Pitching 3D: Anatomy of a Blowup

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Updated on April 6, 2017 3:45PM EST

There are rough outings and then there are blowups. I used to define a blowup start (or BUS) as five or more runs allowed total and greater than a run allowed per inning pitched. Using that crude definition, there were a pair of BUSes that reared their ugly heads on ace starters in the first couple days of the 2017 regular season: Masahiro Tanaka and Jose Quintana.

Let's break down those two performances to see if there is any reason for worry with respect to the long-term fantasy values of these two pitchers.

Masahiro Tanaka

Major League Baseball opted for a "soft" Opening Day on Sunday to tease us Baseballholics with three games that count in the standings, one of which was an American League matchup between the Yankees and Rays. Chris Archer took the mound for Tampa Bay, and Masahiro Tanaka toed the rubber for the visiting pinstripes, but while the former enjoyed a solid day of strikeouts, Tanaka crushed the hearts of his fantasy owners right off the bat with a horrific line that will require some time for a fantasy team's ratios to recover:

IP	R	ER	H	HR	BB	K
2.2	7	7	8	2	2	3

Let's break down those two performances to see if there is any reason for worry with respect to the long-term fantasy values of these two pitchers.

Masahiro Tanaka

IP	R	ER	H	HR	BB	K
2.2	7	7	8	2	2	3

Early season blowups seem relatively common, as some pitchers have yet to reach 100-percent functionality, some didn't show up to camp with the same effectiveness as the previous season, and still others just fall victim to circumstance. The big questions revolve around determining what this means for the player for the next several starts; whether a pitcher like Tanaka falls into the group of pitchers who just don't have it yet or whether he was an unsuspecting victim who accomplished the bare essentials of success.

Let's dive into this game to see if it gives any reason to worry about Tanaka's future fantasy stock, as losing trust in a top-20 starter this early in the season can have dire full-season consequences for fantasy owners.

1st Inning

The trouble started right away. Leadoff batter Corey Dickerson started with a second-pitch single to centerfield, taking advantage of a splitter that didn't dive enough to stay out of the reach of Dickerson's bat. He was followed by a double by Kevin Kiermaier, who took a 90-mph fastball and slashed it to left-center for a double, putting two men on base to start the game.

Tanaka got an out on a deep sac fly, then watched some theatrics play out on the right side of the infield that resulted in an infield hit after replay. He then walked Steven Souza on four pitches prior to Logan Morrison's two-run single. Pitches were hit hard though not crushed, and Tanaka finished the frame with one of his vintage splitters, which included a well-oiled trapdoor.

2nd Inning

Tanaka's motion began to unravel in the second frame, as the typically well-balanced right-hander began drifting off-course to the glove-side, invoking extra spine-tilt on his pitches and shortening his extension at release point. The result was a lack of command on his pitches, perhaps best exemplified by ball four to Kiermeier, a pitch that sailed high above its target and which featured particularly rough mechanical stability.

Two pitches later, Evan Longoria pulled an inside pitch down the right-field line that just barely cleared the field of play for a two-run home run. The hit was going to go for extra bases regardless of venue, but the fact that the ball hopped off the yellow line at the top of the wall, right where the fence dips lower as the homer distance reaches its shortest point from home plate, made the resulting four-bagger feel like the result of circumstance rather than poor pitch execution (though the latter was also true).

3rd Inning

The hardest hit ball off Tanaka came in the third inning, a moonshot off of Logan Morrison's bat that left the yard in right-center and extended the Rays' lead to 6-2. LoMo's bomb was hit off a fastball left right over the middle of the dish, as Tanaka might as well have served up the fastball on a silver platter.

The homer was followed by a double and then a bunt single by Mallex Smith, a play that tested the Rays' infield and pushed yet another run across the board. Derek Norris then followed with a hard-hit ball to deep right-center, at which point the Yankees had seen enough and they pulled the plug on Tanaka's day after just 67 pitches.

Tanaka's delivery looked more stable in the third, but he lacked athleticism as if he was trying to force pitch location after battling with command during the second frame. The velocity picked up a bit as the game went on, finishing with an average of 92.2 mph on his four-seamer (91.3 mph average on the two-seam), which was a small chunk better than last season's average. Even when Tanaka's stuff is lacking, it historically has been his pitch command that has helped the right-hander dig out of trouble, but his lack of pitch location and concurrent lack of life on his pitches gave Rays' hitters the advantage. It played out in various ways, from line-drive base hits to four-pitch walks and bombs that left the yard, but the absence of pitch location thwarted Tanaka's day.

