Aaron Civale is showing us what he hopes to do
A shortened arm path and altered changeup grip aren’t the only noticeable differences between the Aaron Civale of pre-2021 and the one we’ve seen this year. We’ve also witnessed him make some adjustments to the usage and location of his pitches, and he appears to be on his way to being as optimized as a Chick-fil-A drive-thru.
Well, maybe not that miraculous.
Two things are apparent through five starts: One, the 25-year-old has traded in the two-seamer for a traditional four-seamer, and two, the righty has been willing to elevate his cutter. The end result, so far, has led to a 2.94 ERA and 2.98 expected ERA (based on quality of contact, strikeouts and walks) through five starts.
It has also generated above-average contact management.
Of the hard contact Civale has allowed, 53 percent of the balls hit 95 mph or harder have been on the ground (15th-highest percentage in baseball). Considering it’s tough for a grounder to be too damaging, that’s important. These are necessities for a hurler who lives near the bottom of whiff and strikeout rates and isn’t a velocity fiend.
Here’s a quick look at the numbers below the surface that matter. This looks like a solidly above-average if not good pitcher, which he’s been through previous stretches.
What is interesting is how he’s getting there.
The reduction of the two-seamer (or sinker) by pitchers across baseball is not new — it’s been happening over the past few years. Civale, himself, has gone from 35.1 percent usage in 2019 and 28.9 percent in 2020 — his most frequent offering — to just 7.2 percent in 2021, with the four-seamer taking over as his lead pitch.
The flip-flop is enough to make a politician proud.
Simply swapping those two from a performance standpoint makes sense. Last year, his two-seamer led to a .310 batting average, .359 wOBA (weighted on-base average) and 11.3 percent whiff rate. This season, his four-seamer has resulted in a .138 average, .236 wOBA and 25.6 percent whiff rate. So, yeah, good choice.
But it goes beyond that.
His cutter remains his second-most-tossed weapon. But that pitch has also seen a reduction, with Civale putting more emphasis on his secondary stuff. Here, you can peep that new split-finger changeup, which has become a favorite.
That makes him a little less predictable — a great thing on its own — but it’s not just the usage that’s important. It’s also about location.
As noted, he’s been more prone to use his cutter up in the zone. But in fairness, he had started to use more of them in the upper-third or completely out of the zone last year. More precisely, so far, Civale has done a better job of targeting a specific area.
By looking at the heat maps, you can see the more earmarked approach. First, here is how Civale used his cutters in 2020.
And here is how they’ve been deployed in 2021.
Roughly 35 percent of his cutters have made their way to that corner red spot.
That location either darts away from the barrel of right-handed hitters or cuts in on the hands of lefty bats. And it’s up. Has it hasn’t always been perfect placement? Nah, but we’re getting an idea of what Civale is looking to accomplish with it.
And why that area? Well, let’s take a look at where Civale has gotten his called strikes or swinging-strikes with the cutter since 2019.
Hmmm … that deep red spot in the corner looks familiar.
So, if that zone typically leads to a called strike or whiff, it seems like a good target. But it’s not just about optimizing placement of the cutter (it’s led to a .192 batting average and .231 slugging percentage in a very small sample size this year), it’s about making sure all of Civale’s offerings are serving a specific need and setting up the rest.
Let’s put this another way: Civale has three offerings — his curveball, slider, and now, his changeup — that generate above-average vertical break compared to other pitchers at a similar velocity. That means he has three pitches that drop more than normal. If you were trying to make those offerings most effective, wouldn’t you want to change the eye level of the opposing hitter, giving them a four-seam and cutter that stay up and, hopefully, create a nice tunneling effect?
Here’s a good example of that concept with his four-seamer and curveball.
And another.
If he’s able to spot that four-seamer up — and if the above-average spin is making it fall at a slower rate than your average heater — then it’s really hard to tell if it’s the fastball or curveball coming, yet they end up in far different zones.
This concept can often work better than a two-seam/sinker, which is a pitch used typically to produce contact and generally work more horizontally, not used to change the vertical eye level of a hitter.
Used this way, all of his pitches attack different parts of the zone and differentiate themselves. The four-seamers, with slightly above-average ride, live up and trickle back arm-side (and they can probably be tightened up even more).
The cutters dart toward the upper corner, moving glove side.
The changeups move arm-side. They also, because of his new grip, went from a horizontal to vertical attack. They now carry an above-average vertical break compared to the below average drop his changeups had from 2019-2020.
But don’t just take my word for it. Below, you can see that he’s added vertical break on that pitch and some of the horizontal movement has been lessened.
That movement makes it better to pair with an elevated fastball, and so far, according to the Statcast run value metric, the split-change has been Civale’s best pitch in 2021.
The curveballs, meanwhile, break most of all of his pitches, working glove side, and when ahead, tumbling below the zone and the hitters’ barrels.
And the sliders also move glove side with above-average horizontal break, but they don’t drop as much as the curveball. They find their way to a different area — often out of the zone.
Hard stuff up. Soft stuff down.
It’s all about keeping the hitter guessing and accenting what each pitch does.
Now, his two-seamer can fill a different role: a surprise pitch. He can use the arm-side action to start in on the hands of lefties, where it can casually work it’s way into the zone to freeze hitters looking for different movement. For righties, the ball might look hittable but works itself toward their fists, or, since it’s down, might fool the hitter into thinking it’s going to tumble below the zone, but it stays very much within it.
Certainly, it’s too early to be singling out the performance of each individual pitch and reciting them as infallible, which is why we won’t get into much of that just yet. But there’s plenty here at work that theoretically seems to optimize him.
None of this is to say Civale is a finished product. But we can certainly see what the plan is thus far, and the switch to a four-seam led group enables the rest of his weapons to work as they can and should. He can now attack different areas with pitches that do contrasting things, conceivably fooling hitters with a more varied ambush of pitches that try to stay on the same plane for longer.
That will take continued tweaks — no one is ever done adjusting or evolving — but as long as he manages to stay off barrels at a near elite rate and keeps most of the hard contact, when it does happen, on the ground, Civale will prove there is more than one way to make a chicken sandwich — err, collect outs.