Through July, Camilo Doval was the unequivocal bright spot of the Giants season. Sure, he’d had a couple bad games here and there, but by and large, when he came into the game, you knew he was going to bring filthy stuff and blow it by the hitter, no matter who was up. He was dominant. He was impressive. He was a capital-C Closer, the monster at the end of the movie, the guy who turned baseball into an 8-inning game, the rightful heir to Robb Nen. You could overpraise him, but you’d have to put some effort into it.
Now, Camilo Doval is not the unequivocal bright spot of the Giants season.
Since the beginning of August, Doval has a 4.80 ERA, with 6 saves and 5 blown saves. He’s pitched 15 innings and struck out 16 (good!) but walked 7 (not good). He’s given up 8 earned runs, and another 5 unearned runs, though three of those were due to his own error on Sunday, and he earned the hell out of those bad boys.
So what’s going on? Why did Good Pitcher become Bad Pitcher? Let’s look into it.
The first thing I look at, because Camilo Doval throws hard and I am a simple creature who likes looking at the radar gun and saying in whispered awe, “Pitch go fast,” is velocity. So how has Doval’s velocity been this year?
Well, it’s declined over the course of the year. Now, that seems normal, right? A normal thing to happen to a pitcher who throws hard is that, as the long baseball season wears on, he will then throw less hard. Except Doval’s first two years in the league didn’t fit that pattern. Here’s 2021:
And 2022:
That doesn’t seem ideal, but here’s a counterpoint: he’s still throwing the ball pretty damn fast. Even with a little decline from May and June, when Doval was averaging 100.26 MPH and 100.61 MPH, respectively, on his cutter, he’s still sitting at 99.2 MPH. Not a lot of guys are regularly throwing a cutter at 99 MPH. So while I don’t want to totally rule out velocity here, I’d say it’s more of a It Would Be Nice To Throw Harder than a smoking gun.
So what else? Well, let’s look at his pitch usage, because maybe that will give us a hint:
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Hm. It would appear that in his better months (May through July), Doval was throwing his slider quite a bit more than in his less better months. Should he be throwing it more? Is it a pitch selection issue?
Gonna say no on that. In the months that Doval didn’t use his slider much, it’s because he was giving up extra base hits on it. In August especially, opponents were slugging a cool 1.000 off that slider. Here in September, that’s down to .375, which is still a little high for a pitch that should be racking up strikeouts, but is also better than either his cutter or his sinker.
For now, though, we’re going to stick with the slider, because there’s a related issue here.
Camilo Doval is having a hard time getting swingthroughs on that slider. From May through June, batters were swinging through half of his sliders, and now that’s dropped to around 35%. And again we see April, a month in which Doval’s ERA was 3.27, not particularly strong by his standards, following suit.
So what’s wrong with that slider? Maybe it’s movement. If you look at his horizontal movement — and yes, the very fact that I am not embedding the graph in this newsletter is a hint as to what I think about it — it’s barely different than ever during the year. But if you look at vertical movement, you start to see something:
Wait, no! No, I wanted to talk about the slider! Now I have to talk about the cutter! Damn my inability to plan ahead when I’m writing one of these things.
Doval’s cutter has lost a ton of movement over the course of the year. There’s no way around it. Even that horizontal movement chart that I didn’t show…aw, well, I guess I have to show it:
See how it’s getting closer to zero as the year goes on? That’s bad. That’s a bad sign, unless I don’t know how to read one of these things, which is technically possible.
Doval’s cutter, then, has lost velocity over the course of the year (around 1.4 MPH since June), and it’s lost both horizontal (more than two inches) and vertical (about two and a half inches) movement. Consequently, batters in September are hitting .333 against the cutter with a slugging percentage of .500. The sinker hasn’t been great either, but it hasn’t been nearly as bad.
But that just addresses this month. Last month, in August, the cutter was great — batters hit .071 against it with a slugging percentage of .071 — and yet Doval was still very bad, with the slider in particular being the pitch that got hit the hardest. My theory is that the slider was bad in August, and batters were sitting on it, waiting to tee off. Now that he’s throwing it less, they’re sitting on the cutter, and teeing off on that too. So Doval can throw his slider more, but then batters will react and sit on it, and then, you know, we’re off on another golf metaphor.
So what should he do about it? Simple: fix his pitches. Throw harder and get more movement. It’s not rocket science.
Hm, it’s possible that someone in the Giants organization has already considered this solution and it’s difficult to implement.
Considering Doval’s history of not seeing his velocity decline and not seeing his cutter’s movement flatten out so blatantly, it’s tough to see this as anything but a mechanics issue or an injury issue. His release point has stayed pretty consistent this year, but that’s only one mechanical factor and there could be others that don’t show up on a Brooks Baseball graph. On the other hand, it’s easy to say that Doval’s overuse during that end-of-July-beginning-of-August period might have had some lasting effects on him, or that getting into game shape early for the WBC this year could be a factor too.
Without a biomechanical analysis which I am wholly unqualified for, it’s impossible to say what exactly is wrong. Except we can say this: Camilo Doval’s pitches have gotten worse this year, and so have his results. He spent most of the year being a bright spot, but now that spot has started to dim.
After watching his slovenly fielding on Sunday I'd put him on the I-80 bus.
That's different from my straw hat analysis (not worth the straw it's made of). It starts with poor control (look at those walks), which leads him to being behind in the count and reducing velocity (see top graph) so he can throw strikes. The movement analysis is startling though.