This signing happened a few weeks ago, but beyond the Boog Sciambi news, there isn’t a ton going on with the Cubs right now, and for as much as I’m excited to watch games with Boog Sciambi broadcasting, that’s pretty much all I have to say about Boog Sciambi.
Jonathan Holder is a Chicago Cub. A top-40 reliever by fWAR in 2018, Holder was brilliant at times for the Yankees—a key cog in a deep bullpen. In 2019, his ERA soared to 6.31, but his FIP only rose to 4.45, implying he was the victim of some bad luck (furthering this claim, his xWOBA was .001 better than in ’18, his opponents’ BABIP rose from .261 to .307, his LOB rate dropped from 68.2% to a miserable 53.6%, and his strikeouts per nine innings rose from 8.18 to 10.02—all of which basically says that he was unlucky on balls in play). But then this past summer, the FIP kept rising, and eventually, the Yankees said no more.
If we trust xWOBA (and I believe we should) and say that Holder was the same pitcher in 2019 as he was in 2018, potentially with somewhat lucky results in 2018 and very unlucky results in ’19, he slots in as a potential middle relief arm for the Cubs, with setup upside. He’s also a reclamation project, though, so let’s talk about what there is to reclaim, small-sample as 2020 was.
Holder is not a velocity guy. He’s never blown anyone away. Instead, he’s spent his career thus far mixing in a good deal of offspeed. After starting his career fastball/slider/curveball, he added a changeup and cutter in 2018, and while he went away from it in 2019 a bit, the cutter came back this past year, rising alongside the changeup as a replacement for Holder’s slider:
I haven’t dug into when exactly in the year Holder turned away from his slider, or whether he turned away and then came back, but peripheral information from Baseball Savant gives more indication that this was a slider problem, and not just a sudden affinity for the changeup and cutter. Specifically, the slider’s movement changed dramatically:
Now, it’s possible this isn’t the exact problem. But it’s the most noticeable thing that changed, and something went wrong. So when Spring Training begins and we start trying to assess whether Holder’s making progress, the slider will be the first place to look.
We’ll see.
