The Curious Case of Jeurys Familia’s Sinker

As the 2021 regular season winds down for the New York Mets, the focus continues turning toward exactly what the organization is going to do with this roster during the winter months. There are a number of players in Flushing set to hit the open market at the conclusion of the World Series, with one of them being relief pitcher, Jeurys Familia.

The veteran right-hander is finishing up a three-year, $30 million commitment he made to rejoin the Mets prior to the 2019 season. Reports, including one from Pat Ragazzo of Sports Illustrated, are saying Familia will seek a two-year contract this offseason but could consider a one-year pact to remain with the Mets. Whether New York will do that or not remains to be seen, and unfortunately for Familia, a lackluster finish isn’t necessarily helping his cause.

His season-long statistics line up with what he’s generally done since returning to New York as a free agent. The 32-year-old owns a 3.86 ERA through 58 1/3 innings, and although his strikeout rate (27.2%) and walk rate (10.5%) are much improved from the last two seasons, the home-run bug has bitten him badly (1.54 allowed per nine innings), making his performance worth -0.1 fWAR.

There are a number of players on manager Luis Rojas‘ roster that experienced a much better first half than second half in 2021. While Familia’s ERA got worse between these two periods of time (3.62 to 4.06), other areas improved, like his strikeout rate (25.0% to 29.3%) and his walk rate (12.9% to 8.3). One thing that did experience massive amounts of negative regression was his homers allowed per nine innings rate — that number jumped from 0.66 prior to the All-Star Game to 2.32 since the midsummer break.

What’s really interesting about this is that Familia’s batted-ball profile didn’t change very much (outside of his home-run-to-fly-ball rate, of course).

This doesn’t include the big drop in soft-hit rate (25.0% to 13.6%) and a huge rise in hard-hit rate allowed (23.7% to 34.6%), but still, it’s crazy to see someone maintain a ground-ball rate above 50.0% and give up homers that often. Digging into it more, it’s also crazy to see that the source of all these homers is essentially from one pitch: Familia’s sinker.

Familia has thrown four different pitches at least 30 times in 2021: his sinker, slider, four-seamer, and splitter. He’s allowed 10 dingers so far this year — one off his slider and nine (!) off his sinker. If you’re thinking that sounds like a lot for this particular pitch, that’s because you’re absolutely right.

The most homers Familia has ever allowed in one season off his sinker came in 2015 when he allowed three. For his career, he’s allowed 19 homers off his sinker. So, if we do some quick mental math, just about half of those have come in the right-hander’s last 58.1 innings of work.

This issue has obviously put a damper on the overall effectiveness of this offering, as opposing hitters are slashing .283/.331/.543 against it. Despite producing his best walk rate (6.0%) and strikeout rate (19.3%) on his sinker since 2015 (5.8% walk rate, 20.9% strikeout rate), hitters have posted a 136 wRC+ when facing this pitch. The only time it’s been higher in that during a single (and full) season was in 2019, when it was 151.

In trying to find some potential sources behind what’s going on, here are a handful of graphs from Brooks Baseball to illustrate certain changes with Familia’s sinker. First, here’s a look at his horizontal pitch location in recent years:

While there’s been some variation in past seasons, his sinker has mostly stayed in the middle of the plate for the entirety of this season. There’s a similar thing going on when we peek at his vertical pitch location, as well:

Familia’s sinker hasn’t been as low in the zone this year, but it’s probably not a coincidence that he started serving up a bunch of gopher balls when his location suddenly got closer to the center. Lastly, we need to hit on the movement of his sinker, which, you guessed it, hasn’t been nearly as good as it has been recently.

Here’s how his horizontal movement compares since 2018:

And, for good measure, here’s how the vertical movement of Familia’s sinker compares to previous seasons:

This is not the first time Familia has had an issue with his sinker, but having it lead to an increased number of homers allowed certainly is new. It’s something he’ll have to figure out fast, especially if he wants to continue using it as much as he does — this will be the eighth straight season his sinker is the most used pitch in his arsenal.

New York has plenty of tough decisions to make with regard to the roster in the upcoming months. Figuring out how to restock the bullpen for 2022 will obviously be part of that. If they decide to bring the long-time Met back for another go-around next season, they’ll have to be confident these issues with his sinker are more of a bump in the road than the start of a new trend.