Stephen Strasburg: By The Numbers

Photo: cbssports.com

Let’s take this morning to appreciate the quiet dominance of Stephen Strasburg.

The reigning World Series MVP is coming off one of his better seasons in 2019, posting a career best 251 strikeouts and finishing 5th in the NL Cy Young voting.

When looking at his career in total, Strasburg is one of the more underrated arms over the last decade. By the extraordinary powers of data, we breakdown his career, relative to other starters in the league to show that he has been one of the more consistent pitchers in Major League Baseball..

Over the last 10 seasons (2010-2019), Strasburg ranks favorably in several advanced metrics. Amongst starters who have pitched at least 1,000 innings in this time, he has posted top ten finishes in several categories:

Figure One

When you are better than five Cy Young caliber pitchers, where three of which have won multiples of this award, fans should recognize that the Nationals have a Cooperstown level starter in Stephen Strasburg.

One of the more underrated skills that he possesses is the ability to limit contact. In the context of other starting arms, Strasburg was among the upper echelon in xwOBA prevention in 2019. Only four pitchers finished better in this category, as shown in Figure Two below:

Figure Two

When a team’s starting pitcher is in the same tier as Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer, and has remained widely unnoticed over his career up to this point, that is ace pitcher output.

What is even more impressive is Strasburg's development of his secondary pitches. In 2019, he relied more on his diverse arsenal to his benefit. Over the last five seasons, he has trended in this direction:

Figure Three

In the graph above, Strasburg used his curveball more than his four-seam fastball by a margin of 2.1% in the 2019 campaign. He has also steadily decreased his usage of his heater over the last five years, favoring the development of his changeup and sinker. On his way towards helping Washington win its first championship in franchise history, Strasburg employed one of the more effective pitch arsenals in the game.

With a newly minted $245 million contract, Stephen Strasburg looks to build upon his development as a pitcher from last season and continue his rise to prominence amongst the best hurlers in baseball.

Thank you so much for choosing The Launch Angle for some out-of-the-box baseball analysis! If you liked this article, click this link for our previous post. For more BTN content, click this link.