Josh Kalk of The Hardball Times posted an interesting article yesterday about the importance of throwing curveballs in conjunction with high fastballs. It is a fascinating read, as it gives some insight into the strategy of pitching, and provides some graphical evidence to analyze the concept of changing the hitter’s batting eye level. One of the players that he utilizes in his study is Phil Hughes:
Yankee prospect Phil Hughes is another interesting pitcher to track this with because of his large hump on his curveball. In fact, Hughes’ hump is the largest in the league by more than two inches. You would expect that Hughes would be throwing some high fastballs to help with the deception, but he didn’t once throw a high fastball followed by a curveball all year. In Hughes’ defense, his year was less than 40 innings but still you would have expected at least some high fastball/curveball sequences.
Hughes mowed down minor league hitters at every level, but he is still a very young pitcher. He also is almost exclusively a two-pitch pitcher (fastball/curveball) so he needs both pitches working to be successful. His curveball last year was over two runs100 worse than a league average curveball. Surprising considering how much scouts love the pitch and how much movement he gets with it.
It seems pretty clear that Hughes just doesn’t have the necessary deception yet and big league hitters are recognizing his curve and either laying off the pitch or hitting it hard. It is very possible that Hughes’ great movement was enough to fool minor league hitters and up until this point he never needed to properly disguise the pitch. With the Yankees’ rotation looking full after their offseason spending spree, it seems likely Hughes will start the year in Triple-A. He is likely to do well there as he has already shown he can get hitters out at that level, but without some tweaks, I would be very surprised if he had a lot of success at the major league level. Obviously, he is a very young pitcher and has a lot of time to make the proper changes, but it can be hard to work on something at a level where you don’t really need to use it to be successful.
That seems like a pretty ominous endictment of Hughes’ skill set. However, I think it does bring to light a few things that Hughes must focus upon to succeed at the MLB level. Firstly, he needs to work on his slider and changeup, as well as the cutter that he was supposedly tinkering with. Major League hitters are sitting on Phil’s curveball, and he needs to be able to disguise the pitch by using alternative breaking balls. If he can develop one more average pitch and another that can be used occasionally, the curveball can become the dominant out pitch that its degree of movement suggests it should be.
Another point suggested by Kalk is that Phil is not really going to learn much else at the MiLB level, as the hitters there are befuddled by the movement on the curve so that Phil does not need anything else. I think this is overstating matters, as I believe that the minors are the perfect arena for Phil to add pitches to his repertoire. The Yankees should set a quota each game in regard to types of pitches, so that he is forced to experiment with pitches other than his fastball and curveball. Once he has worked out the kinks on his third and fourth offerings, he can try his hand once again at deceiving major league hitters.
Ultimately, I think Phil is going to be a very good major league pitcher. However, success will not come without some tweaking of his pitching style and repertoire. Once he makes the necessary adjustments, he can start working on living up to the Phil Franchise moniker.
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10 Responses to The Problem With Phil Hughes?
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TIQ IQ
Great post. I don’t find the report that damning. Basically, Hughes’ curve is SO good that he needs to learn how to fool hitters with it through “tweaks.” That’s not that bad, is it? He needs that changeup though, that’s for sure.
Yeah, that is what I took from it too- basically he said that as is, Hughes cannot succeed, but you know what, you can say that about a lot of 22 year old pitchers. He needs to improve his other pitches just enough that people stop sitting curveball. He should also throw some high fastballs to change the batter’s eye level, something that I would have guessed he already did.
I’m a bit confused-he says that Hughes didn’t follow a high fastball with a curve all year, and then says Hughes needs to deceive the hitter when throwing his curve. Maybe if he started throwing more high heaters (the best pitch there is, IMO), and started throwing curves after high heaters he’d deceive the hitters more.
I say that because I was confused by the pitch selection almost every time he pitched-it never seemed to play to his strengths.
I thought the Yankee staff as a whole didn’t throw enough high fastballs. If Lilly can get outs throwing it, it has to be a good pitch.
I do agree that he needs to bring his change up to speed.
Right, that was what he was trying to say, I believe, although I was a bit confused by that passage as well, that Phil needs to throw fastball-curve combos more frequently. The point of using Lilly was to illustrate that the quality of the fastball is not as important as the fact that you are using it to set up the curve.
The reason he didn’t throw high fastballs this year is that his high fastballs last year got creamed so he was working on keeping his heater down in the zone. He does tend to pound the zone over and over in one spot, but that’s more a function of what’s being called by his catcher.
The big problem with this article is that it should have been written 8 months ago. Phil was a very different pitcher coming back from his injury. He threw his cutter a lot, and that acted to really throw hitters timing off against him. He was much, much more effective that way. The writer has an interesting point re: Phil’s lack of deception but when he makes zero mention of the marked division between PH b4 and PH after injury return, it makes me wonder whether he’s really informed.
Re: Phil’s break on his curve, that’s not something we needed stats on. We all know how sick that spike curve is. It was almost unhittable 2nd half. The only reason anyone hits it is because he throws so many of them.
I think the only reason anyone hits it is because he doesnt have anything else really. And the high fastballs that were getting creamed were high strikes. The idea here is to even be out of the zone to set up other pitches. And in regard to Phil being a different pitcher after the injury, he pitched in two games. That is a pretty tiny sample to judge him by and say that he was totally different. Let’s see some more of that difference before disregarding everything we know of him until now.
[...] (props to TYY) [...]
It has nothing to do with sample size, for me. It’s due to the fact that he’s throwing three pitches instead of two. I think it makes him so much more difficult to hit.
My point was that we cant really say that he has changed his approach off of two starts and 12 innings in September.
I think the fastballs that were getting hit weren’t high enough in the zone-instead of letter high or even shoulder high, a lot of them were belt high.
I also think he needs to change his pattern and above all to regain the killer command he had. I think the biggest problem he had was throwing way too many pitches too far out of the zone for even impatient hitters to offer at.