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Normally, I fancy myself as someone who stays out of the predictive riff-raff of sports. I mean, what, does the world really need another dude who thinks their opinions are gold? It’s madness. But there’s something so immediately special about David Festa that I must dedicate 600 words to talking about him.
One of the things that set Festa apart from your typical house-of-straw rookie pitcher is whiffs. It’s an instant divider for young hurlers; is he missing bats or over-relying on fortunate batted ball outcomes a la early-career Devin Smeltzer? Guys like that can maybe coast for an extended amount of frames—potentially tricking some into believing their schtick is effective—but they inevitably fall off into nothingness, becoming a random memory only activated after an extended Baseball-Reference adventure.
Festa has the juice: his 29.1 K% is right up there with strikeout artists like Nick Pivetta (28.6%) and Cole Ragans (29.5%). Amongst starters with at least 40 innings, Festa ranks 11th in strikeout rate, above both Joe Ryan and Pablo López.
How does he do it? Well, take a look at the heat maps for his pitches:
It’s gorgeous. If you’re a modern pitcher, you can’t do much better. Fastball goes up, offspeed goes down, and the slider and changeup nail their appropriate locations—down and away to whatever handedness batter so happens to stand in the box.
Despite the relatively limited selection—Festa has only thrown a four-seamer, slider, or changeup since being drafted—he effectively throws everything in whatever count he pleases. He starts batters with an off-speed pitch more often than not. The same is true in all even counts. Even when the hitter is ahead in the count—and a misstep could turn a situation deadly—Festa holds steady and is still likely to toss something soft. And he does so with the kind of precision only seen in the finest German engineers.
One at-bat from his most recent start stuck out to me. Facing Josh Lowe in the first, Festa got ahead quickly, battled a bit, and erased Lowe with a ridiculous changeup. He never wavered from his game plan; he simply executed against a pretty good hitter with the gumption of a pitcher far wiser than his age would imply.
I think what strikes me most about Festa is how dead simple his plan is: he rarely deviates from using fastballs and sliders to righties, and fastballs and changeups to lefties, but he’s just so damn good at commanding the offerings, it doesn’t really matter. He could probably tell the hitter what’s coming and still be successful. That makes him atypical in this age of young pitchers who decimate their opponents with pure, overwhelming stuff but don’t seem to “know how to pitch” to steal a perhaps overused but occasionally helpful idiom.
The only main bugaboo afflicting Festa is a bizarre second-time-through-the-order penalty that doesn’t seem to understand it’s one time too early. It’s strange. 19 of his 25 career earned runs have come when facing hitters a second time, and the righty struggled in the 3rd and 4th innings at AAA this year as well, the frames that officially mark when a lineup has turned over. Is this real? Is it noise? I guess we’ll see.
It feels a little lame to conclude with a truism, but what makes Festa so special is that he has three (maybe two and a half) legitimate offerings that he can command well and will throw in any count, in any situation, against batters both right and left. He’s not a specialist. His weapons aren’t plentiful, but they’re effective—and he knows how to use all of them. Festa’s young major league career appears to augur a future as a rotation staple, and there may still be more to come.
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