Note: Don't whiff on this special FanDuel offer. Win your first contest or get your money back (up to $10) to keep playing. Try FanDuel now!
It's easy to get lost in the shuffle in the Mets' rotation. Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom are two of the dozen or so best pitchers in baseball, and Matt Harvey can be when he is right; Bartolo Colon isn't quite so good, but he might be Baseball Twitter's favorite players, so he gets plenty of pub as well. Because those four generate so many headlines and so much buzz, it's easy to forget that Steven Matz might be as good as any of them.
Well, he probably isn't as good as Noah Syndergaard, but the results in his major-league career so far aren't far off. He sports a 2.52 ERA in 64 1/3 innings of work, and he put together what might have been his best start to date Wednesday, when he went 7 2/3 shutout innings allowing just two hits. He struck out eight with no walks in the outing, and has certainly looked like an ace over his last four starts. So, how good can Matz be? Where does he fall in the Mets' pitching hierarchy?
To answer the second question first, he's probably fourth among the Mets' starters. That's no knock on him; Syndergaard might be the third-best pitcher in baseball, and Harvey and deGrom aren't far behind at their best. Matz could be the best pitcher on half the teams in baseball and still not be as good as that trio.
To answer the first question: Matz really might not be that far behind that trio. His career run prevention marks are stellar, and his 2.83 ERA so far this season might not even quite capture how good he has been; of the nine runs he has allowed, seven came in his first outing. In four starts since, Matz has allowed just two runs on 21 hits and five walks in 27 innings, with 29 strikeouts.
Matz has been a strikeout-per-inning guy in his MLB career, putting down 24.0 percent of batters he has faced by strikes. That would rank 16th among all starters since the beginning of the 2015 season, a pretty great mark, especially for someone with pretty great control as well; his K-BB% is 17.6, which would be 19th in baseball.
What is interesting about Matz's strikeout rate is how unreliant he is on swinging strikes. Just 8.0 percent of his pitches have been swung at and missed, while he ranks 27th among 144 pitches with at least 300 pitches this season in called strike percentage. He is also racking up a ton of foul balls, as 31.9 percent of his strikes have been fouled off, the eighth-highest rate in baseball.
So, we have a bit of a paradox here. On the one hand, it might be tough to keep racking up a strikeout per inning with such a low swinging strike rate. However, Matz's ability to get batters to foul off pitches could make up for that, if it proves to be sustainable. It might not be given that only 27.6 percent of his strikes were fouled off last year, a pretty middling rat, although there may be extenuating circumstances in the form of the so-called "Warthen Slider."
As FanGraphs.com's Eno Sarris featured last season, Warthen has taught any number of Mets' pitchers to throw the slider in recent years, and it isn't your typical slider. The Warthen Slider tends to be thrown harder and with less movement than your typical slider, and has been put to use by everyone from Matt Harvey to Noah Syndergaard to great effect.
Matz didn't really throw the pitch last season, but has made it his go-to secondary offering so far this season, throwing it 14.3 percent of the time. According to BrooksBaseball.com, the pitch comes in at 88.7 miles per hour, about 94 percent as hard as his fastball. That differential, along with the movement he gets, is right in line with what the other Mets' pitchers produce:
| Pitch Type | Velo (mph) | pfx HMov (in.) | pfx VMov (in.) |
| Matz Fastball | 94.64 | 9.9 | 7.17 |
| Matz Slider | 88.67 | 0.62 | 3.58 |
| Harvey Fastball | 94.91 | -5.73 | 10.31 |
| Harvey Slider | 88.46 | 1.15 | 4.26 |
| deGrom Fastball | 93.41 | -4.17 | 9.75 |
| deGrom Slider | 87.74 | 2.87 | 3.75 |
| Syndergaard Fastball | 98.63 | -1.78 | 11.74 |
| Syndergaard Slider | 92.55 | 2.45 | 4.11 |
It's the same pitch. What is interesting is that each pitcher seems to get different results with their sliders. Syndergaard and deGrom are racking up lots of whiffs with relatively few foul balls with the pitch; Harvey and Matz, on the other hand, are generating tons of foul balls and relatively few whiffs. Matz in particular is picking up a foul ball on 29.9 percent of his sliders. The results are slightly different for each pitcher, but the end result seems to be a pitch that opposing batters have trouble squaring up.
Typically, it would be awfully hard to be a high strikeout pitcher with relatively few swinging strikes, but I think it might be sustainable. If you combine swings and misses and foul balls, he has the 22nd highest rate in baseball among 144 pitchers with at least 300 pitches thrown. Swinging strikes are hugely important, but up until a two-strike count, a foul ball serves the same purpose.
So, Matz is going about dominating in both familiar and somewhat unexpected ways for a Mets pitcher. The addition of a slider has only made him tougher to hit, and he was already pretty tough last season. Matz might only be the fourth-best pitcher on his own team, but he still might be one of the 20 best pitchers in Fantasy.
