Time To Get Freaky Again?

It is likely that Tim Lincecum had never experienced struggles with baseball in his entire life.

Drafted by the Giants with the 10^th overall pick in 2006, he was coming off a season at the University of Washington where he won the Golden Spikes award for the nations best player. The Giants had him pitch only 62.2 innings in the minors before they determined he was ready for the majors. Lincecum then proceeded to live up to the hype and more, winning the Cy Young award his first two seasons. While his struggles the next season in August of 2010 are well chronicled, he quickly rebounded to be a key cog in the Giants run to win the World Series.  Last season, Lincecum continued his dominance, putting up an ERA of just 2.74. So naturally, Lincecum followed up all of this dominance to put up an ERA of 6.42 at the All Star Break this year, good for worst in the league. Wait, what?

However, in his two starts since the All-Star break, Lincecum has allowed just two runs and thirteen base runners in fifteen innings, while recording eighteen strikeouts. Looking like the Tim Lincecum of old recently, many are asking the question, “Is Tim Lincecum back?” While this is an intriguing point, the better question is probably “was Tim Lincecum ever gone?”

Many of the focuses on Lincecum’s struggles this season have focused around his struggles with the fastball. But the numbers say differently. While Lincecum indeed had early struggles with fastball velocity, for the season his average fastball (two and four seam) velocity has been a tick over 91 MPH, which is less than two miles an hour slower than last season overall. And again, that lower number includes those starts with reduced velocity in the first month or so.

Furthermore, even given these small velocity changes, their effect is not discernable from either the fastball location or usage. This season, Lincecum is throwing his fastball 52% of the time; similar to the 53% number he put up last season. And it’s not less effective either: In 2011, he threw it for a ball about 37% of the time, while posting swing and whiff rates of ~39.5% and ~7.2%. This year, his numbers are remarkably similar. The fastball is going for a ball just under 38%, while posting near identical swing and whiff rates of ~39.9 and ~7.3%. Not only are those numbers very similar, they are actually slightly better this season. Indeed, Lincecum’s ‘stuff’ hasn’t been the problem this season. His K/9 of 9.75 this year is as high as it has been since he won his last Cy Young, and well about last season’s number of 9.12.

While Lincecum’s fastball that he throws for the vast majority of his pitches, it may be a pitch that is nearly non-existent this season that deserves a lion’s share of the focus. Last season Lincecum’s slider was his off speed pitch, and he recognized this too, throwing it 29% of the time, more than double the frequency of any other pitch he threw (11%). The change-up got whiffs at a slightly higher rate than the slider last season, but the biggest effect it had was his ability to locate it and get strikes. Lincecum threw it for a strike 65% of the time in 2011, which is not only substantially higher rate than both his other off-speed pitches, it is even better than both the two and four seam fastball. In addition to its accuracy, the slider Lincecum threw in 2011 was less than a percentage point in getting whiffs, and was easily his best pitch at acquiring ground balls.

Unfortunately for Giants fans, the reason Lincecum doesn’t throw the slider as much this season isn’t just because he doesn’t feel like it. Before the season, Lincecum declared he was scrapping the pitch to avoid putting stress on his elbow. He hasn’t totally scrapped the slider, but he has started throwing it substantially less. I’m not a doctor nor am I going to pretend to be one, but if Lincecum and the doctors are willing to revisit the issue, they certainly should. Any increased slider usage that his elbow can take would help enormously.

Because the slider issue is two-fold. Not only is he throwing his best pitch less; he is throwing his worst pitch more. Lincecum’s curveball usage has nearly doubled from last season to this one, but not because it was any good. By Tim Lincecum standards, it was actually pretty bad. It was thrown for a ball substantially more than any pitch, but that wasn’t because it was darting out of the zone and getting hitters to chase. The curve was getting whiffs at half the rate of his change or slider. It is no surprise then that by throwing more of his least accurate pitch and less of his most accurate pitch, he has seen his BB/9 increase a lot, from 3.57 last year to 4.27 this season. Over a full walk per nine innings above the league average, this walk rate for a pitcher like Lincecum is unacceptable. He is also getting less groundballs this season, and the slider was his best groundball pitch in the past. It is this, along with walk rate increase, along with a lot of bad luck that have made Lincecum’s stat line unrecognizable this season.

However, the very end of that last paragraph is what brings optimism to Tim Lincecum’s future. Yes, as noted above, he hasn’t been as sharp as in previous seasons. But he also has been the victim of pretty awful luck this season. (All of the following numbers in this paragraph can be found here on Fangraphs.) He has a BABIP of .323, well over the league average of .293 this year and Lincecum’s career average of .296. While it is debatable how much control a pitcher actually has over a BABIP, even someone who thinks it isn’t mostly luck would have to admit that Lincecum’s is abnormally high and likely to drop down to more reasonable levels. In addition to the increased BABIP, Lincecum has a higher HR/FB rate (11.4%) than he ever has in his career. A pitcher certainly has some control over this, but with this number well above his career averages, at least some regression is probably due here as well.

Even a more surprising number than the BABIP and HR/FB rate is the number of runners that have gotten on base against Lincecum that have been able to score. Anyone who has watched his starts this year would say that he always seems to have one inning that really kills him. And in fact, the numbers back this theory up. His LOB% is a shockingly low 61.9%. The league average is 72.6%, and Lincecum’s previous career low in a full season was 75.9%. One could argue that this is not bad luck, and because Lincecum has simply melted down with runners on base. However, a few things about this theory don’t fit. First, Lincecum has the worst LOB% in the whole NL, and has never been anywhere near the bottom of this category before. Second, Lincecum has been remarkably consistent with runners on base in the past. In every other full season, Lincecum has put up a LOB% between 75.9% and 78.5%. What is more likely to happen: A two time Cy Young winner all of a sudden deteriorated into the worst pitcher in the league? Or, what is more likely is that Lincecum has had some bad luck in places no one can control very well. Indeed, I’m not the first person to notice some of these numbers. Grant Brisbee of McCovey Chronicles wondered last week if maybe Lincecum’s first was just an “amazing statistical anomaly.”

In conclusion, it looks like we’ve found some sort of answer to the bizarre struggles Lincecum has had. If he switches his pitch usage to be closer to what he threw last season (elbow health permitting) and has some regression with the bad luck he’s experienced, Lincecum should be able to regain the success he experienced the past couple years. Maybe he doesn’t have the velocity to be a back-to-back Cy Young winner again. Instead, Lincecum should be able to be who he was in 2010 and 2011, a 4-5 win pitcher that can slot in first or second in a rotation, and be worth at least that $40 million he’s making over 2012 and 2013.