Can We Blame Bad Luck for Berríos’ Early Performance?

I have an old friend, which I promise is my last brag of this piece, who believes fully in stats as a way of analyzing things like sports performances and understands the folly – or limitations, perhaps – of trusting your eyes. And so I was shocked when this friend said, rather plainly, that observation would be much better than stats if only you could observe every part of a performance and hold it in your memory correctly. I’m paraphrasing a little, but that was the gist of it. Stats over eye test, mostly, unless you could actually take the eye test and apply to its fullest extent.

So it is with José Berríos so far this season. Our eyes tell us that it’s not going well for him through 5 starts, especially given our collective expectations. The box scores never look that awful, and yet, he’s running a 5.92 ERA. Despite the default ‘small sample’ warnings, we’re very close to half of his scheduled starts for the 2020 season.

Among American League pitchers with enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, Matthew Boyd has allowed the highest batting average on balls in play (BABIP). We used to treat the BABIP leaderboard as a stand-in for the good- or bad-luck leaderboard for pitchers. Now, that’s a bit oversimplified way of looking at it, for a couple of reasons. That might be beyond the scope of this article, and I’ll get to the point. Boyd is having a rough start to his season. Nathan Eovaldi is second on that list, and Berríos is third. Opponents are hitting for a .333 batting average against him when they put the ball in play and it doesn’t go over the fence, about 56 points higher than the league as a whole right now. (Just for fun, the other end of that list starts with Lance Lynn in the top spot, followed by Kenta Maeda [2] and Randy Dobnak [4]).

Let’s say a few general things about Berríos and BABIP:

1) Loud, solid contact should not be treated the same as tappers and dribblers. Evaluating quality of contact is crucial.

2) He’s walking too many hitters, which you can think of as a symptom of command issues. His 11.7% walk rate is almost double his rate from last year, and I don’t think that will work to achieve his goals. We’ve seen some questionable plate umpiring, but in my eyes we also haven’t seen the most impressive command of Berríos’ career. He doesn’t always hit his spot, he can’t always find a strike when he needs one, and there are too many non-competitive pitches at times.

3) BABIP ignores home runs, and the Bad Guys have gone yard in four of Berríos’ five starts this year.

4) It’s also true that he’s been the victim of some bad luck. And with neutral luck or good luck, his stat line would appear to paint a rosier picture.

Take, for example, his last start, Saturday at home against the Royals. In the 4th of one of the double-header games, two full-count walks preceded a 3-run homer against Berríos. One of the walks was a non-competitive pitch. And the home run, to Whit Merrifield, was a changeup and it didn’t look like middle-in was all that close to his desired location for that pitch. So, you might hear it explained as “one mistake,” but the truth is that it’s an example of a series of mistakes, with an exclamation point that shows up in the box score.

The start before that, in Kansas City, Berríos walked Merrifield in the 3rd inning (pitcher’s fault), and then Jorge Soler hit a weak bouncing grounder that found its way through no man’s land on the right side of the infield (bad luck). Merrifield moved to third base on the play and later scored on a sacrifice fly. Earlier that day, it was a lazy fly ball that found grass (you might call that bad luck) followed by Soler missing a home run by six inches (not bad luck), and then a weak ground ball right to second base got through a shifted infield (bad luck), and the result was a two-run single.

I won’t go through this whole exercise and try to retroactively take “earned runs” and erase them from Berríos’ ledger. But hopefully the examples illustrate my point.

I think he hasn’t been quite as bad as we generally associate a 6-ERA pitcher. In watching back some sequences from his previous starts, I’ll be tempted going forward to track the number of non-competitive pitches. Anecdotally, there have been too many for a top-flight pitcher like Berríos. Maybe now that the Twins have their ace, the pressure’s off. You’d like to see the command round into form and for Berríos to stop walking guys and serving up homers. Oh, and a little batted-ball luck could help him out, too.

If you liked this piece and want to read more from Derek Wetmore...

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