seem like a very stupid move. To me, it reads like the Rockies have seen success in Freeland and Senzatela and think it would make sense to remake that in all of their pitchers. Probably a bad idea! It would kind of go against the whole “let pitchers do what they do well, which is why you acquired them” deal I mentioned above.

But, outside of games against LA at least, the rotation hasn’t been bitten by this. Over the course of the season that may change but for right now, the Soft Contact Boys are doing ok. They’re middle of the pack pitching wise and anyone who has watched even a minute of this team play baseball will tell you the problem is the possibly historically bad offense.

When you pitch in Coors, there is rarely a “correct” answer for success. Different things work on different days. The Rockies trying something different isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s worth questioning. Why are they leaning on the exact strategy the Dodgers can dominate? Why are they seemingly pretending like the Dodgers don’t exist in their division and league? Why do they encourage contact in Coors Field? All things I have asked.

The Rockies have a disadvantage unlike any other team in the sport, the ballpark they play in actively hinders many things they try to accomplish. Add on to it that they play in a division with one of the sports great modern dynasties and they seem to be attempting to scale an unclimbable mountain. The Soft Contact Boys (TM Football Friday) strategy seems like, through early results against LA, the worst way to try to climb that mountain. To drive this metaphor home further, this feels like the Dodgers are K2 and the Rockies are pulling up in a ‘02 Subaru Outback with Merrill hiking shoes and a fanny pack of Lara bars.

I guess the good thing is, since it’s real live baseball, we can watch for ourselves to see if it works eventually.

This has been talkin’ Rockies.