Cobb missed nearly two months of the season after getting hit by a batted ball in the middle of June. Other than the removal of one of his ribs to clear a blood clot, Cobb has been relatively healthy. The biggest change in Cobb’s game was the elimination of the fastball in favor of increased usage of the sinker. The image, courtesy of BrooksBaseball.net, below shows the pitch the frequency of pitch type in his career.
Despite throwing the sinker more the ground ball rate actually decreased three percentage points to 56 percent (that’s still really high!). On surface he has a lot of skills fantasy owners should covet. He generates a lot of ground balls and had an above average strikeout rate (23.2 percent) last year. The strikeout rate increased nearly five percentage points compared to 2012. The increase came primarily against right handed hitters as the strikeout rate increased seven percentage points. The more refined command of the splitter/changeup was the biggest reason for this increase. In 2012 he missed up in the zone a lot with that pitch, but last year he kept the ball down. It sounds overly simplistic, but that change led to the swing and miss rate increasing three percentage points and the strikeout rate increasing 12 percentage points.
Despite those positive attributes in his game there are still some red flags. First he allows a lot of contact (91.8 percent career contact rate), which makes him vulnerable to the BABIP monster. To quote Chris Moran, “Of the 30 pitchers with the highest Zone-Contact rates since 2011, only six have an ERA- better than the major league average.” That line is a little misleading and he goes on to say pitchers like Adam Wainwright and Felix Hernandez have similar contact rates and they’re just fine.
What’s peculiar about Cobb’s stat line is he had a HR/FB rate of nearly 15 percent, a LOB% of 81.4 percent while maintaining a 2.76 ERA. He gave up 13 home runs last year and most, if not all, must have come with no one on-base. Also, another sign of good luck was his career best .279 BABIP, but don’t let that fool you into believing he was lucky. He was top ten among starters with at least 20 starts in ground ball rate; combine that with a 23 percent strikeout rate that looks legitimate, it’s no wonder why his BABIP and LOB rates were so low.
If you are looking for his statistical projections please go here and download my latest projections.
