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: Phil Hughes
- 2016 Role: Starting pitcher until his last appearance, when he suffered a serious leg injury working in relief for the first time.
- Expected 2017 Role: Based on salary alone — $13.2 million per year for three years, starting in 2017 — he’s all but guaranteed a rotation spot, assuming he’s all the way back from thoracic outlet syndrome.
- MLB Stats: 5.95 ERA (5.08 FIP) in 59 innings, 5.2 K/9, 2.0 BB/9, 2.6 K/BB, 1.51 WHIP, 0.2 fWAR.
- MiLB Stats: N/A.
- Contract Status: Signed through 2019 for $13.2 million per year.
2016 Lowdown:
It has all gone downhill for Hughes since he was nearly a six-win pitcher — via fWAR — in 2014, his first season with the Twins. Hughes battled injuries and ineffectiveness in 2015 as he gutted out regression across the board, not only in statistics and peripherals but also in velocity on the way to throwing just 155.1 innings a year after going over 200 for the first time in his career.
But if 2015 was to be termed a disappointment, 2016 was a disaster. Hughes made 11 really rocky starts for the Twins, who then moved him to the bullpen in early June. His first appearance came against the Marlins, where this happened.
Hughes was initially placed on the disabled list with a left knee contusion, but once the MRI results were read, the diagnosis was a compression fracture in his left knee that would cost him the next 6-to-8 weeks. A reasonable time frame to return at that point would have been sometime in September, but then Hughes was diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome — for which Matt Harvey and now recently Tyson Ross have been treated — and it was revealed he’d miss the rest of the season some three weeks after he was initially hit by the ball off J.T. Realmuto’s bat.
So Hughes’ season was basically over before it really started, and the numbers in front of us aren’t all that pretty. His extension doesn’t start until this next season, so what are we looking at as far as ways he can be better moving forward?
Where Hughes has steadily declined as a Twin is in strikeouts, walk rate — though that was partly because of such a lofty standard he set — and home run rate. With that has gone Hughes’ ERA, which is no surprise, but he’s also seen his velocity decline precipitously over the last two seasons.
Now we don’t know when his shoulder issues cropped up, but it seems fair to wonder if it was bothering him at all in 2015, when his velocity declined from 93.3 mph on his four-seamer on average to just 91.5, before it further declined to 91.3 mph this season. His trusted cutter also lost about a tick over that two-year span — though it rebounded a bit this year — and a rarely-throw sinker also saw a dropoff of nearly 2 mph as well.
Harvey’s diagnosis of thoracic outlet syndrome came a couple weeks after Hughes’ were announced, and the good thing is that Harvey’s agent — the estimable Scott Boras — has said he expects his client to be ready for spring training. No two pitchers are the same, but Hughes just turned 30 this last year — three years older than Harvey — so he shouldn’t be too far down the timeline, if at all. That’s a good thing.
Harvey too saw a fairly steep decline to his velocity this year, as he sat in the 96 mph range for nearly all of 2015 before being in the low 95s for three of the four months he pitched this season. Maybe “steep” is a bit too strong of a phrasing here, but at the very least there’s correlation for what feels like causation. Harvey was down more than a full mph in 2016 (95.4 mph) from 2015 (96.5), and it feels pretty clear this is why. The rest of his stuff — change, slider and curve — also had between medium- to wide-range drops in velocity. It was most drastic with Harvey’s curve, which was about 1.5 mph slower than the previous season.
The same goes for Ross, whose velocity on his four-seamer has declined from 95.2 mph on average in 2013 to just 93.0 this year — and some of this is just pitcher aging, so it’s not like we exactly have a smoking gun — but Ross was down as low a the 92.6 mph range in the spring and late last season, and only made one regular season outing this year as he battled a mysterious shoulder issue that appears to have ultimately been ruled thoracic outlet syndrome. The original MRI in late April showed no structural damage, yet he was never able to get on track to make any more starts this season and ultimately might miss the beginning of next season after undergoing the same procedure.
So a return to form isn’t unprecedented, it just isn’t all that clear how likely it is.
Now what we don’t know is what things look like on the other side of thoracic outlet syndrome recovery. Based on some research done over at Beyond the Box Score, it doesn’t look like it’s the same sort of deal with how Tommy John surgery has become so prevalent that the return success rate is strong. According to Nick Lampe from BTBS, pitchers returning from thoracic outlet syndrome had trouble with command both in and out of the strike zone — something Hughes simply can not afford based on his skill set.
The list of pitchers he provides is a who’s who of guys who never really made it back from injuries all the way, like a late-career Josh Beckett, Chris Carpenter, Shaun Marcum and Noah Lowry, though Jaime Garcia is a pretty solid success story. Garcia missed nearly all of 2014 and a huge chunk of 2013 as well, but came back to post a 2.43 ERA and 6.7 K/9 with 2.1 BB/9 in 20 starts last season. This year was not as good to Garcia, as he posted a 4.67 ERA, but he did manage to throw 171.2 innings — the second-most he’s thrown in his eight-year career.
So a return to form isn’t unprecedented, it just isn’t all that clear how likely it is. It would seem more unlikely than not, but fortunately Hughes has youth on his side for the most part, and wasn’t a pitcher who relied on insane raw stuff to get by. The road to return for Harvey — or for that matter, Ross — seems like it might be tougher than for Hughes in that respect. Hughes is a stand-up guy first and foremost, so the hope here is that he can get back to where he was before, even if it isn’t threatening all-time K/BB records like he did in 2014.
Grade: F. It’s certainly not Hughes’ fault he got hurt in the first place — and it’s possible the thoracic outlet syndrome was affecting his stuff beforehand — but he just struggled so badly when he was on the mound that it’s hard to grade him any better than an F.
