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Ivan Nova and the Third Time Through the Order

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PITTSBURGH — It’s hard to say much that’s bad about Ivan Nova’s start in the Pirates’ 3-0 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Tuesday.

Nova carried a perfect game through four innings. He had faced the minimum through five innings and that took him a grand total of 38 pitches.

He stumbled — comparatively — in the sixth and the seventh innings, allowing three runs to score and giving up a couple of hard-hit balls. On the whole, it was a start that almost any pitcher would be happy with.

But Nova’s issues at the end of the start aren’t new. He gave up five hits and three runs in the eighth and ninth innings of his previous outing in Atlanta. He gave up runs in each the seventh and the eighth innings the start before that against the Phillies. In each of those starts, he was dealing with an elevated pitch count, so it was easy to explain away the late runs as fatigue. He threw 90 pitches against Philadelphia and 100 in Atlanta.

Tuesday, though, the Diamondback were able to jump on Nova despite an absurdly low pitch count. Through five innings, he’d likely thrown more pitches warming up in between innings than he had in the game.

So if it’s not fatigue, what has been the issue with Nova leaking runs late from otherwise outstanding starts?

Starting pitchers go through a process called a Times Through the Order Penalty. Basically, this means that the more times the batting order turns over, the less effective a starting pitcher is.
It’s a fairly easily proven fact. But it’s hard to suss out why that is.

Russell A. Carleton of Baseball Prospectus postulates that it has a lot more to do with pitch count than it does facing the same batter for the third time that day.

It remains an open question and Nova is an interesting case study for the very reasons outlined above. Coming into Tuesday, Nova had allowed a .513 OPS against the first time through the order, a .596 OPS against the second time through the order and an .863 OPS against the third time.

The theory of TTOP is that a pitcher only has so many ways to get a batter out and the more times that a pitcher has to face a same hitter, the harder it is for him to be tricked or fooled. Fool me once, shame on me and all that.

But Nova said he doesn’t think specifically about how many times he’s faced a hitter that day when deciding how to attack them.

“Everything is the same: just keep making pitches and attacking,” he said. “I’m not thinking, ‘It’s the third time through’ or how many pitches I’ve (thrown). My mindset is just go up there and compete.”

Manager Clint Hurdle seemed to think that Nova’s arsenal lends itself to being able to go deeper into games because he’s letting his defense do so much of the work. When a hitter rolls a sinker down to third base, they’re not really fooled. They saw a pitch in the strike zone and swung at it. The fact that his fastball has so much spin that hitters can’t do much with it is what makes Nova successful.

“He has the two-seamer and the curveball and the changeup and he knows how to pitch,” Hurdle said. “It’s a good combination. It’s a good arsenal to work through the lineup a third time, especially (because) guys, sometimes if they’re down. their swings get a little bit bigger. He can utilize that, add and subtract. He can do some things. You’ve got to have weapons number one. When you add know how and savvy number two, it helps. Sometimes, you just have a big arm. That can get you through three times as well.”

Nova seems to have all of those factors, and yet he still seems to be hurt deeper into his starts. He said that Tuesday, he lost a little bit of command as the game went on. He issued a rare walk and said his two-seamer was just catching too much of the plate.

“I just missed location,” he said. “I almost gave up a homer. I walked a guy. I thought I made a good pitch to get a double play, but it was too far in the hole.”

Hurdle seemed to agree with that assessment, and added that Nova’s breaking ball didn’t seem as sharp as the night went on, saying, “I don’t think it still played later as well as it did early.”

Nova also said it was a different problem that robbed him of a potential complete game in Atlanta.

“I was trying to go really inside to some hitters and the ball just stayed in the middle,” he said. “In Atlanta, it didn’t do nothing. Here, it wasn’t that I didn’t move my sinker, it was just more in the middle.”

It adds up to an unsolved mystery for now and something to keep a close eye on going forward. In the meantime, if Nova can keep going deep into games and giving his team a chance to win, he’s not going to find many complaints.

NOTES

The Pirates were shut out for just the third time this season. … Arizona starter Robbie Ray allowed four hits and struck out 10 in a complete-game shutout. … Andrew McCutchen went 1 for 3. He has hits in six straight games and has raised his batting average 17 points in that span.

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