The Case Against Tyler Glasnow and My War Against Mediocrity
For decades, MLB pitchers have dazzled us with their uncanny abilities. Pitchers like Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax, and Pedro Martinez have captivated the minds of men and women alike. We sit, mesmerized, as they paint the corners of the strike zone flawlessly and with ease. We sit in wonder and awe as their skill makes them look like men amongst boys, immortals amongst mere men.
The same praise we give to the great players of the past and in today’s game, like Gerrit Cole and Clayton Kershaw, is being given to a young pitcher in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. “When he’s 30, he might be the best pitcher in the game.” That’s what former big leaguer Alex Rodriguez had to say about 26-year old Rays starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow. At first glance, Tyler Glasnow is your dream pitcher. He fills out his tall, lanky, 6'8 frame at 225 lbs. His fastball reaches upwards of 100 mph and his curveball is disgusting. In the 2020 regular season, Glasnow went 5–1 in 11 starts with a 4.08 ERA and 91 Ks in 57.1 IP. But for all the hype he receives, his in-depth metrics have been anything but spectacular. When I take a closer look at Tyler Glasnow, I see a ghost, a shell of what he could potentially be. People are mesmerized by Glasnow, mainly because he strikes batters out at a ridiculously high rate (14.3 K/9 in 2020). I will admit that that is a ridiculously high number, and quite impressive. However, we need to pump the brakes on this hype train. What these Glasnow fanboys fail to look at is what happens when he isn’t striking out batters, and it is not pretty. It is no secret he gives up a lot of home runs and he hands out walks like they’re peppermint mints at the Christmas Eve service at your local Baptist church. Let’s look at 3 reasons why Tyler Glasnow is not the pitcher he is being made out to be.
He’s a 2-dimensional pitcher
Glasnow is predictable, and as a pitcher, the last thing you want to be is predictable. Glasnow utilizes a 2-pitch repertoire (fastball, curveball) and hitters are catching on to it. Just look at the graph below, from FanGraphs.com
This graph shows every pitch Tyler Glasnow has thrown from April 5th, 2019 to September 23rd, 2020. The zones are color-coded into hot (red) and cold (blue) zones based on how many pitches he’s thrown in that location. The two hot zones that really stand out out are directly over the heart of the plate and down and away from Glasnow (bottom left). This tells us that Glasnow’s game plan is to keep batters off balance by attacking the heart of the plate with his high-velocity fastball and burying his curveball in the dirt. Glasnow’s gameplan can only work for so long, and it’s starting to come back to bite him. Hitters have now seen him enough to figure him out, and they’re starting to lay off the curveball and sit on the fastball over the plate. Don’t just take my word for it, let’s look at the numbers.
Control issues
One of Glasnow’s many issues is control of his pitches. In the 2020 regular season, Tyler Glasnow led the league in wild pitches, with 7. He had 3 wild pitches during Game 5 of the 2020 World Series alone. Glasnow has struggled with control throughout his career, even going back to his Pittsburgh days. These control issues have stuck with him, and they’re coming out on baseball’s biggest stage.
According to FanGraphs.com, Glasnow’s 2020 BB/9 rate was 3.45. He walked 9.2% of the batters he faced. FanGraphs explanation of the BB/9 metric classifies anything over 9% as “awful.” In 2018, his BB/9 rate was even worse, at 4.27. He walked an even worse 11.3% of the batters he faced. There’s a lot of things that can kill the length of a starting pitcher’s outing, and issuing walks is one of them. Glasnow has struggled to pitch deep into games, often not even reaching the 5th or 6th inning. And if Glasnow wants to be the ace people think he is, he needs to find a way to limit the walks and pitch deeper into games.
He gives up an above-average number of HRs.
Glasnow’s 2020 HR per 9 innings rate was 1.73, his highest since 2017 with the Pittsburgh Pirates. His groundball percentage was a career-low 38.7%. Even in 2018 (another pretty tough year for him), his GB% was 49.8%. Glasnow isn’t inducing outs on the ground, which isn’t great for a pitcher who finds himself in double play situations quite often.
FanGraphs.com classifies a home run to fly ball ratio (HR/FB) ratio of 13% or more as “awful.” Glasnow’s HR/FB ratio in 2020? 23.4%. In 28.2 innings this postseason, he’s given up 9 HR, the most in a single postseason ever. And it’s not like this year is some fluke either. In 2018, his HR/FB ratio was a still-awful 18.3%.
He’s getting crushed. Like, crushed.
Not only are hitters hitting home runs against Glasnow, they are crushing them. The average exit velocity against Glasnow this year was 90 mph. His Barrel%, or percentage of batted balls classified as “barreled up”, was 8.8%, a career high. His HardHit%, or percentage of batted balls with an exit velocity greater than 95 mph, was 41%, another career high. His line drive percentage (LD%) was 23.4%, a career high. Batted balls on Glasnow’s pitches left the bat at an average of 13.4 degrees, the second-highest number of his career (first highest was 2017). All of that just to say that batters are barreling up Glasnow’s pitches (well, the only two he has) and elevating them into the seats. As Pittsburgh Penguins play-by-play broadcaster Mike Lange would say, hitters are “beating him like a rented mule.”
It is no secret he gives up a lot of home runs. He hands out walks like they’re peppermint mints at the Christmas Eve service at your local Baptist church. And I don’t know about you, but I think great pitchers don’t give out a ton of free walks and they keep the ball in the park, which is the exact opposite of what Tyler Glasnow does. He had a really good 2019 season, but to be honest, it was a fluke. He got figured out. Hitters in today’s game aren’t stupid. They’re smarter than ever. They study film, they have access to data, and they certainly aren’t fooled by a 2-pitch repertoire.
I’m not writing this article because I hate Tyler Glasnow. As a Pirates fan myself, I want to see former Pirates do great things, especially players who I had my eye on long before they got to the bigs. I wrote this article because I see prominent members of baseball media, broadcasting, and baseball Twitter talking about how elite Glasnow is, praising him like he’s ace material or the second coming of Nolan Ryan. I wrote this article because I am tired of seeing them celebrate mediocrity, and right now, that’s what Glasnow is: mediocre, at best. They rave about his fastball, they salivate at the mention of the spin rate on his pitches, but at the end of the day, spin rate doesn’t get you 27 outs in a baseball game. You have to do the simple things first. You have to limit walks, hit your spots, trust your defense, and keep the ball in the park. We cannot allow ourselves to become fixated on and evaluate our pitchers on single stats like K/9, which while important, don’t tell the full story. In an era of advanced statistics and more data at our disposal than ever, we have to evaluate players in a more complex way that just a single stat. Because like I said on my Twitter page: “If being mediocre is good, then I was a great baseball player.”