PITTSBURGH — Beginning with his first full season in 2013, in which he earned a spot on the NL All-Star team, perhaps no Pirates pitcher has seen as many highs and lows as Jeff Locke. His rise and fall in 2013 was well documented, as regression in his strand rate (83.3% 1st half, 67% 2nd half) and his BABIP (.228, .365) led to a 6.12 ERA in 57.1 innings pitched after the break. As you probably remember, he was removed from the starting rotation before the end of the regular season, and he was left off both the Wild Card and NLDS rosters.
Since that time, Locke has proved a frustrating pitcher to analyze, as his performance seems to vary considerably from start to start. Charlie Wilmoth wrote about this last week, prompted in part by this Travis Sawchik piece. Sawchik pointed to Locke’s higher walk rate on the road, perhaps indicating that Locke wasn’t getting as favorable a strike zone when he’s the visiting starter. That bias among umpires towards the home team, though real, is probably far less influential than our intuition might have us believe.
Saturday’s performance at PNC Park was arguably Locke’s best start since he threw eight scoreless innings against Cleveland on Independence Day, and it certainly lends credence to the idea that Locke struggles on the road and pitches better in Pittsburgh.
After the game, Clint Hurdle ran through a laundry list of things Jeff Locke did well Saturday night.
“The [pitch] mix played, controlled bat speed, stayed out of the middle of the plate, really good with first pitch strikes as well,” Hurdle said after the start. Locke threw 18 of 24 first-pitch strikes, and perhaps more importantly, to 14 of the first 16 batters he faced.
Another focus for Locke on Saturday was making sure Brewers hitters didn’t sit on inside fastballs, which he felt was a primary reason for the rough start in Milwaukee. He and Cervelli discussed keeping hitters off-balance more by starting off away and changing speeds earlier in the game.
The effectiveness of Locke’s changeup helped that strategy succeed. He generated seven swings and misses on 17 swings with that pitch, more than half of his total whiffs on the night (11). Interestingly enough, he threw the same number of changeups (17) in Milwaukee, and got nearly the same number of whiffs (6).
I spoke with Locke after Saturday’s game, and he offered some interesting thoughts on making adjustments within and between starts:
“[Baseball] is unlike any other sports, in my opinion, where you don’t always know what you have every day. And I know people say, ‘What do you mean you don’t know what you have? You’ve been doing this your whole life.’ But it really is the truth. You don’t know how it’s gonna play.
“I think we’re all at this level because we know how to make adjustments, and I think that’s the only difference between me or somebody that’s in Single-A or Double-A. No one throws a whole lot harder than anybody else; no one does anything too different. But you’re able to correct your mistakes a little quicker, and you’re able to repeat pitches.”
Locke expressed a general confidence in the idea of a changeup.
“I think it’s one of the best pitches in baseball,” Locke said of the pitch. He added, with a laugh: “It looks just like a fastball, except for it’s not one. That’s why it’s such a good pitch. When I’m changing speeds and doing that successfully, then the changeup plays a big part in that.”
Locke has never had elite stuff, so a larger part of his process has been seeing what pitches are working for him on a given night, then tailoring his approach and making in-game adjustments to best utilize his arsenal and keep hitters guessing. As we’ll examine below, his general approach stays the same from start to start, but the results are often very different.
Looking at Home/Road Splits
A quick Pitch f/x query tells us that the percentage of Locke’s pitches that are called a strike at home (18.53%) is better than when he’s on the road (16.87%). To a lesser extent, there’s also a difference between the share of pitches called a ball at home (33.45%) compared to his road starts (34.41%).
So are these home/road splits indicative of a real problem for Locke? It’s possible that he, like most players, prefers playing at home. He may get worn down by the travel time, or sleeping in hotels, and that takes its toll on the field. It also may be the case, as hypothesized above, that he’s getting squeezed by the home plate umpire while on the road. Let’s examine some other options first.
