Cleveland Indians: Diagnosing Cody Anderson’s Struggles

Cody Anderson of the Cleveland Indians has struggled this season, but from what?

The Cleveland Indians officially sent down Cody Anderson this afternoon, but we all saw this coming. During his six major league starts, the 25-year-old allowed 29 runs in just 32 innings. Even his strikeout to walk ratio unimpressed, and fielder independent statistics gave negative reviews of his work.

What went wrong? Just before the season started, Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs noted that Cody Anderson looked like Matt Harvey. He looked at a start during Spring Training for which PITCHf/x data was available, and Anderson’s fastball posted similar speed and movement to Harvey. The two also had similarities between their cutters, sliders, curveballs, and changeups. No one thought that Anderson would pitch like Harvey, but we at least had some inkling that the Cleveland Indian might pitch well this year. 

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Clearly, that never happened, and there are thousands of statistics that can tell you that. What they do not tell you is why that happened. Why did Cody Anderson go from looking like a breakout prospect to an absolute dud?

Let’s start by looking at batted ball data. Anderson has a batting average on balls in play of .369; and while that is high, it is possible that he deserves it. His 40.8 percent ground ball rate is slightly below average, and his line drive and fly ball rates are slightly above average to compensate for this. Using these inputs, my xBABIP calculations predict a value of .376, so perhaps Anderson’s BABIP is fair.

The real outlier here is Anderson’s home run to fly ball ratio. 22.7 percent of Anderson’s fly balls have landed in the bleachers, a rate that is absurdly high. This either means that the right-hander has been unlucky, or he is doing something to cause a lot of home runs. To determine this, let’s see which pitches have been hit for home runs the most this year and last. Below is a table using information from Brooks Baseball.

It is pretty clear that his fourseam fastball and changeup have not seen much of a change on home run rate, and even the slight change for his curveball can be chalked up to allowing a home run out of 50 pitches. His cutter, however, has been a completely different story. While he has only thrown 63 cutters this year, four home runs are still significant.

We can also use Brooks Baseball to investigate the outcomes of Anderson’s cutter in general. This year, batters have posted a .318 batting average and a .864 slugging percentage against the pitch versus .240 and .260 marks last season. Certainly, last year’s sample size of 200 pitches means that this year’s results carry less weight, but the change is noticeable never the less.

Even with this overall drop in productivity, it still seems hard to believe that one pitch that he only throws 7 percent of the time can sabotage an entire season. In fact, simply looking at pitch values shows that all of his pitches have worsened from 2015 to 2016.

The increase in home runs on his cutter is simply a microcosm of his entire struggles this year. While his velocity and whiff rates increased from last year to this one, his placement has suffered. In fact, he has left more pitches over the heart of the plate. Again using the cutter for reference, 11 percent of his cutters have been “grooved” this year compared to just seven percent one year ago.

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So for Cody Anderson to get better in the minor leagues, he simply needs to work on his execution. There might be some mechanical flaw causing this problem, and indeed, his horizontal release point has shifted a few inches this season. Should he correct these issues and stop leaving pitches in the danger zone, his home run rate should come back to earth, and hopefully, he can become a serviceable starting pitcher once again.