The 2019 MLB regular season is still pretty young. It’s also Memorial Day, though, which is one of those arbitrary checkpoints when it comes to looking at player and team stats. With just about two months of games in the books, the whole “small sample size” argument continues to lose significance.
For the New York Mets, their greatest perceived strength heading into this season was the starting rotation, especially after bouncing back in 2018 to post a collective 17.5 fWAR (thanks mostly to Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, and Zack Wheeler). This part of the roster has experienced some ups and downs since Opening Day, and while they’ve stumbled out to a 4.52 ERA as a group, their 4.7 fWAR is at least among the top half of all teams in baseball.
When breaking each starter’s individual performance in specific situations, I couldn’t help but notice the numbers Steven Matz has put together in front of the home crowd at Citi Field and on the road as a visiting player. Among Mets starters with at least 20 innings pitched on the road in 2019, here’s where each of them stand with regard to ERA:
| Player | IP | ERA |
|---|---|---|
| Steven Matz | 20.2 | 6.10 |
| Noah Syndergaard | 37.0 | 5.11 |
| Zack Wheeler | 31.0 | 4.94 |
| Jacob deGrom | 30.0 | 3.30 |
More than one Mets starter has had their struggles away from Flushing, but Matz has very clearly struggled the most in a smaller number of innings (his disastrous eight-run outing over 0.0 innings in Philadelphia didn’t help). But when we shift back and see how these same four are performing at Citi Field in 2019, it’s the complete other end of the spectrum for 27-year-old left-hander.
| Player | IP | ERA |
|---|---|---|
| Steven Matz | 24.0 | 1.50 |
| Jacob deGrom | 28.0 | 4.18 |
| Zack Wheeler | 39.0 | 4.38 |
| Noah Syndergaard | 32.1 | 4.73 |
Similar to the first table, it can’t get much clearer than this. So how exactly has Matz landed on such different early-season ERAs at home and on the road? Part of it has to do with his batted-ball profile, which also feeds his home runs allowed thus far.
Here’s how Matz lines up with regarded to batted-ball events and quality of contact between these two situations.
| 2019 | LD% | GB% | FB% | IFFB% | Soft% | Hard% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 19.3% | 49.1% | 31.6% | 16.7% | 19.7% | 41.0% |
| Away | 16.7% | 44.4% | 38.9% | 3.6% | 13.9% | 43.1% |
The amount of hard contact he’s allowing is a problem — his cumulative 42.1% clip is 10 percentage points higher than his career mark. The southpaw’s ERA in each situation isn’t entirely surprising, though, especially when just looking at these numbers. Significantly less soft contact paired with more balls in the air (and fewer infield flies) usually isn’t a recipe for success.
So this is why seven of the nine home runs he’s allowed have come on the road, and his dingers allowed per nine innings as a visiting player is all the way up at 3.05 (0.75 at home).
Matz has worked through this performance by lowering his overall walk rate (6.8%) compared to last year (8.9%) while keeping his strikeout rate nearly the same (23.2% in ’18, 23.4% in ’19) and amping up his strand rate (81.0%) to career-high levels (66.9% in ’17, 74.9% in ’18). What’s been interesting to this point has been a change in pitch mix.
After tossing his slider at an 8.4% clip last year, that number is currently down to 4.5%. That difference has gone right to his changeup, a pitch he’s throwing 20.8% of the time. Matz has steadily used his changeup more with each big-league season he’s accrued — after tossing it at a 9.9% rate as a rookie in 2015, it’s gone up every single year since. The only problem is that it hasn’t been a super effective pitch.
As a rookie, this pitch produced a 26.7% strikeout rate and 18 wRC+. Since then, Matz has gotten his strikeout rate with changeups above 20.0% just once (21.9% in ’18) and the wRC+ produced by opposing hitters has never been below 120. Those numbers so far in 2019 are 13.0% and 153, respectively. Meanwhile, his curveball and changeup each have a strikeout rate above 35.0% with a wRC+ allowed below 100.
The answer here isn’t simply to throw more breaking pitches, but the usage of those offerings shouldn’t each be hovering around (or at) career-low levels for a full season of play. If anything, they should be going up. It’d probably help the southpaw get his hard-hit rate allowed under a little more control.
Matz has enjoyed a solid start to his year overall — his current 0.4 fWAR in 44.2 innings is already about halfway to last year’s 0.9 mark, which took him 154.0 innings to achieve. There are some things the lefty can consider tinkering with if he wants to experience a true breakout, though.
