Among the many flyer relievers the Cubs have picked up over the last two years, Ryan Tepera is the only one to receive an MVP vote.
OK, so maybe that vote was an oopsie, but Tepera did turn in a productive 2020 season for the Cubs, and stood out in at least one very extreme way: among qualifying pitches, it was Tepera’s recently-added cutter that generated the highest whiff rate in all of baseball.
The Cubs opted to non-tender the 33-year-old righty earlier this month rather than commit to arbitration, which could’ve seen Tepera earn upwards of $1.5 million for 2021. My guess is the Cubs tried to get a pre-tender deal done like they did with fellow relievers Colin Rea, Kyle Ryan, and Dan Winkler, but perhaps Tepera wanted a chance to test out free agency with his new pitch in tow. Understandable.
But that doesn’t mean the Cubs might not bring him back. Even as the organization has made itself very good at finding and reclaiming intriguing relievers, AND finally has a good stable of young arms approaching the big leagues, Sahadev Sharma reports that, “While the team let Tepera go rather than head to arbitration with him, they remain interested in bringing him back at the right price.”
The rub with Tepera is the lack of clarity about how his early success with the cutter would translate in a full year, given how he really fell off in the second half of the abbreviated season in 2020. As we wrote before:
From the first second we got a look at [Tepera’s new cutter] during those exhibition games against the White Sox, it’s clear that the pitch was ridiculous. What I’ve wondered – and I’m about to check live as best as the data allows – is whether the whiff rate dropped as the season went on and players had some scouting on the new pitch. I feel, anecdotally, like it did. We know that Tepera’s overall effectiveness waned in the second half, so maybe it was because the cutter lost some of its magic (at least in the eyes of the batters). OK, checking now, and posting the chart …
And yup. As the season went on, Tepera leaned on the cutter more and more heavily, because obviously. But as he did, the swinging strike rate dropped pretty significantly. Don’t get me wrong, a 19-20% swinging strike rate on a pitch you’re using nearly half the time is really, really good. But it’s not quite MVP level. It might be a situation, going forward, where more balance in the pitch mix will be necessary for the cutter to stay at peak effectiveness. That is to say, it’s a fine line between using your best pitch as much as possible, but also not using it SO much that you’re trading off optimized results if you worked in more of your other pitches. Not too many pitchers can be Mariano Rivera.
It’s not that hard to see why the Cubs declined to tender Tepera, why he wanted to test free agency rather than sign a lower pre-tender deal, and why the market for him might be mixed. His overall results in 2020 were actually in line with his career – decent reliever, worth having in your bullpen, full stop – but might he actually be better than that now? Worse? Really hard to say.
For my part, I’m of course fine if the Cubs want to bring Tepera back, though I’m also fine and open to them continuing to work to unearth new Tepera’s each year, while also affording some innings to their young arms. As we’ve discussed before, you can’t actually know what you have until you make innings available at the big league level.