Just How… Bad Is Aroldis Chapman?
Aroldis Chapman’s struggles have come at just the wrong time for the Yankees (Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke)
What’s Going On?
Aroldis Chapman has seemingly been two different pitchers this year, and it’s time for me to take some responsibility. On May 26, I published a post about how great Aroldis Chapman had been. In my defense, he had been great. He had a .47 ERA and a K/9 of almost 18. For a few games after the article, his ERA continued to fall. He was at 0.39 on June 6, and then things got very, very bad.
Since June 6, Chapman has 10 appearances in which he is 1-3 with 4 saves and 3 blown saves. He’s allowed 15 hits and 14 earned runs in just 6.2 innings during that time, for an 18.90 ERA. Opponents are slashing .455/.600/.848 against him, which is otherworldly. This slash line, if a batter were to post it, would be unlike anything ever seen in the integrated Major Leagues. .455 would be the highest batting average posted since integration, eclipsing Tony Gwynn’s .394 in 1994 by over 50 points. .600 would be the second-highest OBP ever, trailing only Barry Bonds’ outrageous mark from 2004. MLB has only seen a SLG of .848 or better once since integration, when Barry Bonds posted .863 in his 73-homer campaign in 2001. Bonds, again, is the only competition our hypothetical player who only has to face this last month’s iteration of Aroldis Chapman would have when it comes to OPS, but the 1.448 OPS our player would reach would be the highest MLB has ever seen.
I want this to be abundantly clear. Through the first week of June, Aroldis Chapman was having the best season that any pitcher has ever had. Since then, he has turned every single batter he has faced into a combination of Tony Gwynn, Josh Gibson, and Barry Bonds. That’s not what he’s supposed to do.
Why?
Let’s start simple here. From the beginning of the season to June 6, Aroldis Chapman was striking out almost 1.9 batters per inning on average. Since then, he is striking out 1.35 batters per inning on average (the game in Seattle is doing a lot of work here), down 28% from his mark earlier in the season. So strikeouts are down. That’s bad. It gets worse.
Even when Aroldis Chapman is good, he’s not exactly known for his control. For reference, he has struck out 6.4 more batters per 9 innings than Masahiro Tanaka in his MLB career, but Tanaka’s strikeout to walk ratio is 4.76 while Chapman’s is 3.49. The guy is always walking people, no matter if he’s dealing or struggling. Even with that context, his walks lately have been alarming. Through his first 23 IP, he walked 11 batters. That’s an average of just under one batter every two innings. That’s survivable, and it put him exactly at his career average of 4.3 walks per 9 innings. In his last 6.2 IP, he has walked 11 batters, or 1.65 per inning. That’s inexcusable, and would be 14.85 walks per 9 innings. Precisely 0 pitchers in the history of Major League Baseball have ever pitched at least 50 innings in a season and averaged anything close to 14.85 walks per 9 innings. The closest anyone has come is when Bill Parsons walked 10.11 per 9 in 1973 for the Brewers, who went 74-88. I guess we can take solace in the fact that Chapmans 23.9% walk rate in his last 10 games is not unprecedented in baseball history, or even in his career. There are 9 spans of 10 games from his 2011 season alone in which he walked 30% or more of the batters he faced (there is significant overlap between these spans). Even Dellin Betances had a few such spans in his phenomenal 2017 season. I don’t like it, but it seems he should be able to snap out of it.
Striking out fewer guys and walking more guys is a surefire way to get less effective. Allowing a historically great (or awful, depending on who you are) batting line is too. But why is he doing these things? We need to go deeper.
Mythbusting
Let’s talk about what probably isn’t at fault here: spin rate. Now, I didn’t say sticky stuff because I have no idea what Chapman was using, how much he was relying on it, or the extent to which losing that substance has affected him, but the stats suggest that it’s not a lack of spin that’s bothering him. He still has elite spin on his four-seamer (down negligibly from May and June), and his slider spin has increased from June to July.
Could Chapman have been relying on sticky stuff as a means to maintain control over the location of his pitches? I guess it’s possible.
