Game one the highly anticipated NLDS series between the Mets and Dodgers, as you may have heard, is scheduled for this Friday at 9:30 p.m. ET at Chavez Ravine. Related to that topic, as you also may have heard, have been these words uttered by one young, confident New York baseball thrower a few days ago.
“I think we’re going to give it to the Dodgers anywhere we are.”
That’s what 22-year-old Mets rookie starter Noah Syndergaard had to say about his club’s imminent postseason series last Saturday night after New York uninspiringly bowed to the Nationals by a final score of 3-1. The Dodgers had yet to wrap up homefield advantage for the opening series at that point, but that didn’t stop Syndergaard. A bold prediction, no doubt, considering his team will face Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke — both NL Cy Young candidates fresh off historic campaigns — on the road in back-to-back contests to open up New York’s first postseason series in nearly a decade. But, then again, Syndergaard does have legitimate reasons for confidence in his team — and more specifically, himself.
While the Mets did come up on the short end of his final start of the regular-season last weekend, it was through little fault of the 6-foot-5 right-hander, who spun a seven-inning gem in which he whiffed 10 batters and scattered two hits and just one run against Bryce Harper and company. His second-best outing of the season by GameScore (76) capped an impressive inaugural season in the majors for Syndergaard, who, along with posting baseball’s second-best average fastball velocity (96.5 MPH), mustered a 9-7 record, 3.24 ERA and 5.4 strikeout-to-walk ratio across 24 brilliant starts for the Metropolitans.
But perhaps no pitcher in baseball (save for Jake Arrieta) pitched better down the stretch of the regular-season than Syndergaard, who will take the ball Saturday night in game two of the division series in L.A. After the Mets opted to skip his first start of September to stash away innings for the postseason, the former first-rounder went on to post baseball’s best strikeout-to-walk ratio (18.5), second-lowest WHIP (0.65) and ninth-lowest opponent OPS (.525) in the season’s final month among pitchers with at least 25 innings in that span. The Mets knew it was only a matter of time before his raw talent would manifest into some of baseball’s best production, and fortunately, it’s arrived at an opportune moment.
Question is, can he parlay that September success into October? The answer may hinge on the effectiveness of one pitch.
Data courtesy TruMedia Networks
After he’d made his prophecy to the media last Saturday, Syndergaard talked about other things. “I feel like I ended the regular season on a high note,” the pitcher admitted, “and I learned a lot this season. Now I have to transfer what I learned during the season into the playoffs.” What exactly was he referring to? Any number of things, as one could imagine. The learning process in big-league baseball is forever ongoing, and for a rookie, there’s a lot to ingest; learning takes place from one pitch to the next. And what stands out more than anything else from Syndergaard’s rookie stint, and the adjustments therein, has been the evolution and development of his repertoire.
Cue the changeup. Scouts knew Syndergaard had the premium velocity and quality breaking ball to make an effective big-league starter — and a very good late-inning reliever, at worst — but his changeup was comparatively less refined, and it showed after his promotion. From May to June, Thor wielded his change just 6.4% of the time. It induced a whiff 14.5% of the time he threw it and held opponents to a .657 OPS, which by those standards made it an average major-league change. Since then, things have changed. Syndergaard has doubled his changeup use since the beginning of July (14.8%), and in the month of September, it became his No. 1 non-fastball offering (20.2%). Opponents whiffed 18.4% of the time and saw their OPS against it tumble nearly 100 points (.576) since July 1.
Data courtesy TruMedia Networks
Perhaps the most interesting part of Syndergaard’s changeup isn’t necessarily that he’s using it more as the season has progressed. Rather, it’s when he’s used it. In fact, when Syndergaard fell behind in the count to an opposing batter from May through the end of June, he featured his changeup just 6.1% of the time. Since then, he’s thrown it 22.1% of the time, and in September/October, the change morphed into his most-used offering (34.4%) whenever he fell behind to a hitter. Additionally, we can see that Syndergaard isn’t necessarily using the pitch against both righties and lefties; it’s predominantly transformed into a pace-changer against left-handed hitters as the season has progressed.
And that’s something to remember when Syndergaard toes the rubber this Saturday in Los Angeles. There’s a potential for Don Mattingly to pencil in any number of left-handed hitters into his game-two lineup against the Mets — Adrian Gonzalez, Joc Pederson, Corey Seager, Andre Ethier, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley — so how Syndergaard chooses to sequence his offerings against them (especially in tough counts) will have a large net effect on how the game unfolds. If he gets ahead early in the count, he should be able to use his fastball more comfortably, against which the Dodgers have struggled quite a bit this season (.662 team OPS vs. 95 MPH and above, fourth-worst among NL clubs). Falling behind is inherently less promising, but if Syndergaard’s changeup looks as crisp as it did for the past month, that might be enough to keep postseason bats at bay.
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Statistics courtesy of TruMedia Networks, Inc unless otherwise noted or hyper-linked.
Alec Dopp is a two-year contributor to Gammons Daily with an unhealthy obsession for pitching and hitting mechanics. You can contact him at alecdopp@gmail.com and follow him on the Twitter Machine at @alecdopp, should you feel so inclined.