STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Let's just dispense with the notion that Jameson Taillon is the Pirates' "fifth starter" right now.
Even though, technically, that might just be true. At least in this rotation, which had been performing out of its collective mind before a considerable bump in the road out west:
Despite an up-and-down start to his 2019 season, Taillon still should be recognized as the team's "ace," should you subscribe to that term. At the very least, his talent alone should quell any doubts.
A quick look at Pirates Twitter during his last start against the Diamondbacks shows a fan base that expected Taillon to exemplify something else. That certain something is another of those old reliable baseball terms, though this one has more of a tangible feel to it: "stopper."
Fate had other ideas, with Taillon laboring through five innings. Let's take a closer look.
Though the reasons behind Taillon's poor start are many -- lack of putting hitters away, an unusually flat four-seamer being the main culprits -- there is a singular item of note stemming from this outing.
The eyes jump to Taillon's 15 swinging strikes in just five innings, and that attention paid is justified when noting Taillon totaled 15 whiffs or more just twice in his watershed 2018 season. It's almost impossible to compute -- how can a pitcher who clearly had some swing and miss working end a start with five earned runs across just five innings? Volume plays a part, sure. Getting knocked around a bit begets more hitters to potentially whiff. But this dichotomy highlights something that many Pirates fans and observers might not be ready to accept.
Taillon's slider -- even with all the promise and intrigue it brings with each revolution as it hurtles towards the plate -- is still a work in progress. Take a look at the pitch year-over-year:
That's quite a bit more of the plate than Taillon would like to touch. This, despite the offering actually gaining some average spin rate -- 2473 rpm (40 rpm better than 2018) -- which is the lifeblood of any good slider. When these errant instances get to the hitter, bad things can happen, as they did against the Diamondbacks:
Those aren't exactly buried, and you'll notice both of these instances came on two strike counts. Taillon has favored the slider at two-strike counts to the tune of a 31 percent usage, just a tick above his four-seamer which is seen at 30 percent. Certainly, that's nothing ludicrous on the surface. Pitchers can and should throw their best pitches when a punchout is in the offing. Taillon's slider is sturdy enough, sure, but compared against the rest of the league its presumed prowess is diminished somewhat. His 10.2 whiff-per-swing rate (percentage of pitches that hitters swing at that end up as a swing and miss) ranks just 35th out of 71 current major league starters with at least 10 whiffs on the pitch in total.
When it is working, Taillon gets a lot out of the pitch:
Whether it be with men on base, a right-handed or left-handed bat, high leverage/low leverage or any other permutation, when you can locate like that, to both sides of the plate, a slider is a dagger that can piece the soul of any hitter.
For reasons I have yet to fully fathom, Taillon's slider at two-strike counts has been missing ... something. In those two-strike counts, Taillon's whiff per swing on the slider -- 22.7 percent -- is a bit more than a tick worse than it is at other counts. In non-two strike even counts (0-0, 1-1), that figure is 27.3 percent. When behind in the count, the slider is even harder to connect with, with a 28.6 percent whiff per swing rate.
The beauty of a slider -- and, not coincidentally, the entire reason the Pirates should have emphasized the pitch on a wider scale long ago -- is that it can be equally effective serving as a put away pitch, or something to get back into a count. Taillon has clearly been able to use it to get hitters to two strikes, but has not yet been able to lock it in as a put away pitch. Not just yet.
This, despite the pitch carrying better overall swinging strike and contact rates than its 2018 counterpart:
With another year of tinkering with this pitch underway, it is entirely plausible we have not yet seen the best version of Taillon's pitch. The peripherals above certainly suggest that he's close.
It may even be possible for Taillon to actualize the ceiling that many pictured when he first unlocked the pitch last year.
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The Pirates got a huge lift when Gregory Polanco returned from injury much sooner than expected. Though his sample size since return is maddeningly small, that does not preclude his results at the plate -- I'll save the defense for another column -- has been equally as confounding:
Big Greg has shown some remarkable patience for a hitter anxious to get back to meaningful contribution, and has stung some balls when contact is made. Yet his overall hard-hit rate is woefully under the MLB-rate.
It's rather incongruous. How can a hitter average over 90 mph on exit velocity yet retain such an anemic hard hit rate overall?
Again, we are talking about just 16 batted balls to date, but the delta of those batted balls tells us a lot. Of those 16, seven have been struck at less than 86 mph, while only six have seen 90 mph or greater. A pair of monster singles at 108.8 mph and 105.2 mph are enough to skew this data.
Of those seven that have been less than screaming off of the bat, five were changeups, two were a slider and one was a four-seamer. Here we can perhaps find a sliver of a takeaway from Polanco's early returns.
In 2018, the right-fielder carried an average exit velocity of 85.9 mph on offspeed pitches. This figure was decidedly average, placing him 141 out of 276 qualified hitters. Giancarlo Stanton -- who punished offspeed stuff to the tune of 96.2 mph exit velo on average -- he is not.
But he also is nowhere near the ineptitude of one noted Pirates killer in Billy Hamilton, who could only muster up 72.4 of exit velocity against these pitches. Still, there is an opportunity for El Coffee to simmer against these offerings. He saw the second highest amount of offspeed pitches among Pirates hitters in 2018 by volume (276 total pitches) and fourth most by percentage at 12.5 percent. Of those offspeed pitches, 81 came from when Polanco was ahead in the count. And it was pretty obvious what pitchers were trying to do with them:
That 4.52 P/PA (pitches per plate appearance) figure above? That figure would easily represent the highest of Polanco's career. Should he be able to lay off even a portion of those offspeed pitches -- especially when ahead in the count -- he stands to see more fastball counts. More damage would theoretically ensue, and the Pirates just might have their best bat from 2018 back in their 2019 lineup in fully realized form.
