FanPost

A Look Back at Huascar Ynoa’s 2021: How Did He Fare

Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

Heading into the 2021 season, one of the key questions surrounding Braves’ pitchers was seeing who would take a step forward to be an integral part of the pitching staff. Among the available candidates, one of the most interesting cases was Huascar Ynoa, who seemed to be straddling the line between "possible rotation candidate" and "someone who needs to be shifted to the bullpen" between his potential and existing questions. Because of this, I looked into how to improve the pitchers’ chances, I ended up homing in on Ynoa and writing a FanPost to try to break down what I felt he could do to improve. As such, it’s only fair that those questions get analyzed to see what got answered (or not answered), as well as learning what ended up not being relevant.

Question #1: Can Ynoa improve his active spin rate on his slider?

Answer: I’m addressing this one first to acknowledge that this question…turned out to be completely irrelevant. Sliders are a bit weird when it comes to active spin (how spin translates into movement), and my question was based around the idea that he might be able to get more movement on the pitch if that area improved, while Ivan the Great and OmarReborn pointed out that it could very well be a gyro slider, which generally has a low active spin rate in order to work more vertically. As the season went on, it turned out that they were indeed right on this point. That’s not to say that higher active spin rates are bad, as Kyle Crick gets incredible movement on his slider with a great (for sliders) active spin rate. But in Ynoa’s case, it’s a deliberate part of how he throws his sliders.

Verdict: An Irrelevant Question

Question #2: Can Ynoa make his slider’s spin direction mirror that of his fastball?

This also turns out to not be relevant. Like the above question’s answer, Ynoa throwing a gyro slider instead of a standard one ends up making this question not quite applicable, as the "non-mirroring of spin" is more a deliberate characteristic than something that Ynoa is necessarily doing bad. If he threw a standard slider, then this question would be more relevant in order to allow both pitches to play up, and the idea of spin mirroring is something to keep in mind when looking at ways to improve pitchers. But in Ynoa’s specific case, this central question actually turned out to not be applicable whatsoever.

Verdict: Also Irrelevant.

Question #3a: Can Ynoa’s velocity gains stick?

Answer: As the aforementioned FanPost came out at the beginning of the season, I had pointed out that Ynoa had seemed to start off with better velocity on his pitches compared to 2020, particularly since higher velos wouldn’t exactly hurt his fastball in particular. As it turns out, those gains in velocity not only turned out to be real, but held relatively fine for the whole season, even post-injury.

Question #3b: If the velo gains are real, can that help his fastball do better?

Answer: The good news is that if you don’t worry too much about SSS from 2020, you can point towards improvements in his four-seam’s whiff rate and wOBA/xwOBA as maybe hints that the velo did help his fastball some. Unfortunately, even if that’s true, the issue is that it didn’t help his fastball enough, as it still got pounded by batters to the tune of a .361 wOBA/.399 xwOBA and a below-average 14.6% whiff rate. What also doesn’t help is that not only does the pitch itself not have great movement, but his issues with release points both impact his control and command of the pitch and how his fastball and slider play off each other. (More on this in the next section.) Plus, it doesn’t help matters when he didn’t really improve on his "throwing the fastball down the middle" problem:

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Verdict: The velo gains stuck and might have improved the pitch, but nowhere near enough to compensate for its problems.

Question #4: Can Ynoa improve his issues with his release points?

Answer: This is merging two related questions into one, and the answer on both fronts is a fairly solid no. Specifically, Ynoa has demonstrated two issues with his release points, namely the ability to consistently repeat them and how the release points used for his pitches affect how those pitches off of each other. To illustrate both, let's start with his release points from his October 1 outing against the Mets (red=four-seam, yellow=slider, green=changeup):

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Oof. While he has definite areas from where he throws pitches, it's clear that there's quite a bit of variability in release points even within different pitch groups. In turn, this heavily impacts Ynoa's command of his pitches, where his trouble in replicating his release points makes it harder to command his pitches where he wants them to go. This is also the reason why his four-seam's location chart appears as it does, because even when he throws the four-seam in the zone, his issues with commanding the pitch make it appear in the heart of the zone way too much to be helpful. However, a good example of someone improving their profile through better release points is Framber Valdez, whose changes transformed him from a pitcher on the edge of Houston's staff picture to a workhorse of their rotation, even though he has since regressed somewhat. (Yes, I know the Braves ended up beating up on him a ton in the World Series, the point still stands.)

However, his release points also mean that his four-seam and slider don't play as well off of each other as they could. The above picture also shows that he throws his four-seam and offspeed pitches from entirely different arm slots, and while Ynoa has raised his arm slots across the board compared to last year, they’re still different arm slots. That’s not necessarily a death sentence in and of itself, as there are times where the differing arm slots help pitches play up if it results in similar pitch paths, particularly against opposite-handed batters. Unfortunately, it’s not the case with Ynoa, as his pitch paths take clearly different paths so each pitch is quickly recognizable to a batter regardless of handedness. To illustrate this, here’s how his pitches look to righties and lefties, respectively.

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There’s at least an argument to be made with his changeup playing off his fastball against lefties, but even with them the difference in arm slots is fairly obvious to those batters. Ynoa can somewhat compensate through the fact that his slider isn’t easy to hit anyway, which mitigates the arm slot difference on that pitch’s performance. However, this is almost certainly the other reason why his four-seam gets whacked, as its profile plays down even more simply due to the fact that batters more or less can tell when the pitch is coming.