We know that when compensating for park effects, rest in between starts, etc., and taking an aggregate view, pitchers and hitters play better at home than they do on the road, so a small strike zone can’t entirely explain Locke’s performance in Milwaukee and other houses of horror. Consider the 2015 home/road splits (through Sunday) for members of the current rotation who have at least 40 innings pitched both at PNC and on the road:
You can see that each pitcher does at least slightly worse on the road, once xFIP does its smoothing out of home run rate and other factors. These differences could also be at least in some part due to a tailored approach for PNC Park, but we would need to see some proprietary information to fully test that theory.
With respect to Jeff Locke, and also Charlie Morton, you can see that each has had some bad luck in their road starts. These numbers reflect the fact that both are back of the rotation starters, and their overall xFIP this season (3.92 for Locke, 3.84 for Morton) puts them in a group of NL starters that includes John Lackey (3.95), Shelby Miller (3.93), Lance Lynn (3.85), and Jordan Zimmerman (3.83).
It’s possible that Locke is getting squeezed a bit on the road, but the effect is likely very small, and it seems his home/road splits are better explained by the typical differences that we see among all Pirates starting pitchers.
Locke’s Summer Struggles
Let’s take a deeper look at the roughest stretch for Locke this season — his eight starts between July 24th and September 2nd — and try to figure out where the problems lie:
As you can see from the chart, Locke struck out fewer batters during this stretch, but also walked fewer, with a higher FIP and ERA than his season averages. The lower walk numbers would seem to cut against the idea that he’s getting squeezed while on the road.
What jumps out to me, though, is the high home run rate. Locke also has a slightly lower strand rate at 64.6% during this stretch, compared to 67.8% on the season. When the strand and home run rates get normalized, you have a 4.00 xFIP, which sits very close to his 3.91 xFIP through the 2014 and 2015 seasons.
It’s also worth noting that three of Locke’s worst starts in the sample were at home — one against the Nationals, not yet into their collapse; one against the Cubs, surely bound for the playoffs; and the other against the Giants, who recently won their third World Series title in five years. There are also three bad road starts against divisional opponents, and the Pirates’ poor performance across the board in those games has been well documented.
Essentially, this difficult stretch for Locke coincided with perhaps the toughest portion of the Pirates’ 2015 schedule. Perhaps it’s to some extent obvious why he’s rebounded with consecutive effective starts against the Reds and Brewers.
As a final test, let’s examine the type of contact Locke surrendered during this stretch compared to his season stats:
Locke certainly surrendered more line drives in this stretch, but his fly ball rate is down slightly, which ought to lead to fewer home runs, if anything, and not more. Intuitively, the slight rise in hard contact might explain some of the extra line drives, but initial analysis has found that hard contact doesn’t correlate with more line drives.
The reasonable conclusion is that Locke probably had some trouble beating good teams — some at home, some on the road — but he almost surely had some tough luck along the way.
The “Real” Jeff Locke
Both Locke (and to a similar degree, Charlie Morton) are prone to these troubles, given their more contact-oriented strategy and limited ability to miss bats when they need a strikeout. Locke does lead the rotation in pitches thrown to the edges of the zone, increasing the risk of starting the vicious cycle of more called balls, more baserunners, and more balls in play.
Occasionally, the contact-oriented strategy and the edge-heavy approach will lead to stretches that include unusual amount of runs allowed, as both Locke and Morton have found over the last few years. I don’t mean to dismiss entirely the notion that Locke doesn’t get as many calls on the road, but his issues with consistency of late are far more likely to be the result of variance related to contact, and the quality of his opponents, rather than bias in the strike zone.
For now, the Pirates have Locke scheduled to make at least two more starts in the six man rotation that’s not a six man rotation: Sep. 18th at the Dodgers, and Sep. 23rd at the Rockies. Dodger Stadium and Coors Field are almost polar opposites in terms of friendliness to pitchers — as are the Dodgers and Rockies — so it will be interesting to see how Locke performs coming off these consecutive strong starts.
Bear in mind that this year is likely not the final chapter of Locke’s story with the Pirates. Given that he will only be entering his first arbitration year, A.J. Burnett will likely retire, and J.A. Happ will soon be a free agent, don’t be surprised if the Pirates decide to roll the dice again with Jeff Locke’s arsenal and approach in 2016.
