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The Blue Jays don't need to worry about Roberto Osuna

Toronto Blue Jays relief pitcher Roberto Osuna has been scuffling significantly in recent months, but it’s nothing the club should lose sleep over. (Winslow Townson/AP)
Toronto Blue Jays relief pitcher Roberto Osuna has been scuffling significantly in recent months, but it’s nothing the club should lose sleep over. (Winslow Townson/AP)

On Tuesday night, Roberto Osuna didn’t only fail to lock down a game for his club, he forced them into a 19-inning marathon they ultimately lost.

The cost was not only the “L,” but also 10 innings of relief work from Tom Koehler, Luis Santos, Matt Dermody and Chris Rowley that left the Toronto Blue Jays bullpen utterly spent heading into Wednesday’s series finale against the Boston Red Sox.

In recent weeks, the Osuna blown save has gone from rarity to a shockingly mundane occurrence as the Blue Jays closer has converted just 13 of his 20 opportunities since the All-Star break. During the season’s second stanza he’s sporting an ugly 6.00 ERA. He’s been one of the reasons Toronto has fallen out of the race, as opposed to a characteristically stabilizing force at the back of the bullpen.

What exactly is the difference between first-half Osuna, who rattled off 22 straight saves at one point, and second-half Osuna, who has rarely seemed this hittable? The answer is not much, but not nothing.

Full seasons by relievers are tricky enough to analyze with confidence due to the inherently small sample sizes. That makes parts of a seasons a real minefield. However, there are a couple of changes in Osuna worth watching:

Velocity

Osuna’s velocity has been a topic of discussion all year long as he hasn’t been able to produce the same top-end gas he demonstrated earlier in his career. That’s rarely seemed like a problem, as until recently 2017 looked like his best season yet. Now it’s cropping up again as a worry.

In the season’s first half, his four-seam fastball hummed in at an average of 95.43 mph. In the second it’s sat at 94.07. For a power pitcher like Osuna, that’s a pretty significant difference.

However, looking at the data more closely it appears that Osuna has emerged from his velocity dip. In his 23 outings since the break he’s averaged at least 95 mph three times, and two of those are his last pair of appearances. The situation will continue to bear monitoring, but this could be an issue that helps account for his struggles without dimming his future outlook.

Pitch Selection

Over the course of the season Osuna has gone more and more away from his standard four-seam fastball in favour of sinkers and cutters. Nowadays he’s throwing his four-seamer just over a quarter of the time, compared to 40 percent earlier in year:

Via Brooks Baseball
Via Brooks Baseball

The efficacy of this strategy is starting to come into question a little bit for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the four-seamer is the easiest pitch for Osuna to command. The right-hander’s walk rate rising from 2.3 percent to 5.7 percent as he tapers off the usage of that pitch is not a coincidence.

Also, the change in his pitch mix has coincided with a change in his batted-ball results. In recent weeks, Osuna has seen his ground ball rate rise considerably and his fly ball rate drop. Normally this would be considered a positive development, but he’d always been a master of inducing the harmless fly balls in the past, whereas grounders have a way of sneaking through holes or moving over runners. Which brings us to the most important element of all.

Luck

Luck can seem like a lazy and unsatisfying answer to almost any question, but it’s better to accurately point to luck than produce a disingenuous explanation to serve a sexier narrative. So, we arrive at luck.

Osuna’s second-half ERA is 6.00, but his FIP is 2.38 — significantly better than his career average of 2.74. That kind of gap is usually a smoking gun that fortune has simply not favoured a pitcher. In the young right-hander’s case he’s not only been unlucky, but that bad luck has met him at the most inopportune times.

With runners on base in the second half, Osuna has allowed an ugly .298 batting average against. It’s tempting to assume when presented with those numbers that he has some kind of mechanical issue out of the stretch, but that seems unlikely because in those spots he’s struck out 23.5 percent of the batters he’s faced and walked two percent.

What’s really happening is that he’s running a .400 BABIP in those spots — a wildly unsustainable number. His new tendency towards sinkers and ground balls is opening the door for spurts of balls finding holes and that door is being kicked down by a tidal wave of misfortune.

There’s no doubt that Osuna has been worse in the latter portion of 2017 than he was early in the season. He’s striking out a couple fewer batters, his walk rate is up, his velocity has been volatile and his pitch usage strategy is a bit of a head-scratcher.

However, he’s only pitching slightly worse. The decline in results is vastly disproportionate to the relatively small issues that have cropped up in recent weeks. Blown saves make for juicy headlines, but the Blue Jays don’t have a real problem at the closer position.

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