Top Performances: DRA vs. Dylan Cease

The 2023 season was abysmal for the Chicago White Sox. It blew up on them so completely and so violently that even Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams, safely ensconced with the team for over two decades, were thrown out. As a result, they entered this offseason with a mandate to make big changes. Newly promoted GM Chris Getz faces the task of disassembling this failed would-be hegemon and trying to build a new one before his own time runs out. In the early going, it seems like his best chance to accelerate the construction process is to trade Dylan Cease.

Almost everyone likes Cease. He’s been as durable as any starting pitcher in baseball for the last half-decade. He takes the ball every fifth day, as reliably as anyone. He’s not just an old-fashioned, quantity-over-quality plow horse, though. With a nasty repertoire that includes a high-rising fastball, a devastating slider, a curve, and a split-change, Cease has racked up at least 214 strikeouts in each of the last three seasons. He’s a frontline starter, almost by consensus.

You know who hates Dylan Cease, though? It’s DRA. As Cease’s top-line results took a huge step backward in 2023, most onlookers and some value metrics shrugged dismissively. Not DRA. It went from evaluating Cease as that surefire frontline guy (with DRA- marks of 85 and 80 in 2021 and 2022, respectively) to labeling him a below-average innings sponge in 2023, with a 108 DRA-. As the Sox shop their ace, we might benefit from taking sides in the debate between DRA and the rest of the baseball world.

Here’s the unusual thing about Cease: He’s a strictly vertical guy who still walks everyone. Of the pitches he threw this season that were called balls, only 16.1% missed wide, but not high or low. That’s the third-lowest percentage, out of 147 qualifying pitchers, and most of the guys who hang out in the same range as Cease on that particular leaderboard throw a lot more strikes. In fact, here are the 15 guys whose misses are least concentrated in the spaces off the edges, but instead of showing those numbers, these are their overall Called Strike Probability (CSProb) and walk rates for the season.

The strike zone is taller than it is wide. By how much that’s true varies from batter to batter and umpire to umpire, but it’s true. That means that, on any given pitch, a hurler is likely to have a greater margin for error from high to low than from left to right. Add in the fact that vertical movement generates more whiffs than horizontal movement does, and you have the explanation for baseball’s historical preference for pitchers with relatively high arm slots. The parts of this game that aren’t physics or biomechanics are mostly geometry.

Pitches don’t come much more strictly vertical than Cease, either. Beyond his arm angle, the observed movement of his stuff paints a clear picture.

The only thing with significant wiggle on it is that split-changeup, and Cease throws that pitch only sparingly. Obviously, though, not every pitcher with a vertical movement profile is created equal. The intensity of Cease’s stuff—seriously, look at all that rise on the fastball—makes commanding it all and hitting the strike zone too difficult for him. Specifically, because he almost always tries to attack the top of the strike zone with that heater, it often takes off on him and misses so far above the zone that hitters aren’t tempted. Because he almost always tries to throw his slider as a strike-to-ball bat-misser, he often misses so far down or away that hitters aren’t tempted, either. He threw 100 more pitches that badly missed the zone, way out in the area where neither swings nor called strikes even feel possible, than anyone else in MLB in 2023.

That’s sufficient to explain Cease’s walk rate, and why that walk rate feels so out of joint with his skill set. It’s not quite enough to explain DRA’s disdain for him, though. To do that, let’s turn to the machinery of DRA, itself. Remember that DRA adjusts its expectations for every encounter between batter and pitcher based on things like handedness and opponent quality, the better to measure the contribution of each combatant to the outcome. Thus, by going to the BP Pitching Leaderboards, you can see Deserved totals for various stats, to set them in contrast with the observed ones. Let’s do that for Cease’s walks and strikeouts since 2021.

Season
SO
dSO
BB
dBB

2021
226
226
68
64

2022
227
225
78
74

2023
214
206
79
83

After a couple years in which DRA saw Cease’s strikeouts as essentially perfectly earned and his walks as (if anything) slightly inflated, last season, it thinks he got lucky, even in the aspects of pitching where we don’t think of luck as playing a large role. Given what we’ve already discussed—his huge volume of bad misses and lack of ability to command the ball in the meaty parts of the strike zone—that doesn’t feel unfair. It also speaks to the decrepit state of the AL Central, though. Although not in so many words, DRA is (in part) saying it’s not impressed by some of the competition he dominated en route to his gaudy strikeout totals this time around.

We also need to go a little further, though, to complete the picture of DRA’s distrust of Cease. The decline in his Not in Play Runs total (from 11th of 129 qualifying starters in 2021 down to 61st of 147 in 2023) is worrisome, but he’s still above-average in that aspect, thanks to the strikeouts he piles up. The real danger and damage comes when batters do put it in play against him.

Cease allowed a career-worst .331 batting average on balls in play in 2023. Since the White Sox weren’t exactly defensive world-beaters, and since BABIP is BABIP, that has led many to conclude that he was (if not unlucky) ill-supported, and that he’ll bounce right back in 2024. With an Out Runs (those accrued to the player via outs on balls in play) 9.8 runs to the bad, Cease was fifth-worst among qualifying pitchers. According to DRA, he deserved every bit of his bad batted-ball outcomes.

We can trace the reason for that back to the shape of his arsenal. Lateral movement doesn’t yield as many whiffs or strikeouts as vertical movement does, but it’s the more important variable for managing contact. Moving the ball side to side can prevent hard contact (something Cease gave up at a career-high rate in 2023) by getting the ball in on the handle or out on the end of a bat. Consider these two heat maps, with the pitch locations of balls put in play by opposing hitters. One is for Kyle Hendricks, who ranked third in Out Runs in 2023, and the other for Cease, who ranked 143rd.

Aiming for the edges, instead of testing the top and bottom of the zone, leads to more walks, all other things being equal. This is a bad example, of course, because Hendricks and Cease have almost no things equal. Hendricks’s command is why he’s still in baseball. Cease’s stuff is dominant, and could be even more so if he could just find the boundaries of the zone more and miss by wide margins less frequently. Still, it’s illustrative. Cease probably doesn’t need to reinvent (or even materially adjust) his arsenal, but the arsenal he has does come with some limitations. Pitching from high to low will never be a good way to manage contact, so there’s added pressure to be fine enough to keep the strikeout rate far ahead of the walk rate.

Soon, we’ll find out what some other team thinks Cease could do differently, to sustain the kind of success he enjoyed before this difficult campaign. It’s unlikely that it’ll be another team in the Centrals, so he’s likely to face stiffer competition, but with a tweak here or there, he might step right back toward the front of even a good rotation. It might just be a temporary condition, this enmity between DRA and Cease.

Source link