What’s up with Darren O’Day? Once the most reliable member of the Orioles bullpen (save for those few glorious months when Andrew Miller was wearing a cartoon bird), is O’Day suddenly ineffective?
Over a stretch of 20 innings pitched from last September through last Friday night, O’Day allowed seven home runs. Prior to that, he had given up just three homers all 2014 (59.2 IP), and seven in all of 2013 (62.0 IP).
Just like that, O’s fans find ourselves a bit nervous when we gear up to chant “O’Dayyyyyy, O’Day O’Day O’Dayyyyyyyy,” when Darren finishes an inning.
I wanted to look at the home runs he’s allowed over this recent cold stretch, to see if any obvious patterns or issues jumped out at me.
Thanks, as always, to the great Pitchf/X tool at BrooksBaseball.net.
April 24, 2015 – Brock Holt, BOS
Holt’s home run came on a 1-2 fastball. It clocked in at just under 87 MPH, and while it was up out of the zone, it was also right over the middle of the plate. If Holt was looking fastball, he got one and it was an easy one to elevate.
April 12, 2015 – Jose Bautista, TOR
Bautista’s homer came on a 2-2 slider, the fourth slider of the AB. Again, not a terrible pitch – down in the zone, but still getting more of the plate than you’d think O’Day had wanted.
As far as movement and velocity, it was right there with his other sliders of the AB:
October 10, 2014 – Alex Gordon, KC
Gordon’s home run came on a 1-1 fastball. It was just over 89 MPH, and high over the outside corner.
Like Holt, if Gordon was looking fastball, the pitch did most of the work for him.
October 2, 2014 – Miguel Cabrera, DET
Cabrera ambushed an 89 MPH sinker that O’Day left near the middle of the zone.
September 19, 2014 – David Ortiz, BOS
Ortiz hammered an 0-1 89 MPH fastball that O’Day may as well have laid on a tee. Safe to say he missed his spot on this one.
September 14, 2014 – Brian McCann, NYY
McCann hit a 2-0 87 MPH sinker. O’Day threw him two sliders to start the AB, and got squeezed pretty badly on the second one. The count should have been 1-1.
As with Bautista’s homer above, O’Day kept it down, but got a good chunk of the middle of the plate.
September 2, 2014 – Jay Bruce, CIN
Bruce hit a 1-0 87 MPH fastball that was again up and out over the middle of the plate.
And that’s it – the end of the bad streak for O’Day. The first thing that pops out at me, as I try to look for a pattern in these homers, is that – with the exception of Holt – these are all REALLY GOOD HITTERS that are victimizing O’Day.
Take out Holt, and the other six hitters on this list have combined for 1625 major league home runs and 45 20+ home run seasons. So yeah, very, very good hitters.
Still, as one of the game’s premier setup men, you’re paying O’Day to retire the other team’s best hitters, many times in high leverage situations. So, while tipping our cap to the other guys, we can’t just give O’Day a pass.
What else do we see?
Of the above batters, five of the seven were swinging from the left side of the plate. Last year, before these home run issues popped up (actually, right before), our own Gordon Dixon wrote a piece on how, after struggling against lefties in 2013, O’Day was back on track to being lethal to hitters from both sides, as he’d been earlier in his career.
Over the first 70 AB last year, lefties hit just .186/.286/.286 against O’Day.
Here’s Gordon:
In 2013, O’Day utilized his slider a whopping 47.04% of the time against lefties, with the sinker coming in at 19.5%. In 2014, the split is nearly identical (30.67% and 30.03%). Combine that with his fastball and we see he’s less reliant on any of his main three pitches than in previous seasons with the Orioles.
Gordon also noted increases in O’Day’s velocity from his career numbers. His sinker and four-seamer were up from the low-mid 80’s to the mid-upper 80’s, while his slider from the high 70’s to the lower 80’s. If we look at the homers from last September-October, we see two 89 MPH fastballs, an 89 MPH sinker, an 87 MPH sinker, two 87 MPH fastballs, and an 80 MPH slider. So yes, the velocity was still there on those particular pitches.
Has the velocity increase O’Day showed in 2014 held so far in 2015?
In short, no. After upticks in velocity every year from 2011-14, O’Day’s velocity so far in 2015 is back to 2012 levels on the sinker and fastball, 2013 levels on the slider.
How worried should we be about this? Well, O’Day was having hamstring soreness late last year, which could have accounted for his reduced velocity and ineffectiveness. At the same time, it’s concerning that the velocity dip has carried over into 2015.
There may be hope though. If we look at his month-by-month numbers in recent years, we see that he’s been known to ramp it up a bit as the season goes along;
Even if his velocity doesn’t completely return to the career-high levels it was at in 2014, O’Day has proven in the past that he can be effective at the lower velocities.
While the velocity is down, and we have home runs by Bautista and Holt (and Gordon before them) fresh in our minds, I don’t want to overreact either. O’Day has still only allowed one ER in 8.1 IP this season (he wasn’t charged with an ER on the Holt HR due to Manny Machado’s error that preceded it), for a 1.08 ERA. He has seven strikeouts and just one walk in 8.1 IP.
As for his IS% (percentage of inherited runners who score), it’s a bit inflated right now at 50%. We have to consider the small sample size, and assume that it will normalize to near his career number of 26%. As an Oriole, his best year was 2012 (14%), followed by 2014 (20%), and 2013 (32%).
As fans (and humans, for that matter), we’re inclined to look for patterns – things that make our world make sense amidst chaos and variability. Case in point: at the beginning of this article, I said I was looking for patterns.
As a pattern, it’s easy to look at O’Day’s surrendering of the long ball over his recent outings as a huge red flag.
Take each home run as an isolated occurrence though, and it’s equally easy to just say “well, he made a mistake to a great hitter, and the guy didn’t miss.”
I’ll leave it up to the reader to draw your own conclusions about O’Day from the data above (please, do so!)
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As for me though, because I live my life in constant donning of orange-colored glasses, I’m willing to take a leap here and say that O’Day will be just fine, as long as he stops catching so much of the strike zone to the best hitters in the game.
“But, Brock Holt?!”
Well, even a blind squirrel…(see: Lough, David).
O’Dayyyyy, O’Day O’Day O’Dayyyyyyyyy, O’Dayyyyyyyy, O’Dayyyyyyyy
