Tyler Gilbert's No-No: A Breakdown

In case you missed it, Tyler Gilbert, a former nobody, made his first MLB start this past Saturday, and threw a no hitter. The first no hitter of 2021 since the ban of foreign substance. Since this is so impressive, I'll give Gilbert a brief introduction. The now 27 year old was born and raised in Santa Cruz County, California, and upon high school graduation, he went the JUCO route to continue his baseball career at Santa Barbara City College. He pitched well enough there to land a scholarship at USC, and in 2015, in the 6th round of the MLB Draft, Gilbert was selected by the Philadelphia Phillies. After climbing the minor league ladder, as well as a mix of trades and international stints, he got the call he'd been waiting for. August 3rd of this year, Gilbert was called up to the Arizona Diamondbacks; the same day brought him his MLB debut, where he pitched one scoreless inning in relief. Then, 11 days later, he made his first career start against a lineup that looked like this:

LF: Tommy Pham

2B: Adam Frazier

3B: Manny Machado

SS: Jake Cronenworth

C: Austin Nola

1B: Eric Hosmer

RF: Wil Myers

CF: Trent Grisham

P: Joe Musgrove

And at this point we all know how that turned out.

So how did he do it?

To start, let's take a look at his pitch selection. In a complete game he threw only 102 pitches, the hardest of which was thrown 91 mph. Despite not throwing at a crazy velocity, 93.1% of his pitches were some variation of a fastball. His four-seam, sinker, and cutter were thrown 18.6, 27.5, and 47.1 percent of the time, respectively. He also used a knuckle-curve 5.9% of the time, paired with a splitter which was only used 1% of the time. Using this data, one would think that Gilbert located his fastballs well. Let's take a look at this chart, displaying every pitch he threw, along with pitch type and location.

Firstly, Gilbert is missing badly with his sinker, elevating the pitch when it should be thrown lower in the zone to induce ground balls. The 4-seamer is kept out of the middle of the zone (for the most part). At the professional level there isn't much you can do with a 91 mph pitch that doesn't move, other than barely catch the outside corner for called strikes. A few times Gilbert got lucky when missing with this pitch, as well as the aforementioned sinker, but we'll get to that later. Lastly, the cutter seems to be everywhere, but as long as it has sufficient movement, it should be thrown almost everywhere.

But let's remember, this is baseball. You can throw the perfect pitch and the hitter can fight it off, or you can throw an absolute meatball that the hitter swings right through. Luck could be to blame in Gilbert's debut as a starter. And while it would be unfortunate for the story-lines, it would logically make sense. So it must be considered. At first glance, one would notice that Gilbert gave up 20 batted balls, 10 of which were hit at exit velocities above 95 mph, landing at a hard hit rate of 50%. Pretty bad. However, there's always a however. Of those same 20 batted balls hit, only 5% of them (just one batted ball) was barreled up. Hmm. Balls were hit hard, but few had a sufficient launch angle to be barreled up. So there's a discrepancy here.

Let's first take the time to fully define what it takes for a batted ball to be "barreled". For those who don't know, barreled balls are hit at an exit velocity of at least 98 mph, and have a launch angle of 26-30 degrees. For every extra mph above 98, the range of launch angles barrels encapsulate increases. The point here is that you can hit a line drive without it necessarily being barrelled. 35% of Gilbert's batted balls allowed in his no hitter were line drives, further displaying this notion. Additionally, 8 of Gilbert's 20 batted balls allowed had expected batting averages above .350, 6 of which surpassed the .500 mark. This doesn't even include a fly ball off the bat of Wil Myers that ended up being caught at the warning track (xBA: .280, distance: 401 ft.). Watching the game displayed hard-hit grounders being hit right into the shift, line drives hit right at players (including the final out of the game), and the warning track play I just mentioned. Rather poetically we wrap up this analysis with SIERA, the overarching stat of all batted ball data. In Gilbert's 9 innings of work, his SIERA was 5.42.

So it seems luck was a major factor in Gilbert reaching this feat. But two additional notes must be made. First off, this is the textbook definition of a small sample size. One game, nine innings, that's all we're analyzing here. So none of this is to say Gilbert isn't or won't be a good pitcher. Second, the measure of luck is only used because one would assume it runs out one day. What I mean by this is, while Gilbert was very lucky in accomplishing his no hitter, he still threw a no hitter. The luck didn't run out. No pitcher, no matter how talented, is going to go 27 outs without allowing a hit without a little bit of luck. It's just the way the game works. While luck suggests Gilbert has some things to work on (use the sinker to get ground balls!), it doesn't take away from the major accomplishment he reached, nor the record-breaking amount of time it took him to get there. As far as I'm concerned, Tyler Gilbert has etched his name into the history books by throwing a no hitter in his debut as an MLB starter. That achievement alone should make him happy. All of us sabermetricians would be lucky to be in his shoes.