Twins

2016 Minnesota Twins Report Card: Kyle Gibson

This is a series of evaluations that will be done this offseason on every player that closed the season on the 40-man roster for the Minnesota Twins, with one appearing every weekday from now until each player has been evaluated. The plan is to start with Mr. Albers and move all the way through the pitchers, then to the catchers, infielders, outfielders and finally those listed as designated hitters on the club’s official MLB.com roster. That means we’ll wrap it up with Miguel Sano sometime in the first week of December.

  • Name: Kyle Gibson
  • 2016 Role: Starting pitcher.
  • Expected 2017 Role: Pretty much certain he’ll be in the rotation, but has a ton to prove after a rough 2016.
  • MLB Stats: 5.07 ERA (4.70 FIP) in 147.1 innings, 6.4 K/9, 3.4 BB/9, 1.56 WHIP, 1.1 fWAR.  
  • MiLB Stats: N/A.
  • Contract Status: Arbitration-eligible for the first time this offseason, eligible for free agency after 2020.

2016 Lowdown:

There’s room for pitchers like Gibson on virtually any starting rotation in baseball. Sure, he isn’t the sort of ace that might have been expected when the Twins spent their 2009 first-round pick on him, but with all things considered — including injury issues that dropped his original draft stock and a Tommy John surgery besides — getting Gibson to the big leagues can be considered a success. The path to further success has been muddled to this point, as Gibson is now a veteran of over 570 big-league innings, and the numbers aren’t exactly pretty:

  • 4.59 ERA (4.21 FIP)
  • 6.1 K/9
  • 2.1 BB/9
  • 2.0 K/BB
  • 1.41 WHIP

When Gibson’s at his  best — and so far, that’s probably his 2015 season — he’ll mix in a ton of grounders, a fairly strong strikeout rate and will keep the walks for the most part in check. Gibson posted a career-best 3.84 ERA in 2015, posted his second-best groundball rate (53.4 percent) and also had his best strand rate. He kept the ball in the ballpark for the most part — maybe not enough for a groundball guy — and maybe the best part was that his strikeout rate picked up steam as the season went on. Heading into Gibson’s age-28 season, he looked ready to cash in on his sinker/slider-heavy repertoire to give the Twins a sturdy mid-rotation option behind Ervin Santana.

Instead, Gibson regressed in every way possible. His strikeouts-to-walks ratio was already somewhat iffy coming into 2016, and that gap narrowed — normally a good phrase but not in this case — this season. Balls were flying out of the year at an unprecedented pace against Gibson, while his groundball rate cratered and somehow his BABIP still soared. BABIPs can be tricky for guys who roll a ton of grounders, but when the groundball rate goes down, that should usually mean more fly balls which are easier to convert into outs. At least, as long as you have fairly competent defensive outfielders. About that….

Where my expectation for Gibson to improve from 2015 to 2016 came from was predicated on the fact that his slider and changeup had very good swinging-strike rates in 2015, and those, paired with a heavy sinker, should result in strikeouts and grounders — which are two-thirds of the holy trinity for a pitcher, with the third being limiting walks.

And by the looks of things, that’s where Gibson got into trouble. The spike in walk rate doesn’t help anybody, but a pitcher who lacks command isn’t going to be able to execute secondary pitches with any regularity. Falling behind 1-0 or 2-0 leads to more fastball counts, and in the case of Gibson this season, it led to him throwing his four-seamer as often as his two-seamer — something he did not do in 2015. In 2015, Gibson threw 1,237 two-seam fastballs and 637 four-seamers; in 2016, those figures were 668 for the two and 681 for the four.

Even in a good season for Gibson in 2015, his four-seamer was…..very bad. Opposing batters pounded it for an OPS of 1.064, with a swinging-strike rate of just 3.1 percent. Basically speaking, if hitters were swinging, they were connecting, and if they were connecting, it was to Gibson’s detriment. Gibson had a line-drive rate of 31.4 percent on the four-seamer in 2015 — a staggeringly high number — and just a groundball rate of 36.3 percent. So there’s little wonder why Gibson’s balls in play on his four-seamer went so poorly — they were balls being pasted in the air. Not exactly a recipe for success.

His two-seamer, on the other hand, was a fair amount better. It induced an OPS against of .740, and for the most part was batting average driven, as it resulted in an isolated power of just .112 — or about half of the .225 mark he had on the four-seamer. Basically speaking, even though batters hit .277 against Gibson on two-seam fastballs in 2015, they still only slugged .389. Of course, that’s because Gibson had a 64.6 percent groundball rate on the pitch, and it’s awfully hard to get extra-base hits on grounders after all.