His average pitch velocities are down month over month, although our July sample is still quite small, and that may have some explanatory power, but I’m skeptical of how much it tells us.
Is Chapman’s velocity down? Yes. But his batting average allowed, expected batting average allowed, slugging allowed, expected slugging allowed, wOBA allowed and xwOBA allowed on his four-seamer are all lower in July than they were in June despite his slightly lower spin rate. It doesn’t look like spin is the culprit here.
I Have An Idea
As I mentioned, discerning whether or not this is a result of the enforcement of the ban on sticky stuff is effectively impossible. We’ve seen Chapman have comparably wild stretches to what he’s experiencing now throughout his career, and he’s still throwing hard and striking out a fair few batters.
What’s truly unprecedented about this stretch is that, at least in the Statcast era, Aroldis Chapman had never allowed an xwOBA as high as that which he’s allowed in the past few weeks.
If we dig a little bit on this, we can see why.
By xwOBA, his fastball and slider, which he throws over 85% of the time combined, are being hit harder than they ever have.
The fastball explanation seems easy. He’s throwing the four-seamer in the zone more than he ever has before, and getting the third-lowest whiff percentage on it of any full season in his career. Presumably he’s having to throw it in the zone so often because batters are chasing it less than they ever have before. To make things worse, guys are better at hitting high velocity today than they were 3-5 years ago, and his velocity is declining year over year. Not ideal.
The slider is a slightly different story with some of the same elements. He’s throwing it in the zone a pretty average amount of the time compared to the rest of his career, but is having the same problem as he is with the fastball in that the chase rate he’s generating is at an all time low. Add that to the career-low whiff rate he’s generating, and he’s in trouble. Guys are laying off pitches out of the zone and making more contact when they swing at it.
So What Do We Do?
As has been the cure for many of our other gripes with the Yankees this year, waiting for regression to the mean, though painful, is likely our best solution. Chapman is wild and getting hit hard, and while he’s getting hit harder now than he ever has before, his wildness is not unprecedented. His xERA and xFIP remain far lower than his realized ERA and FIP, and it is near impossible that his .333 BABIP allowed and HR/FB rate of over 30% can persist. As compared to 2019, his line drive rate is better this year, his ground ball rate is better this year, his infield fly rate is better this year, and his fly ball rate is basically the same. With that batted ball profile and comparable (or increased) velocity and spin, it’s hard to believe the worrying trends of the last few weeks can last.
Additionally, I just refuse to believe that sticky stuff could matter this much to a guy who isn’t depending on it for spin. Whether he was using Spider Tack or something much more innocuous, taking it away cannot possibly explain his ERA and FIP doubling from his career averages, his K/BB ratio falling by a third, and his hits and walks allowed skyrocketing. I refuse to believe that anyone just loses everything in a day without a serious injury being involved.
Aroldis Chapman is exactly what he always was: an effectively wild flamethrower who finds new ways to get outs when the old ways stop working (remember when he invented an unhittable splitter out of the blue?). He had a wild stretch that unfortunately coincided with the sticky stuff ban enforcement (which has not affected his spin rates but appears to have had some effect, mental or otherwise, on his performance) and the offensive outburst that comes with the beginning of the summer every year. It’s unfortunate. It’s annoying. It’s been particularly damaging to the Yankees in the standings. Does it bear any resemblance to what I expect to see from Aroldis Chapman moving forward? No. It doesn’t.
So How Bad Is Aroldis Chapman?
Ultimately, it seems like the answer here is that Aroldis Chapman is probably slightly worse than he was in 2019. For reference, he 2019 he had a 2.21 ERA, made the All Star team, and was 106% better than the average pitcher. As frustrating as it is to watch him struggle and as ugly as it looks when he seems unable to do anything but issue walks and let up homers, a combination of regression to the mean, stuff, experience, and a healed fingernail will turn Chapman back into a bat-missing out machine in short order. Does he need to be the closer for now? Maybe not (as we discussed on our podcast), but he’ll be fine.
