The biggest positive of this frustrating Chicago Cubs season has been the emergence of Shota Imanaga as a frontline starter. As you probably remember, Imanaga was introduced to the wider American baseball-watching public when he started the gold medal game of the 2023 World Baseball Classic for Team Japan.
Well, he’s not the only Cubs starter who had a breakout performance against Team USA at the 2023 WBC. During pool play, Javier Assad came out of the bullpen at Chase Field and mowed down three innings’ worth of American hitters. With only nine appearances’ worth of major league experience, Assad was a relative unknown at the time. Since then, he’s claimed a regular spot in a good Chicago rotation, and pitched very well.
He’s one of just 91 pitchers who’s thrown 200 or more innings over the past two seasons. Of those, he’s eighth in ERA, with a mark of 3.13. The thing is, I’m not really sure how he’s doing it. FIP takes an extremely dim view of the right-hander, who turned 27 on Tuesday. Assad’s FIP is 4.59 this year, and over the past two seasons combined, it’s 4.43, which is 68th out of those 91 pitchers over the past two seasons.
And it’s easy to see why. Assad, despite being in the bottom half of that list of starters in strikeout rate, has the fifth-highest walk rate:
Javier Assad Defies the Odds
| Stat | ERA | FIP | K% | BB% | HR/FB% | GB% | HardHit% | BABIP | LOB% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value | 3.13 | 4.43 | 21.0 | 9.7 | 12.1 | 44.7 | 39.9 | .272 | 83.8 |
| Rank | 8th | 6th | 62nd | 87th | 46th | 29th | 53rd | 16th | 1st |
*Out of 91 pitchers with at least 200 IP since 2023
With the tools available a decade ago, we’d just look at that and dismiss Assad as a fluke. Obviously that BABIP and that strand rate are going to regress, and his ERA will be back in the fours in no time.
Even with modern tools, I’m at something of a loss when it comes to explaining Assad’s success. His Stuff+ doesn’t pop off scale. His quality of contact numbers are better than his bat-missing numbers, but they’re not any better than average. He’s right in the middle of the Baseball Savant leaderboard for EV50 and xwOBA. The one area in which Assad is near the top is opponent contact rate on pitches outside the zone; Assad’s opponents are making contact on 69.8% of swings outside the zone, which is the fifth-highest mark in the league. Assad also has the fifth-smallest gap between his in-zone and out-of-zone contact rate.
If an abnormal percentage of Assad’s contact is coming outside the zone, that could allow him to get by with his low-strikeout/high-walk peripherals. But he’s just giving up a lot of contact everywhere. This season, 238 pitchers have allowed 25 or more balls in play on pitches outside the zone. Of those, Assad has the 57th-lowest opponent wOBA on those balls (.232), but 20.6% of his opponent contact comes on balls outside the strike zone, which is 110th.
One thing Assad has is a highly varied repertoire. This season, 502 pitchers have thrown 250 or more pitches, but only 45 of those pitchers have thrown five or more different pitch types at least 10% of the time. Assad is one of those, and he has a sixth pitch, a changeup, that he’s thrown 3.6% of the time.
Those six pitches cover a range of more than 20 miles per hour, and if you look at the clock chart for the movement profiles of those offerings, it looks like a representation of the time a college junior spends at Jungle Jim’s on Thirsty Thursday: It goes from 7 o’clock all the way to 2:45 or so. Expressed on a graph, it looks like this:
Pretty, isn’t it? Kermit the Frog looked at that graphic and immediately reached for his banjo.
I think it’s fair to say that Assad has an overfull toolkit of pitches, which forces opponents to cover an enormous range of velocity and movement profiles. Assad segregates some of his pitches by opponent handedness (curveballs and changeups to lefties, sliders to righties), but he throws his fastballs to opponents on either side of the plate. It’s a lot for a hitter to keep track of, but the benefits of such an eclectic pitch mix seem to be intangible.
But here’s the thing about waiting for Assad to regress. Since 2010, there have been roughly 1,900 individual pitcher seasons of 100 innings or more. On only 79 occasions has a pitcher of that high volume outperformed his FIP by more than a run. Only six pitchers have done it twice, and only three of those have done it in consecutive years:
Recidivist FIP-Beaters of the 2010s and Beyond
| Season | Name | Team | IP | K% | BB% | K-BB% | ERA | FIP | E-F |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Blake Snell | TBR | 180.2 | 31.6% | 9.1% | 22.4% | 1.89 | 2.94 | -1.05 |
| 2023 | Blake Snell | SDP | 180 | 31.5% | 13.3% | 18.2% | 2.25 | 3.44 | -1.19 |
| 2014 | Chris Young | SEA | 165 | 15.7% | 8.7% | 7.0% | 3.65 | 5.02 | -1.36 |
| 2015 | Chris Young | KCR | 123.1 | 16.6% | 8.6% | 8.0% | 3.06 | 4.52 | -1.46 |
| 2011 | Jeremy Hellickson | TBR | 189 | 15.1% | 9.3% | 5.8% | 2.95 | 4.44 | -1.49 |
| 2012 | Jeremy Hellickson | TBR | 177 | 16.7% | 8.0% | 8.8% | 3.10 | 4.60 | -1.50 |
| 2011 | Johnny Cueto | CIN | 156 | 16.5% | 7.4% | 9.0% | 2.31 | 3.45 | -1.15 |
| 2014 | Johnny Cueto | CIN | 243.2 | 25.2% | 6.8% | 18.4% | 2.25 | 3.30 | -1.05 |
| 2012 | Miguel González | BAL | 105.1 | 17.7% | 8.1% | 9.7% | 3.25 | 4.38 | -1.13 |
| 2014 | Miguel González | BAL | 159 | 16.5% | 7.6% | 8.9% | 3.23 | 4.89 | -1.67 |
| 2018 | Mike Fiers | DET/OAK | 172 | 19.5% | 5.2% | 14.3% | 3.56 | 4.75 | -1.19 |
| 2019 | Mike Fiers | OAK | 184.2 | 16.7% | 7.0% | 9.7% | 3.90 | 4.97 | -1.07 |
Assad is currently at 94 2/3 innings, which means that either in his start on Friday or the one after, he’s going to make it seven. See, when I said his ERA would go “back” to the 4.00s earlier, I meant that figuratively, because Assad has never posted an ERA in the 4.00s over a season. Not only that, he’s never not outperformed his FIP by more than a run:
Javier Assad Defies the Odds, Part 2
| Season | IP | K% | BB% | ERA | FIP | E-F |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 37.2 | 18.1% | 12.0% | 3.11 | 4.49 | -1.39 |
| 2023 | 109.1 | 20.9% | 9.1% | 3.05 | 4.29 | -1.24 |
| 2024 | 94.2 | 21.0% | 10.2% | 3.23 | 4.59 | -1.36 |
The collection of pitchers on the list above, with the exception of Cueto, have all been oddballs. Snell wrecked his FIP in both of his (contentious) Cy Young seasons, but never on any other occasion. Fiers and Young were both extreme fly ball pitchers, while González and Hellickson were both 6-foot-1 righties with kitchen sink-y, pitch-to-contact repertoires. Just like Assad.
Can Assad keep doing this? Defying the odds to outperform his peripherals? I guess. He’s never done anything else.