But flash forward to 2016, and the results show that Gibson — as we previously noted — threw as many two-seamers as four-seamers for some reason. It’s hard to know why for sure, but there are a couple possible theories. If Gibson was in counts where he needed strikes, a straight four-seamer is going to be easier to command than a two-seamer with arm-side run. It’s hard to exactly deduce this statistically, but his first-pitch strike rate this season was 59.4 percent, more than a full percent lower than 2015. He was about league average in 2015, and a 1 percent drop means he threw a first-pitch strike to somewhere between 6-to-8 fewer batters (percentage-wise) from one year to the next. That alone is probably not the reason for the huge regression, but it didn’t help.  

We can also dig into strikes and balls to take a look if that might have contributed. It’s still not a huge difference, but Gibson threw strikes 61.9 percent of the time in 2015 and just 61.5 percent in 2016. Strikes and balls also require some things of the batter and umpire that Gibson may not have had much control over, but over the span of 3,200-plus pitches in 2015 and nearly 2,500 this season, it still shows that Gibson lapsed a bit, and as a pitcher who didn’t have overpowering raw stuff, he couldn’t really afford that. Another indicator is zone percentage, as Gibson hit the strike zone — as Fangraphs’ PITCHf/x sees it — just 36.5 percent of the time — far and away a career-worst mark. He was at 38.6 percent in 2015, and over 39 percent in his previous two years. Now, hitting the zone isn’t always the magical barometer for success — guys with nasty stuff usually try to get ugly swings on pitches out of the zone — but again, for a guy who for some reason threw more four-seamers than two-seamers for the first time ever, this seems to be fairly significant.

That presents an interesting disconnect: how do you get Gibson into counts where he can actually utilize his good offspeed stuff if guys are teeing off on his fastballs? That’s the question that Derek Falvey and associates will have to answer heading into 2017.

The other thing that it may come down to is flat out results, as simple as it seems. Gibson’s two-seamer got flat out pasted in 2016, as opposing batters teed off to it to the tune of a .362/.464/.497 line (.961 OPS). Again, the isolated power isn’t terribly high, but that batting average and on-base percentage is basically a conga line around the bases. There are a couple interesting things here. First is the isolated discipline, which suggests — at least as far as I understand these splits — that a number of Gibson’s walks came on three-ball two-seamers. That is, that he got to a three-ball count, and the fourth ball was a two-seam fastball, and hence the wide gap between average and on-base percentage. That sort of helps verify our theory that he couldn’t locate the two-seamer. Also, we noted Gibson’s huge BABIP jump (.287 in 2015, .330 in 2016).  There was a pronounced difference between the BABIP on two-seamers of Gibson’s put in play in 2015 (.289) and 2016 (.373). No whether that points to regression in Gibson’s stuff, or the infield defense behind him……that’s less clear.

There is clear evidence however that Gibson’s stuff wasn’t as crisp, at least not as far as for swings and misses on his fastballs. Fastballs in general are already not swing-and-miss pitches before throwing in that Gibson isn’t exactly Corey Kluber in this respect. His 4.4 percent whiff rate on his two-seamer and his 3.1 rate on his four-seamer from 2015 both cratered in 2016; the four-seamer was down to 2.2 percent, and the two-seamer was just 2.8 percent. So again, if hitters were swinging, they were connecting. The four-seamer was hit hard again in 2016, with a .989 OPS against that was much, much more power driven as one might expect (.275 iso).

Maybe the most disappointing thing of all from Gibson’s season is that his offspeed and breaking stuff was….actually pretty good. The curve was thrown the least of the three and generated the highest OPS against, but that was just .679. In general, all three were pretty solid offerings, as the curve induced a whiff rate of 10.9 percent, the change 18.1 percent and the slider 24.9 percent. All three of those marks are roughly at or above their marks in 2015.

That presents an interesting disconnect: how do you get Gibson into counts where he can actually utilize his good offspeed stuff if guys are teeing off on his fastballs? That’s the question that Derek Falvey and associates will have to answer heading into 2017.

Grade: D. Gibson didn’t give the Twins quantity or quality, and took a big step back in pretty much every way possible from a fairly solid 2015 season. He’ll be 29 all next season, so he’s not exactly young for someone with parts of four years of MLB experience, and didn’t pick a good time to have the worst of his three full MLB seasons.

 

 

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