Last week, as I was walking down the street, I saw two pedestrians in Jake Irvin City Connect uniforms. I wondered whether these people were related to Irvin? In his time in the Major Leagues, he has not been a player who would tend to dominate jersey sales, seeing as he had one of the highest ERAs in baseball last season.
So far this season, Irvin has continued the Nationals trend of having poor starting pitching with a 7.07 ERA in three games started. Moreover, Last night against the Brewers, he had a lackluster outing, allowing three earned runs in five innings. Concerningly, Irvin walked five batters. While some may assume Irvin is back to the subpar pitching of the beginning of his career, his early results show reasons for optimism, unlike Miles Mikolas.
Last year, I suggested that Irvin throw his slider and sinker more while throwing his fastball less. Irvin has somewhat followed this gameplan. He has thrown his slider marginally more this year, but his biggest change is his dramatic increase in cutter usage. He went from throwing his cutter 4.2 percent of the time last year to 14.6 percent of the time this year.
The change in repertoire is indicative of Irvin’s clear efforts to improve. Irvin’s cutter has a similar movement profile to his slider. Both pitches have similar horizontal and vertical breaks, but the cutter is about six miles per hour harder on average. Irvin’s offerings that move away from right handed batters are strong and he should continue throwing them more often.
Advanced metrics like stuff plus, which analyzes a pitches qualities like velocity and movement and compare them to Major League average pitches, also show that Irvin is improving. Last season, all of Irvin’s pitches besides his slider had stuff plus scores below average. This year, all of Irvin’s pitches besides his change-up are above average. He has tinkered his pitches movement profile in a way that should be conducive to future success.
Irvin has also significantly improved his control this season. Last season, he walked eight percent of the batters he faced, and he has already cut that down to seven percent of the batters he has faced this season. Moreover, he overall has increased the percentage of fastballs that he has thrown in the zone from 53.3 percent to 61.1 percent.
Young pitchers need to not give free passes and attack the zone to succeed. Irvin is improving by doing this. However, Irvin needs to learn how to throw quality strikes. The percentage of pitches he has thrown through the heart of the plate and not in the “shadow,” where it is harder for batters to determine if something is a ball or strike, has increased. Irvin needs to learn how to deceive batters and throw strikes that are not right down the middle to continue his positive trajectory.