Alex Cobb: An Elite Pitcher

When we think of 2021's elite pitchers, some common names come to mind. Cole, Buehler, Burnes, Gausman, Wheeler, and more. I'm here to bring the Angels' Alex Cobb to the table. Plagued by an unfortunate combination of bad luck, poor fielding behind him, and the very nature of the team he plays for, Cobb has been on very few (if any) radars this season. Not only that, but no one could've seen this coming. Or to be more specific, no one who only looks solely at statistics could've seen this coming. Let's cut to the chase here and discuss.

Firstly, what exactly has Alex Cobb done this season to warrant such a title? Well, his ERA and xERA line up exactly at 3.82, and he has an excellent FIP of 2.63, paired with a 3.64 SIERA. For most of the year, he went unnoticed, as his ERA hovered in the 4-5 range, while maintaining near his current FIP, SIERA, and xERA. Cobb also ranks 75th percentile in xSLG given up, and even more impressively is 92nd percentile in chase rate and 94th percentile in barrels given up. While he may give up quite a few hits (which leads into my next topic), he doesn't get hit around, is able to miss barrels, and catches guys off balance with pitches outside the zone.

Secondly, Cobb has been quite unlucky this season. As mentioned before, Cobb's ERA soared at the beginning of the year, being around the 4 and 5 range, but it has slowly brought its way down. However, he still finds himself on the unlucky side, with a BABIP of .327. The league average tends to be around .300, and his career average is even lower, at .292. Yet his barrel rate is 3.7%, using the power of ground balls (2.2 average launch angle given up) to get outs. So he misses barrels, gets ground balls at a high rate (54% of balls in play to be exact, versus the 44% league average), but still manages to give up a high batting average on balls in play. So he gives up weak hits. A ground ball through the hole here, a bloop that falls in there, and all the sudden you've given up a couple runs without any balls being hit particularly well. A 2.63 FIP along with a 9.73 K/9 tells the story much better than an ERA or a simple box score could. But I'm about to display the story beyond the world of statistics.

This season, in 2021, Alex Cobb has broken out. The invent of advanced analytics can display this clear as day, and 6 or 7 years ago we would not be here discussing Cobb's breakout season. However, before the season began, there was no way you could look at his prior stats and predict this. Let's run through his 2021 statistics that I mentioned previously, followed by his statistics from his first 9 seasons in the bigs. Note: Cobb only threw 22 innings in 2016, and missed all of 2015 due to Tommy John surgery, as well as only 11 innings in 2019 due to hip surgery.

From this, there are two conclusions I can draw, both of which make you reconsider a lot of conventional wisdom that the statcast era has brought us. Conclusion 1: ground ball pitching is arguably the most predictive pitching measure. Looking at this table, only two stats remain constant (other than ERA, which we don't really care about). Ground ball rate, and SIERA (a stat that throws type of contact given up into the equation in some way). From this, we can partially deduce that ground ball pitching will yield a successful pitcher at some point, whether it be in their rookie year, or their 10th MLB season. As Moneyball puts it, the beauty of ground ball pitching is that no matter how hard it gets hit, it can't go over the fence. In today's age of strikeout pitchers who throw 95+ mph, the art of giving up weak contact--specifically ground ball contact--has been somewhat forgotten.

Conclusion 2 is a combination of using coaching and confidence as predictive measures. As a young player with the Rays in a rich farm system including Matt Moore and Jeremy Hellickson (both top 100 prospects), Cobb was just looking to prove himself. High standards could've been set in his mind, and he never ended up reaching them. In 2018 he was called upon to be an ace of some sorts for a lackluster Orioles' rotation, and throughout his career he hadn't enough national recognition to be confident in himself, which clearly didn't help his on-field-product, as he struggled mightily in his 3 seasons with Baltimore. Playing for the infamous Orioles' pitching coach staff of the late 2010s along with the pre-statcast Rays meant he wasn't getting the coaching he thought he could as an MLB pitcher. This all lead to untapped potential. With the Angels this year, which is a significant step up from Tampa Bay and especially Baltimore, he made a few tweaks, which lead to results in bullpens and practice, which lead to confidence, which lead to much better performance on the field. Specifically, from 2011-2020 he threw his curveball and changeup 23% of the time and 29% of the time, respectively. In 2021, he's thrown his curveball only 16% of the time and his changeup 37% of the time, while maintaining his fastball usage around 46-47%. This adjustment has clearly paid dividends for Cobb, and likely wouldn't have happened without decent coaching. Kevin Gausman, Wade Miley, and teammate Dylan Bundy have all been more examples of why leaving Baltimore and their poor pitching coaching can help revive a career.

In my mind, the true answer lies somewhere between conclusion 1 and 2. It took a good coaching staff to realize that Cobb has always been a ground ball pitcher, and just needed a few tweaks to pitch at an elite level. The coaching staff and Angels' front office, realizing the potential in Cobb, developed a high opinion of him and Cobb realized this, leading to his confidence skyrocketing. My big takeaway from this is that if there's even one shred of promise deep inside a baseball player, any good coach or front office will take that player in, and chip away, helping the player find and channel it. That's how you find a buy low player. Groundball rate is, in my opinion, the most predictive measure of doing so, but any speck of promise will do. So take a chance on the guy no one knows about. Because he might end up being elite.