FG article on Newk

[Enscheff]

Worst post you've made.

Matt has told you guys several times I drink Zima, not beer.

[Enscheff]

Did you guys let Newk know this though..

Braves FO is hella smart. I'm sure they already know this and have relayed the info to Newk.

[bravesfanMatt]

Matt has told you guys several times I drink Zima, not beer.

Mike's hard lemonade man..

[Enscheff]

Mike's hard lemonade man..

That's right, Zima was during my hardcore college days. I've mellowed a bit since then.

[Enscheff]

These posts by Carp and I happened in the trade thread, but I thought they belonged in here too...

Carp:

Quote Originally Posted by Enscheff View Post
I would be interested to see if you can identify any starter that has produced 3+ WAR over more than a couple seasons without throwing a third pitch ~10% of the time. A true 2 pitch guy that was a MOR pitcher or better for an extended period of time.
Without looking, the pitchers that came to mind as popular two pitch pitchers were Randy Johnson, David Price, Chris Archer, Derek Lowe, and Roy Oswalt. And looking at fangraphs, that seems to support my thinking for the most part.

Luckily someone did this for you, using basically the same parameters as you suggested:

https://www.draysbay.com/2013/8/29/4...-pitch-pitcher

And that's only between like 2008 and 2012.

Me:

Crazy that you found an article where someone answered the exact question I asked haha. I was looking for more sustained success than 1 outlier season, but that list of names is informative. Here are the guys that appear on the list more than once (meaning sustained success with 2 pitches, * indicates more than twice):

Archer (we know he is a good comp)
Burnett
Kershaw
Jackson
Gio*
Kuroda*
Santana
Beckett

The question then becomes, are Newk's 2 pitches as good as those guys' 2 pitches? We can't compare all the pitches to each other easily, but we can compare FA velocity. Here are the FA velocities of Archer, Gio and Kuroda over the 3 seasons they posted 3+ WAR as 2-pitch guys:

Archer: 95.0-95.9
Gio: 92.8-94.2
Kuroda: 92.1-93.1

Gio and Kuroda posted those average velocities back when the average MLB FA was more than 1 MPH slower than today, so we can mentally add 1 MPH to account for "velocity inflation".

Newcomb: 92.8

So Newk's FA is sitting a 1-2 ticks below the velocity those guys had on their FA to make being a 2-pitch guy work for an extended period of time. In other words, it doesn't appear his 2 pitches are good enough to sustain success by using only those 2 pitches.

It should also be noted those guys all used a 3rd pitch more than Newk currently does. They had a better FA than Newk AND they used a 3rd pitch more often to get these results.

I still think he needs to add a 3rd pitch, and I still think it needs to be a change. He probably only needs to get that change to about a 45 and use it ~10 times per game to be a truly effective SP over a decent stretch of time. It is certainly doable.

Oddly enough, I have seen Gio comps thrown around for Newk quite a bit. We should all be thrilled if that's what he ends up being.