NEWSLETTER
It’s no secret that, generally speaking, as pitchers age, they lose velocity. It’s also no secret that, generally speaking, as players age (past 28-30), they become less effective at baseball. On the pitching side, those probably aren’t wholly independent truisms.
But does that mean that, when a pitcher sees a drop in his velocity, he’s in for a serious decline in performance?
As part of my due diligence on the Edwin Jackson signing (still not official, mind you), I reviewed a variety of things about his 2012 season, and previous seasons, wrapping my head around his prior performances, and what they suggest about his future with the Cubs. I’ve already dug into a great deal of the statistical analysis piece, but my research turned up something else worth discussing.
Here’s a chart from FanGraphs showing Edwin Jackson’s fastball velocity over the last five years:
While it isn’t dramatic, you can see a pretty clear drop in velocity in 2012 – from about 94.5 mph to about 93.5 mph. My internal alarms went off: should we be concerned? Is this the start of a decline in velocity, and, more importantly, performance?
The Cubs will have Jackson for the seasons in which he turns 30, 31, 32, and 33. I was curious, then, if I could find examples of other pitchers who lost fastball velocity in their late-20s/early-30s, and, if so, examine how those pitchers fared during those early-30s years, despite the drop in velocity.
In short, the results were encouraging – albeit in a very limited sample. As a starting point, I looked at pitchers who pitched the 2012 season at ages 32 to 34, on the thinking that what we really want to capture is performance in the later years of the Jackson contract. I limited the group to pitchers who threw at least 170 innings, trying to weed out pitchers who had serious injuries, which could skew both velocity and performance.
That left me with 11 pitchers (to which I added CC Sabathia because (1) he turned 32 during the 2012 season, and (2) he’s always been a hard-thrower, and I thought he was a pretty good fit for this exercise): Cliff Lee, Kyle Lohse, Ryan Vogelsong, Wandy Rodriguez, Josh Beckett, Jake Westbrook, Mark Buehrle, Chris Capuano, Aaron Harang, Jeremy Guthrie, and Barry Zito.
Remembering that the point of this exercise is to find pitchers who experienced a drop in velocity and then review their attending performance, I threw out the pitchers who do not appear to have experienced an appreciable drop in their velocity over the last five years – Lee, Rodriguez, Westbrook, Capuano, and Vogelsong.
The other seven pitchers:
So, what can we take away from this exercise? Well, not too much – it is an extremely limited sample, and the drops in velocity we’re discussing are typically just a mile per hour or two. (Of course, in the big leagues, such a drop can make a dramatic difference.) Further, there are always latent explanations for changes in effectiveness that have nothing to do with fastball velocity.
We also have to keep in mind that this is all relative. Even after his drop in velocity in 2012, Jackson’s average fastball velocity was still good enough for seventh in all of baseball. And, despite that drop of a mile per hour in velocity, his stats did not drop in any meaningful way.
It does seem clear, though, that as pitchers enter their 30s and experience a drop in fastball velocity, they are best served by recalibrating their pitch mix, and learning to become an effective pitcher in ways unrelated to blowing hitters away. The pitchers who have had the most success in that adjustment have started relying far less on their fastball as they age.
And, hey, what do you know? Edwin may have already started the process. In 2012, he threw his fastball less (53.8% of the time) than he has ever in his career before, and started throwing a cutter (which he throws almost as hard as his fastball).
I’m cautiously optimistic that, even if Jackson’s decline in velocity from 2012 is here to stay, he can still be an effective pitcher during his stay with the Cubs – and could even improve.
UPDATE: A comment of mine from below, in response to some very astute readers: “By limiting it to guys who are still pitching (lots of innings), I (inadvertently!) cut out a huge swath of players who could have seen their velocity drop in their late-20s/early-30s, and then got bounced to the pen or out of the league completely. It made sense to me as I was doing it, and I stand by not wanting to include guys with injury problems (because they are unpredictable, and because, as they relate to velocity/performance, we could get into a tail wagging the dog situation), but I obviously goofed by going backwards. It’s still interesting to see how these particular pitchers evolved as they aged, I guess.”