Verdict: While Ynoa raised his arm slots in general, his release points are still a major issue for him and are likely the largest questions he’ll face going forward.

Question #5a: Can Ynoa develop a better changeup?

Answer: While Ynoa showed improvements in some areas, his changeup was not one of them. Its movement continued to only be okay-ish, where the pitch was mainly distinguishable by being around 8 MPH slower than his four-seam. By no means is it a terrible third pitch, and it was good at getting whiffs and limiting hard contact, but not only is its profile still on the limited side, it's fairly telling that even in September (the pitch when he used it the most), it was still fairly low in usage.

Question #5b: Will the development of his changeup affect his ability to be a starter?

Answer: As it turns out…yes and no. For the most part, the answer is no, as Carmen Ciardello found that not having a third pitch doesn’t necessarily mean that a pitcher can’t still be a starter. In particular, he found that pitchers who heavily rely on two pitchers are generally okay at least twice through the order when compared to pitchers who work a lot with at least three pitches, which is not unwelcome news to Ynoa. However, while it might not affect him being a starter, it likely does affect what type of starter he might be, as two-pitch pitchers fare even worse when the batting order rolls around a third time. Plus, Ynoa’s 2021 performance doesn’t exactly go against these findings, as while he was fine against batters the first two times through the order, he got slammed the third time through the order with a 8.31 ERA/6.86 FIP/6.31 xFIP. Because of this, he’s likely limited to twice through the order before he needs to be pulled.

Verdict: The changeup did not develop and looks to be a distant third pitch, and while it doesn’t mean that he can’t be a starter in the traditional sense, it likely does limit him to two times through the batting order.

(In-season) Question #6: Can Ynoa adjust as needed with his pitch mix?

Answer: I hinted at this near the end of the original FanPost, but this question ended up becoming more prominent as the season went on. As mentioned above, Ynoa’s four-seam is not that great of a pitch despite its velo, and Ynoa's slider is the real out pitch. Additionally, as Carmen Ciardiello found in April, throwing a pitch more doesn't really alter its effectiveness that much, so Ynoa would have a strong argument to throw his slider more. And that's exactly what Ynoa did during the season, particularly in September when he threw his slider over half of the time while cutting the usage of his four-seam.

Verdict: Yes, Ynoa has shown the ability to adjust his pitch mix in-season and started working more off of his slider.

(In-Season) Question #7: Did Ynoa actually develop a sinker?

Answer: This one also popped up in-season because it appeared he occasionally seemed to throw a sinker with more horizontal movement than his four-seamer. However, looking over his pitch profile, it seems that it was less a deliberate attempt to throw a sinker and more a combination of Baseball Savant’s classification and the aforementioned questions around his release points that suggested he threw one. In particular, let's look at Savant's Visual Pitch Report, specifically its graph of vertical and horizontal movement for his fastballs (red=four-seam, orange="sinker").

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Remember the inconsistency mentioned above with his pitches? Not only does that affect the movement on his four-seam and give the profile a ton of variance, but the graph heavily suggests that the "sinkers" are just his four-seamers that get reclassified as such when they have at least 12 inches of horizontal movement, instead of actually being a separate pitch entirely. While it would be interesting to see him add a proper sinker to his pitch mix, it doesn’t seem to have truly happened, which is why I’ve generally used "four-seam" and "fastball" interchangably in this article instead of making much mention of a sinker.

Verdict: It doesn’t appear to be the case.

(In-season) Question #8: Did Ynoa have problems resulting from his injury and recovery?

Answer: If you want to be technical, yes, Ynoa’s results were slightly worse in the second half than the first half, with slightly worse walk and strikeout rates, FIP/xFIP, and spin rates. However, not only were the differences relatively small, but it’s also important to remember the greater implementation of the sticky substance ban that happened mid-season, during Ynoa’s recovery. As such, the lower spin rates may have at least some connection to other areas getting slightly worse. Additionally, he was still generally fine in the second half regardless, as his worse results mainly seem to be a product of bad luck than Ynoa actually getting worse.

Verdict: Technically he had a worse performance, but not meaningfully so.

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Question #9 and Summary: Can Ynoa stick as a starter?

Answer and Summary: The answer is likely yes...ish. That’s not to say that he’s free of issues, of course, and Ynoa still has plenty to address. Not only is everything surrounding his release points generally a mess, but they don’t allow his pitches to play as well as they should, particularly his fastball. This is especially highlighted by the fact that his changeup has remained a "change of pace" third pitch, which in turn means that he should avoid facing the lineup a third time through even more than other pitchers. Additionally, while he was able to limit the walks, those release point issues do raise fair questions as to how well that’ll last going forward.

Despite all of that, though, Ynoa has probably the easiest case to make one of the final rotation spots as things stand. Even with his problems, he still put up a solid performance in 2021, and his "second half struggles" were really more bad luck than him actually taking much of a step backwards. Plus, not only has he shown the ability to adjust his pitch mix as needed, he was generally fine twice through the order and can probably handle being a starter as long as he’s limited to that. It also helps that projection systems generally are believers, with Dan Szymborski stating that ZiPS sees him as "one of the best fourth starters in the league" and Steamer being a bit less optimistic but still generally liking him. As such, even with multiple areas of concern, Ynoa generally showed in 2021 that he’s someone who can be counted on going forward.

All screenshots taken from Baseball Savant, first picture taken from Todd Kirkland's picture on this July Battery Power update.

This FanPost does not express the views or opinions of Battery Power.