The Royals need innings from starters; Mike Minor needs his change-up

There's potential here for a mutually beneficial relationship.

Flashback! Do you remember a quote like this from almost a decade ago?

“Ultimately we would like a starting rotation that can pitch 1,000 innings.”

Clipped from a 2012 article, the statement at the time wasn’t that far-fetched; a handful of teams were getting that kind of workload from their rotations. Certainly, it was a high bar to set, but not one that was completely out of reach. In fact, the Royals came close to 1,000 innings immediately after Moore first made that statement, finishing with 986.2 innings from their rotation in 2013. It was the fourth-highest mark in the majors that summer. They finished with the exact same number of frames tossed by their rotation the following year. How’s that for consistency? Let’s call it the Juego Grande James Shields Effect.

But the game has undergone immense change since then. The last time a club topped 1,000 innings from their starting pitchers was in 2015 when the White Sox paced MLB with 1,011 frames. The Mets’ starters also topped the mark that year, finishing at 1,002.2 innings. Since then…nothing.

A mere four years later, the Mets starters led the league in innings pitched at 941.1. They were one of four teams that got 900+ innings from their rotation in 2019. The Royals’ starters threw 860 frames that year, ranking them 15th, dead in the middle of the pack.

If pitching is the currency of baseball, innings are the currency of pitching. We are about to enter a year where intense focus will be on workloads of starters, times through the order and the balancing of the amount of work from younger arms against keeping those arms fresh and sharp. This was a direction the game was already going, but the shortened 2020 has only accelerated the movement.

With a plethora of young prospect arms in the mix, the Royals are going to need to be smart and proactive in their workload management. While a pitcher like Brady Singer is a “born competitor” or whatever euphemism for badass you want to use, it’s probably neither realistic nor ideal to put him on the bump for 32 starts and 200+ innings in the upcoming season. Ditto for Kris Bubic, Daniel Lynch, Jackson Kowar, Asa Lacy or any other young gun lurking around the Royals’ corral.

The Royals need innings from their rotation. But from where?

Brad Keller may be the most interesting pitcher in baseball, but he’s never topped 170 innings in a season in his professional career. He maxed out at 165.1 innings in 2019, but that was a year where he really seemed to hit a wall around inning 150 and couldn’t make a full complement of starts, the Royals wisely shutting him down in early September.

Danny Duffy’s career-high in innings pitched came in 2016 when he split his time between the rotation and the bullpen; he finished with 179.2 innings pitched. He’s never made more than 28 starts in a season and in the three years prior to 2020, Duffy averaged 144 innings a year in 25 starts.

This is why Mike Minor will be a key contributor to this starting rotation.

Minor missed two years with shoulder problems (2015 and 2016), including surgery to repair a torn labrum. He made the Royals out of spring training in 2017 and spent the year in the bullpen, where he was a very successful reliever. In 65 appearances, Minor threw 77.2 innings with a 10.2 SO/9, a 2.6 BB/9 and a 2.55 ERA to go along with an fWAR of 2.2. He entered free agency after that season and, at the time, I thought he could cash in as a closer for a club desperate to splash the cash on a bullpen part. But Minor wanted to return to the rotation and the Texas Rangers were willing partners. Minor made 28 starts in 2018, throwing 157 innings. The next season he made 32 starts and hit his career-high in innings pitched at 208.1. It was also the best season of his career.

Back in Kansas City on a two-year, $18 million deal, Minor is set to be a rotation mainstay for the Royals in 2021 almost no matter the results. This is because they are going to need innings and it’s innings Minor can provide. But for Minor to recapture the success he had prior to 2020, he will need to rediscover the velocity of his fastball.

It sure sounds strange to write about “fastball velocity” as a key component for Minor’s success. In a game where flamethrowers bringing the extreme heat has become more and more prevalent, Minor is old school in that his fastball doesn’t reach the mid-90s’ As a starter, he’s normally living around 92 mph on average. But last year it tumbled to an average of 90.6 mph.

This resulted in an unsavory domino effect.

The change is Minor’s bread and butter. It really blossomed in 2019 when there was 6.3 mph of separation between it and his fastball. He was using the change “in” against right-handed hitters, bringing it as a “front-door” change. It was wildly successful. That year, opposing hitters had a .178 batting average against the cambio along with a .265 slugging percentage. According to Statcast, the pitch had a Run Value of -24 which was elite level. Last year, with the decline in fastball velocity paired with a not as steep decline in the velocity of the change, the separation between the two was just 5.2 mph. The gap actually narrowed as the season progressed as his change picked up a tick of velocity while his four-seamer remained static. That’s not what you want between the fastball and the change. He was also catching a lot more of the plate with the change. It’s wasn’t as much “front door” as it was “straight down the chimney right into the kitchen.”

The results were a .196 batting average against the change along with a .339 slugging percentage. Definitely not a major increase, but enough to make a difference in a short season. Overall, his change was worth a Run Value of 0, making it an average pitch. But average is good! At least it’s acceptable, right? Well, maybe not when the change had previously been such a weapon.

Minor’s other season as a starter in Texas in 2018 saw the Run Value for his change clock in at -1. So maybe the -24 Run Value on the pitch in ’19 is a heavy outlier? Perhaps. But he wasn’t throwing that “front-door” change to right-handed hitters. There’s no denying the change was less effective in 2020 than it had been in each of the previous two years, at least on hard-hit rate. And if the change isn’t as much of a weapon, lookout for an already pedestrian fastball with declining velocity.

You can see the impact below. Minor’s Hard Hit % jumped across the board with the rate on the change doubling while the rate on the four-seamer increased by 10 percentage points. Yes, the batting average and slugging percentage against the fastball decreased from 2019 to 2020, but his .244 xBA and .459 xSLG tell the tale of a pitcher who was able to evade what could have been maximum damage.

The fastball and the change work in concert. If one instrument is out of wack, the whole performance is in danger of going off the rails. And that’s what happened for Minor in 2020.

The decrease in velocity 2020 from Minor was obvious from the jump. And he was never able to get it back. And it impacted his entire season.

As I’ve written plenty ahead of the 2021 season, we absolutely have to take into account the irregularity of what happened in 2020. In Minor’s case, an extended break after an abbreviated Spring Training along with the accelerated Summer Camp, he just wasn’t stretched out when the season began. That he never really found that mobility is a concern, but it’s understandable. Exhibition games are for working out the kinks. When you don’t have that luxury of time and are thrown into actual competition, it’s easy to see how an athlete can get sidetracked. Routine matters. So like expecting Carlos Santana to rebound from a down offensive year, we can likewise expect Minor to do the same with the benefit of a full slate of bullpens, lives and exhibition games in Arizona.

Honestly, the Royals probably aren’t asking for much. Just a league averagish starting pitcher who can bear more than his share of a workload when split among five starting rotation slots. Minor himself has said he wants to throw as many innings as possible. Looking for a repeat of 2019 is probably asking for too much, but it is reasonable to expect a bounceback season from the southpaw. With the technology and results available at Baseball Savant, we will be able to monitor his progress.

With a young staff on the move, it’s imperative that Minor find that lost velocity in his fastball and his location on his change. His success—and the success of the Royals’ rotation overall—depends on that.