Davis Martin doesn't like talking himself up too much, even after good starts. That's why our profile of him was mostly interviews of his friends.
"I don’t think it’s anything that I’m doing different, it’s a byproduct of a team doing a lot of good stuff together," Martin said after throwing six innings of one-run ball against the Twins last week.
So it seemed like the time to approach things from a different angle: going negative.
Public metrics on pitcher stuff quality are bearish on Martin, and wouldn't have predicted him sitting at a 2.00 ERA a third of the way through the season, much less riding the 10th-best K%-BB% among qualified starters, and the second-most pitching fWAR in the AL.
Which is a fancy way to say that even while most advanced output stats respect what Martin has accomplished, stuff metrics can't tell you how he's gotten there. Baseball Prospectus' StuffPro seems to regard Martin's arsenal (0.1, where it's better to be in the negatives) as merely below-average, albeit squarely in the bottom-third of the league. But Stuff+, which is housed at FanGraphs and elsewhere, has Martin at 91 overall (where 100 is average), and was recently cited by my former colleague Eno Sarris for why the 29-year-old is a good "sell high" candidate for fantasy baseball owners.
Martin famously is pretty well-versed in what metrics tell him about his pitches' movement and where is the best place to attack with them. But the game results are obviously providing rosier feedback to his performance than metrics based on raw pitch movement moment, and rooting his answer in what shows up on the scoreboard allowed Martin to wriggle out of talking about himself again by the end of it.
"It's the first year that I probably looked the least amount into metrics, into stuff, into what my pitches are doing," Martin said. "In years past, I needed to do that to validate that I could be a good pitcher in this league. Right now, I know that if I compete and be present and do all the things that I think that I can control, I'm going to give myself and my team an opportunity to win,
"The pressure that the offense takes off of our pitching staff, knowing that we don't have to be perfect, we don't have to keep it to one run or two runs because our offensive can pop off for five or six in an inning, I think there's a lot of factors and elements that bring that out."
Both Stuff+ and StuffPro grade out hard-throwing relievers Grant Taylor, Jordan Hicks and Seranthony Domínguez as having the nastiest arsenals on the White Sox. StuffPro really loves Bryan Hudson's invisible four-seam fastball, and all metrics agree that Reese McGuire is the worst pitcher the Sox have put on the mound this year, so the results are not just fully counterintuitive. But it certainly feels like they're missing something.
"I think his stuff is way better than on the public side of things," said pitching coach Zach Bove.
StuffPro regards Martin's four-seam and sinker as two of the weakest pitches anyone on the Sox throws, which feels way too harsh, but it also matches how he's always pitched and talked about his arsenal, mix-and-matching with a wide suite of shapes to protect his fastballs rather than blowing hitters away. There are numerous effective changeups across the league that stuff metrics can't agree on, and Martin's kick change is no exception, as it's either the best (StuffPro) or worst (Stuff+) pitch he throws depending on what model you're dealing with. But it's the across-the-board bad reviews for Martin's high-80s slider that earn the most outright scoffing.
"When your slider has a 51 percent whiff rate and it's the second-best slider [among starters] in all of baseball, the game is telling you enough," said Bove, who said he often uses stuff metrics for feedback when trying to design or tweak a specific pitch. "[Last start] he didn't have [his slider]. Part of that is wind and stuff like that, and he still pitched good. It shows you his growth as a pitcher, but I think his slider has definitely gotten better metrically and from how it's performed, and the changeup and sinker and all his stuff. So yeah, don't pay a lot of attention to the public side of things because we have our in-house stuff. But also it's how does it work together as a whole, his arsenal? Because obviously the hitters are saying he has good stuff."
But as even Chris Getz acknowledged recently, Martin is "outperforming" the team's own preseason projections that factor in their in-house stuff metrics. The GM suggested the unquantifiable piece of the equation is makeup, and Martin was in line with that, in the sense that he pointed to lessons taken last year from Martín Pérez that could probably fit under the umbrella of pitchability.
"Martín was big last year on setting up pitches, how to get pitches in the right spot for the best chance of success," Martin said. "There's certain bread-and-butter sequences that I feel like if I do and I execute correctly then I'm going to get the results I like. So it's just being able to consistently do that over and over and over again. It's doing the things that aren't tangible that the Trackman can't read.
"Are you setting up pitches right, are you adjusting before the hitter is adjusting in those situations? There are plenty of throwers in the league, but the pitching aspect is still there."
To his point, Pérez is still getting outs this year for the Braves (2.79 ERA with a 20.5 strikeout rate that's near his career-high) despite an arsenal that grades outs as being worse slop (88 Stuff+) than your uncle shares on Facebook. Maybe for both pitchers, there's a clear difference between getting your stuff to the best point metrically, and to the point where it works best for you.
"I have, metrically, all my stuff where I want it," Martin said. "Now it's just, can I execute it?"
