NEWSLETTER
What a disastrous beginning this has been to the Zach Davies-Cubs relationship, and it was already under the microscope given that he arrived to the Cubs in the Yu Darvish trade. No, the Cubs didn’t seek to trade Darvish for Davies – the point of the trade was the salary dumping (sigh) and the young prospects – but I’m pretty sure they were hoping he would be something like a “step down” from Darvish rather than a completely unusable pitcher.
Through five starts, that’s unfortunately what Davies has been. The results have been atrocious, as you know, but worse, they’ve been justified by his performance. Davies is a command and control guy who cannot locate his pitches right now. So if you’re throwing an 87 mph sinker in the middle of the zone, you’re going to get hammered. And if you’re walking guys when you aren’t getting hammered, the results will be doubly terrible. Something is off.
Worse, there might not be any kind of explanation for the worst stretch of Davies’ career (he’s historically been anywhere from perfectly solid to quite good).
“It’s been tough,” Davies said of the five-start beginning to his Cubs career, per NBCSC. “I don’t think it’s really anything too much mechanically, or pitches. It’s just going out there and performing.”
Well woof then. I would have HOPED it was some mechanical issue that he’s just having some trouble sorting out, rather than a shoulder shrug of I don’t know what’s up I just need to pitch better. To be sure: it might be a mechanical issue! Either one that hasn’t been isolated yet, or one that he and the Cubs don’t want to talk about publicly. That wouldn’t be surprising, so I’ll leave open that possibility.
Because otherwise, these charts would be even more terrifying. Here’s Davies’ sinker location for his career before 2021:
… and here’s his sinker location this year:
My god. Yikes. The problem is not the least bit complicated, even if solving it is proving to be.
Some numbers:
⇒ Davies’ 9.47 ERA is the worst five-game stretch I could find for his career, though he had a five-game stretch late in 2019 that hit 9.41. He finished that year by posting a 1.93 ERA over the next six starts. So, hey, I guess he can be this terrible and then be great?
⇒ That 9.47 ERA is worst among all starting pitchers who’ve made five starts this year, but is better than Max Fried (who was atrocious and hurt), Patrick Corbin (for whom something is definitely wrong), and Matt Moore (who is trying to come back). It is only slightly worse than Jose Quintana’s 9.00 mark.
⇒ Incredibly, Davies’ 6.20 FIP is better than a ton of starting pitchers here in the early going, including his teammate Kyle Hendricks (7.57, thanks to all those dingers).
⇒ Davies has an insane 15.0% walk rate, which is just 0.7 percentage points lower than Tyler Chatwood’s walk rate with the Cubs. It’s also way more than twice his rate coming into this season (6.9%).
⇒ Davies’ average exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard contact rate are all currently obliterating his previous career worsts.
Again: a five-game sample at the start of a season – with a new team, no less – is going to feel magnified. So what I am not aiming to do here is to suggest that he can’t get things right and be fine and Davies-like the rest of the way. But I think it’s worth pointing out that he’s never been this bad for a five-game stretch before. What he’s doing right now is almost unimaginably worse than the guy he typically is, and it’s not been bad luck. He’s just been bad.
So that needs to be fixed, asap, or else the Cubs are going to have to figure out how to maneuver around him in the rotation for a bit.