All Right, Now What?

Anybody can have a bad day, but when a star pitcher's first start of the season ends in disaster — particularly when he's facing a light-hitting ballclub — his rest-of-season fantasy value becomes a topic of conversation.

Tanaka's pitch location was an ongoing trend throughout the game, as the right-hander continued to keep pitches down whether going to his fastball or his trapdoor splitter. The problem was that the trapdoor was malfunctioning, and too many splitters caught too much plate, allowing the Rays' hitters — who were clearly looking for the ball down — to take advantage. Check out his pitch plot for the ballgame (courtesy of Brooks Baseball):

Most of his strikes found their way toward the heart of the plate, playing into the hands of opposing batters. Tanaka cleaned up the velocity as the game went on, and given the calendar date, his pitch-speed is less of a concern. More worrisome was the lack of depth on the splitter and the mechanical lapses that he endured in the second inning, as consistency is supposed to be Tanaka's calling card as a top-shelf starting pitcher. The two elements are likely related, as his ability to bury the split increases his strikeout upside and allows Tanaka to exploit batter weaknesses, two factors that are essential to his meeting fantasy expectations.

Jose Quintana

Whereas Tanaka dealt with a handful of problems in his first outing of the season, Quintana's rugged debut to 2017 was rooted in a single symptom: home runs.

IP	R	ER	H	HR	BB	K
5.1	6	6	5	3	3	2

Quintana's command wasn't sharp, as evidenced by the HBP and three walks in 5.1 innings of work, but he paid for his mistakes. The southpaw only gave up five hits on the day but three of them left the building, scoring five of the six runs that were tacked onto his stat line. Let's take a look at those three homers to see if there's something we can glean.

The first home run was also the biggest in terms of damage to Quintana's stat line, as JaCoby Jones plated himself and two other Tigers after Quintana had surrendered an infield hit and a hit-by-pitch. The infield hit was a grounder that forced shortstop Tim Anderson into the 6.5 hole, but he couldn't come up with the ball cleanly and it would have taken an excellent play to complete a 6-3 in that case. The HBP came on a high-and-tight fastball that grazed Mikie Mahtook, setting the stage for Jones' three-run blast.

Jones appeared to dig the ball out of the dirt to do his yard work, but data from Brooks Baseball shows that the point of contact was made closer to the knees. Either way, it was a quality pitch that normally has no business resulting in a home run. The fact that Jones went out of the strike zone for this pitch is further confirmation that the homer was unpredictable and unreliable, making it difficult to blame Quintana for the result. Combined with the infield hit and the HBP that didn't miss the zone by an egregious amount, it's fair to say that the first three runs off Quintana on Tuesday weren't an indication of struggles on his part, but rather a circumstantial result that was largely out of the southpaw's control. The only real knock to Quintana here is that he threw two curveballs in a row, but one can hardly blame him for going with a breaking ball multiple times in a plate appearance that required eight pitches.

The second homer was an opp-o job by Nick Castellanos, and once again Quintana hit a spot low-and-in to the hitter.

Perhaps the Detroit batters were looking for that location, but it's just as likely that Castellanos was able to time the pitch well, considering that it was a six-pitch at-bat and the fifth sinker that he had seen in that plate appearance.

So we have two homers and four runs that were largely out of Quintana's control. So what about the third home run of the day?

Finally, we have a fairly typical longball that was hit as a direct result of poor pitch-execution. For starters, Ian Kinsler is a lefty-masher who can ruin an inside pitch, and the setup from catcher Omar Narvaez indicates that Quintana was trying to hit the low-outside corner again, but instead the pitch drifted up and into Kinsler's happy zone. So the southpaw missed with the wrong pitch to the wrong hitter in the wrong part of the strike zone, and Kinsler made him pay. These things happen, and the solo shot put just one tally on the scoreboard in an otherwise forgettable day for Quintana.

The popular narrative might revolve around the fact that this was a makeup game from the day before and Quintana may have been thrown out of sync by the adjustment, but the evidence indicates that he was largely hitting his spots and executing his pitches, only to have his best efforts thwarted by Detroit bats that refused to follow convention. I would chalk it up to a bad day, and I saw little indication of a larger issue that would cause a wrinkle of concern for Quintana's rest-of-season fantasy value.