Today is definitely “talk about slash bemoan Spencer Strider’s current condition” day. Demetrius will have more content on the right-hander’s struggles later, but I want to throw out something different for this morning.
There seems to be a by-default narrative that Strider is damaged now, presumably owing to the fact that, well, he’s been bad, or at least not his expected self, for his past five starts. But, this narrative has to deal with an uncomfortable “problem” that threatens to upend it:
* Note: It’s possible to make this seven starts, and have his “broken” period be his last five starts. But he still had seven strikeouts in his outing against the Giants, even though he allowed two homers. It can go either way.
Look, Strider is clearly “broken” or “cooked” or whatever adjective you want to use that means the same thing now. And it’s not because he’s allowed seven homers in his last four starts (nine in his last five). The strikeout rate is… gone. The xFIP is the same as it was when he was getting back into the swing of things earlier in the year, and then recovering from a rehab-less layoff due to a hamstring injury.
But he was also clearly not “broken” or “cooked” for a eight-start stretch that’s roughly half his season to this point, and instead looked pretty similar to the Spencer Strider of yore. Not exactly the same, but close to the same topline, as he was 79/59/62 with a 37% K% and 8% BB% from 2022-2023.
I think the point, then, is that we should be asking, “What happened to Strider in late July?” rather than “Is Strider cooked?” Because he already showed he wasn’t cooked for about half his post-elbow injury exposure to major league hitters, and was in fact pretty close to 2022-2023 Strider. (You also can’t ascribe those eight or nine effective starts to the competition, as they included the Mets twice in back-to-back games, the Phillies, and the Yankees.)
In my quick glance, the issue is fairly obvious: slider mechanics. In the “good” stretch, his four-seamer was relatively erratic, but the slider was placed where you’d expect: the gloveside corner. In the “bad” stretch, the four-seamer mechanics look decent in that he’s repeating his delivery to get it towards the top of the zone, and is making a concerted effort to do something other than just pump the four-seamer in there because he knows it can overpower hitters. But the slider is a gigantic mess, for nearly too many reasons to describe. It’s getting hung what looks like about twice as often as it’s going where he intends it to go, the gloveside corner spot has been replaced by something at the knees but more towards the middle of the plate, and sometimes he pulls it a bit too much and it ends up fairly irrelevant. Fundamentally, he’s not hitting the spot that makes it deadly, which is something he seemingly worked on as a way to compensate for his diminished velocity earlier in the summer.
Anyway, what do you think? What changed?