Kyle Freeland vs. God

Welcome to Football Friday (a baseball column). It’s technically season five of Football Friday but since I stopped doing it after like two last year I’m just going to call this a reboot. It’s a reboot of Football Friday (a baseball column), so it’s season one again.

We’re a week into what CDC experts are calling the “2023 Colorado Rockies baseball season” and so far, the wheels haven’t really come off. For the most part, the Rockies look the part of a team with a strong top line and literally non-existent bottom or middle lines. Jose Urena, who starts today, is the third starter in the rotation until Antonio Senzatela gets back (and even after that, he’s probably going to pitch 130-150 innings for this club). Mike Moustakas is the club’s best bench bat. Mike Moustakas was one of the worst players in baseball last year, you might remember.

But, despite all that, the Rockies starting rotation is boasting not one but two legit arms it seems. German Marquez, who got roughed up by the Dodgers a bit but has looked every bit the whiff machine he once was so far, and Kyle Freeland who I will now talk about.

Kyle Freeland has opened the season with 13 and 2/3rd scoreless innings. That’s really good!

In 2018, Freeland had arguably the best season any Rockies pitcher has had since Ubaldo Jimenez was the GOAT in 2010. He pitched to a sub-3 ERA, he nearly threw a no-hitter in Coors Field, and out of 3,250 pitches batters could only “barrel” (MLB’s statistic for a hit ball that has at least a .500 expected batting average) 30 of them.

Since then, Freeland has struggled to regain that magic. He’s a pitcher who lives on the edges but, because of his stuff, must trick batters into thinking these are over the plate. This has led to a lot of pitches being, well, over the plate. This season, through two starts, Kyle has looked more like 2018’s version than any of the years since and in looking at his stat cast it may be because he’s a completely different pitcher.

Prior to last season, Kyle Freeland was a fastball, slider, curveball type dominant pitcher. He would throw these three pitches a little over 20% of the time and they dominated each at-bat. Freeland notably was able to use his fastball extremely effectively against righties in 2018 and has since worked to find that magic. But, starting in 2022, a new trend emerged and if Kyle’s first two starts are anything to go off of (it’s all we have to go off of), that trend is only blowing up.

Kyle Freeland might be a sinker baller now.

Kyle’s sinker has increased dramatically in usage since 2021. That season, he only threw it 14% of the time, his least used pitch. Then in 2022, he added it to his main repertoire and threw it just 1% less than his 4-seamer. Now this year, through his first 160 pitches, Freeland has thrown his sinker 34% of the time. He’s attacking hitters early in counts with it, throwing it 39% of the time as his first pitch and 33% of the time when he’s behind in the count. It’s basically become his primary pitch to generate contact through these first two starts and he has been extremely effective in doing that. In the 55 sinkers he’s thrown this year, only two have left the infield for singles, a .100 batting average against. Freeland appears to have found a pitch that he can aggressively get in front of the count and generate pretty weak contact if the batter swings.

For Freeland (and the Rockies), missing bats is obviously the number one goal. Any ball hit in Coors has a chance to drop. But if Kyle has found a weighted sinker that can’t be lifted, he has a chance to be a far more efficient pitcher than a strikeout wizard and that efficiency is just as valuable in the ballpark.

Through his first two starts, Freeland is in the 78th percentile in hard hit % and 72nd in expected ERA. If you want to see if this is smoke and mirrors, you can look at his FIP (2.99) and see this pretty strong start is truly effective pitching.

I can’t tell you if this means Kyle Freeland is going to put up 2018 numbers again, but I can say this may be an actual case of the Rockies adding a pitch to the arsenal that is truly effective and makes their guy better.

If he sucks with it the rest of the way, you can’t blame me, is what I’m saying. But if he’s elite all year with the sinker then I will take the credit for calling it out to you.

The Coming Week in Rockies

The Rockies now have three more games against the Washington Nationals before welcoming in someone named Nolan Arenado for a three game set. The Rockies are notorious fast starters and late season losers so it will be interesting to see how many wins the club stacks up as it races to win 50 games before anyone gets a scouting report on them. Unfortunately for us, Jose Urena, Austin Gomber, and Ryan Feltner will be forced to start most of these games. Fortunately for us, Kris Bryant may be good again.

I laugh at your failure

This week, something pretty cool happened in the horrifying hellscape America calls “electoral politics”. Wisconsin, long known for being a state of weird little guys, flipped the ideological lean of their state supreme court to liberal and will now have a firm defense of elections and abortion. That is pretty neat. Also, it gives me a chance to laugh at the Republican failure.

I wrote about this last November, but the republican strategy is hilariously doomed right now. Electorally, they’ve convinced themselves that people will vote for them because of crime and transgender athletes. When, in reality, people will vote against them because of abortion and their obsession with transgender athletes. It seems that the GOP has wound up losing to the age old idea of “mind your own business”. Beyond Wisconsin, the right suffered extremely hilarious defeats in school board races around Illinois. They’ve become so loud on the subject of banning any book that says the word “gay” that they have turned every suburban mom into a militant “get out the vote” poster. It’s a failure that I can revel in and long may it continue until that party no longer exists.

Let’s hope this Football Friday lasts more than a month before being cancelled by the woke hive mind (me forgetting).