NEWSLETTER
Craig Kimbrel’s spring debut this weekend featured some wildness and a lot of hard contact, which was reminiscent of his early-season appearances last year. That leads me to make jokes about how he did four appearances like that, got his mechanics sorted out, and then was the best reliever in baseball not named Devin Williams the rest of the way.
I’m joking insofar as we can say some spring issues will sort out and make him dominant come April 1. I’m not joking, however, insofar as his results this weekend actually concern me. Kimbrel gave up four hits and four runs (one strikeout) in an inning that got rolled because he couldn’t finish it before he hit a pitch limit. Neither his curveball nor fastball were located all that well, so the counts weren’t great, and the contact was firm. It wasn’t the kind of serious wildness that freaks you out, and, more importantly, Kimbrel’s fastball velocity – about 95 mph – was right where you’d hope to see it this time of year.
For Kimbrel, fastball velocity has shown to be so freaking key to his performance over the years. When he’s worked 98 mph and up, he’s been super elite. When he hasn’t been there, he’s struggled.
To be sure, getting good results thanks to increased velocity is an obvious part of the equation, though it’s also just a matter of “when Kimbrel is right, his mechanics are good, his velocity is good, and thus his results are good.” So I don’t want to act like having premium velocity, alone, is what will make Kimbrel successful this year – the mechanics on the curveball, as we saw last year, are also critical.
HOWEVER, manager David Ross made a really good point about Kimbrel’s appearance this weekend, which reminds you how much of a difference a click or two can make in the results department for a reliever like Kimbrel.
“It looked like just a little bit of rust,” Ross said of Kimbrel’s outing, per Marquee. “He felt good, the ball was coming out good, didn’t look like he was laboring at all …. A couple of these guys if that’s 96, 97 [mph], it’s above the barrel, it’s probably a pop up rather than a ball that reaches a gap or hits where they can’t get to it.”
Thats a good point about a guy whose four-seamer is the type that you want living up in the zone with late life (inducing whiffs and lazy fly balls). All the more reason not to think too much about the results in a first spring appearance when he’s still 95 mph.
To that end, a reminder about Kimbrel’s career fastball velocity – if he’s at 95 mph at the start of March, that’s historically been where he builds from. Even in his best years, he was about 97 mph by the start of April, and then he builds on up through the summer to that 98-100 mph range. At 33, he might not tickle 100 mph again this year, but he can be just as effective at 98-99 mph. He was, you’ll remember, at that level in his dominant September last year, so even last season is a pretty normal historical marker of velocity progression and impact (in an otherwise abnormal year). It increasingly looks like 2019, with the free agent layoff, the too-quick-ramp-up, and then the knee injury, is the outlier in his velocity progression (which was also a disastrous year for his performance from beginning to end).
