Jon Gray vs. Eddie Butler: Judging the Debut

We don’t know much about Jon Gray‘s major league career, but here are a few things we do know.

I am not a spontaneous person, but twice in the last two years, I have dropped everything to be at a Rockies game I hadn’t planned to attend. Those two games were the debuts of Eddie Butler in June 2014, and Jon Gray last night.

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If you’ve been following the Rockies for any amount of time, you know that our problem is pitching, which is what made these two games such big events. We have enough talented young hitters and solid veterans to put together a good lineup any night of the week. What we don’t have are the pitchers who can hold the opposing offense to fewer runs than our team scores. Last night’s game is case in point: forgetting Jon Gray for a moment, the Rockies’ bullpen surrendered six earned runs scattered over five innings. This is not acceptable.

More on that in a moment, but what made Gray and Butler such exciting call-ups is that they represented an era of highly talented, well-developed starting pitchers who could truly be difference-makers for the team. I admit that I was putting more hope in Gray than I would have liked, simply because Butler has not panned out (yet). He was rushed to the big leagues, in my opinion, and the fact that he only seems to be getting worse raises serious concerns about coaching at all levels of the Rockies’ system. Gray’s debut had the potential to confirm or dispel those concerns for me.

Of course, you can only know so much from one start, and in the interest of not overreacting, it’s important to note that we need to see much, much more from Jon Gray before we can come to any conclusions. But I do have a couple of observations about him that encouraged me.

One, he’s very much a strikeout pitcher. He recorded four in four innings last night, including a particularly filthy swinging strikeout of Nelson Cruz in the first. His pitches have great movement, and he was throwing up to 97 mph last night. The biggest difference between Gray’s debut and Butler’s is the amount of strikes they threw. 56% of Gray’s pitches were strikes; 61% of Butler’s were. The MLB average is 62%, so from that standpoint Butler looks like the better pitcher.

But the Dodgers’ lineup hit Butler HARD; ten of those strikes became hits, four for extra bases. Gray gave up five hits, and only one went for extra bases. He only threw one pitch that stayed in the air for a while, and it landed safely in Brandon Barnes‘s glove. While Gray needs to work on pitch efficiency and throw more strikes, he looks like he has the goods to succeed long-term in a way that Butler didn’t.

Another thing Gray did well is make adjustments and settle down. To me, the first inning rarely tells an accurate story about a pitcher, particularly his first big-league inning EVER. A pitcher who can take his lumps, figure it out, settle in, and do the job is a pitcher I want, and that’s how Gray performed. He struggled a little bit in the third inning, mostly thanks to some crap defense, but without the first inning his line reads 3 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 2 K’s. He’d still have a 0.00 ERA. It’s a long season, and Gray will need to show a lot more consistency before we can be sure that’s the kind of pitcher he is, but I liked what I saw.

When Butler debuted last June, not only did he not settle in, he gave up three hits to Dee Gordon, including two triples. Without the first inning, his line still reads 4.1 IP, 9 H, 5 ER, 3 BB, 2 K’s. He did not make the changes that Gray was able to make.

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I have an overarching concern about all this young pitcher hype that goes back to what I said earlier about the bullpen. If I’m Jon Gray, my biggest takeaway from last night’s game is that it really doesn’t matter how well I pitch. The relievers probably won’t hold any lead I give them, and the defense probably won’t come through for me either. I liked what I saw from Jon Gray, but a good pitcher stands a much better chance at becoming great if he’s surrounded by a winning team that shows up for him every day. If I’m Jon Gray, it’s pretty clear to me that I don’t have that. His debut may have been better than Butler’s, but the Rockies lost both games.

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