In fact, he looks like a very different pitcher than in recent years. But luckily for my story, he has changed something. If he can switch from throwing far too many balls to bullying hitters without changing anything, maybe it’s not a great metric. He was bad before, or at least he wasn’t good. Just explaining that Cabrera is good isn’t enough, though. That sounds like a pretty good metric to me. He’s joined in the bottom five by Jordan Lyles, Brad Keller, Blake Snell, and Chad Kuhl.

On the flip side, Cal Quantrill, he of the 11.7% strikeout rate, is at -104 already. Want proof that this is a decent statistic? Spencer Strider checks in at +50 to lead baseball, with the top five rounded out by Jeffrey Springs, Clayton Kershaw, Shane McClanahan, and Jacob deGrom. If you nibble ineffectually, you’ll run up a huge tally of called balls. If you simply pound the strike zone with so-so stuff, you won’t get many called or swinging strikes. You can think of that gap as a crude measure of how much a pitcher can attack the zone or entice hitters to leave the zone without giving up too much contact. From 2019 to 2022, he racked up 260 more called balls than called and swinging strikes. That’s a huge divergence from Cabrera’s earlier career, when he struggled with both his command and with missing bats. That’s no fluke, either he’s so deceptive and so hard to square up that he’s recorded more called or swinging strikes than he has balls this year, by a count of 68 to 60.

Nineteen of the 45 opponents he’s faced have struck out. He’s only pitched 11 times in 2023, but those 11 times have been revelatory.

Long hard ride book