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Where is Marco Estrada's strikeout surge coming from?

Marco Estrada, Blue Jays, MLB, Toronto Blue Jays
Marco Estrada has been striking out hitters like never before in 2017. (Frank Gunn/CP)

In broad strokes, Marco Estrada has been the exact same pitcher Blue Jays fans have grown to love this season.

He’s still a fastball-changeup guy who doesn’t throw hard, but keeps his ERA in the low threes. He still gives up a couple more home runs than you’d like thanks to a heavy flyball tendency. He still commands the ball extraordinarily well.

The one eye-popping difference in Estrada this year is the strikeouts he’s piling up. The right-hander enters Saturday’s start against the Rangers striking out 27.2 percent of the batters he’s faced, significantly better than his career mark of 22.2 or the 20.4 he’d produced in his previous two years as a Blue Jay. During his Toronto tenure, Estrada has dominated at times, but he’s never done it by punching so many hitters out.

Even in this strikeout-heavy era, most pitchers don’t find their best swing-and-miss stuff at the age of 33, but that’s what the Blue Jays starter has seemingly done. So, how’s he doing it?

When it comes to Estrada, we tend to assume that positive developments are related to his top-shelf changeup, and it’s worth noting that his use of the pitch has spiked this year compared to his earlier Blue Jays seasons.

Via Brooks Baseball
Via Brooks Baseball

However, as it turns out, the explanation behind this phenomenon is a little more complicated than Estrada throwing his best pitch more. The way he’s using it has changed as well as the amount.

It begins with the first pitch, where Estrada has gone to his best offering more frequently as opposed to setting it up with the hard stuff.

Second pitch is a similar story:

Hitters are seeing a lot more changeups early in the count, which means the fastball and cutter are harder to catch up to when they come around later. With this plan of attack it’s no surprise that Estrada has seen the whiffs increase on both of his hard pitches this year:

Instead of using his changeup as his primary strikeout pitch, the right-hander has deployed it early to get ahead and make his hard stuff more formidable. Unsurprisingly then, he’s getting more of his Ks than ever from those pitches:

At this point it’s worth mentioning that Estrada is a four-pitch guy, not a three-pitch guy, and his curveball has been put to the side here. The reason for that is that his curve isn’t a strikeout pitch. He’s gotten just 29 of his 366 Blue Jays strikeouts with the offering so it doesn’t factor too much into his recent success in that area. While it’s a useful tool for putting Estrada in favourable counts, it has little to do with what we’ve seen recently.

Because of Estrada’s well-documented unwillingness to wave off pitches, the credit for his effective pitching-backward approach seems to fall on the lap of new batterymate Luke Maile. Maile and Estrada bonded quickly and the 26-year-old catcher clearly has the veteran buying into a different strategy.

So far, it’s indisputably working. On Sunday, Estrada set a career high with 12 strikeouts against the Baltimore Orioles — nine of them coming via the four-seam fastball. The 90-mph fastball isn’t supposed to be a strikeout weapon in the major leagues, but when you’ve got a changeup like Estrada’s a lot of the rules don’t apply.

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