Colorado Rockies: After mundane start for German Marquez, should we be worried?

FanGraphs has a great amount of Advanced Stats and Park-Factored stats that are always very helpful for evaluating Rockies players. Here’s what they say about Marquez’s first three starts:

5.73 xERA | 5.94 FIP | 4.89 xFIP | 86 ERA- | 137 FIP- | .318 BABIP

OK. So if you’re new to Advanced Stats, I’ll give you a quick breakdown here real quick:

xERA simply means “Expected ERA.” If we think back to Marquez’s 4.02 ERA, and see that it’s expected to be 5.73, that points toward the fact that he’s probably gotten very lucky. Think back to his start against the Dodgers where he gave up six hits, walked six batters, and struck out only two while giving up just a single run. Marquez has certainly gotten lucky in spots his first few starts.

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FIP (Fielder Independent Pitching) is a stat that measures the Three True Outcomes: Strikeouts, Walks and Home Runs. To make it simple, the more batters you strikeout, the fewer you walk and the fewer homers you give up then the lower your FIP will be. Think of it like another form of ERA. Now let’s look at Marquez’s FIP and oh no, 5.94 is NOT good. Given that his ERA is 4.02, that gap says that once again he’s gotten lucky. Now scroll over to his xFIP (Expected FIP) and we see it’s about a run lower. So it may not be as bad as we think, but it all points towards the fact that his stats should still be higher.

Now let’s look at the park-factored stats. ERA- and FIP- will essentially tell us how well Marquez is doing compared to what a league-average pitcher would do at Coors Field. Marquez’s ERA- checks in at 86. With a league average ERA- at 100, that means Marquez’s ERA is 14% better than average. That’s pretty good! Now let’s check that FIP- of 137. That means his FIP is 37% worse than a league-average pitcher would have on the Rockies and oh no, this doesn’t seem so fun anymore. That gap is certainly driven by the fact that Marquez is walking batters at a massive clip and striking out batters at a lower rate than he normally does. Not exactly something you want to see out of your ace.

But there’s more than the Three True Outcomes. They only account for around 35% of all results in the game on average, so what happens when the ball is put in play? Let’s look at Marquez’s batted ball profile with a combination of stats from both FanGraphs and Statcast:

38.3% Hard Hit% | 12.8% Barrel% | 60% Groundball% | 21% Soft Hit % | 23.1% HR/FB%

Were you confused by Marquez’s results already? Well, you’re about to be if you weren’t.

The first thing to point out is Marquez’s 60% GB% and his 21% Soft Hit%. Per FanGraphs, both of these would be career bests for Marquez. And those are certainly things contributing to his lower-than-expected ERA and are also a recipe for success not just at Coors Field, but for any pitcher. Get soft contact and have hitters put it on the ground and you’re very likely to succeed. His Hard Hit% of 38.3% would be the second lowest mark in his career. Yay!

Now, more concerning with Marquez is his 12.8% Barrel% and his 23.1% HR/FB%. Marquez has never allowed a Barrel% higher than 7.5% and has never had a HR/FB% higher than 20.1%. Both of those came in Marquez’s 2019 season but they also came alongside a K% of 24.3% and a career low BB% of 4.9%.

Of course, this is all based off a small sample size. Only six balls have been barreled against Marquez. That’s not many, but to put things in context: Marquez only allow 12 balls to be barreled in 2020 when he pitched 81.1 innings (he’s pitched 15.2 so far). In 2019 he allowed 38 balls to be barreled in 174 innings pitched. Marquez won’t end at 12.8% at the end of the year, but the early trend isn’t exactly looking all that positive for Marquez.

So the results are pretty confusing so far. Marquez is obviously being seen better by batters but it’s not resulting in runs. Are they seeing a certain pitch better than normal? Let’s see what Statcast tells us.

The first thing from Marquez’s statline on Statcast is that his xwOBA (Expected Weighted On Base Average) and xwOBACON (xwOBA Based On Contact) are both career highs for him, sitting at .388 for his wOBA and .433 for his xwOBACON. Neither are great for him, but both point toward some of the same things we’ve seen in his traditional and advanced stats: He’s getting lucky even while batters are seeing him better.

So now this means that hitters have to be seeing a certain pitch, or multiple pitches, better than normal, right? Is there something different in his pitch mix? Let’s get what we can from Statcast.

Colorado Rockies

In 2021, Marquez’s pitch mix is fairly similar. You’re getting mostly 4-seam fastballs and curves from Marquez with an array of sliders, sinkers and changeups mixed in. The biggest difference is more fastballs in 2021 (45.0% vs 38.5%) along with fewer sinkers (7.1% vs 13.9%) and fewer changeups (2.5% vs 5.3%). Throwing fewer sinkers and changeups is a good thing, though. They were two of the pitches that hitters hit the best against Marquez.

A stark difference this season, though, is how well hitters are hitting Marquez’s slider. In 2020, hitters had a wOBA of .205 against Marquez’s slider and in 2021 they’re posting a wOBA of .569 against it. Again, this is largely because of a small sample size against Marquez, but many of the stats suggest that hitters are hitting his other pitches similarly, so the stark difference in how well they’re hitting his slider should be concerning.

On top of that, hitters aren’t whiffing on his slider anywhere near as often as they did in 2020. Where he once got a whiff on 46% of his sliders in 2020, he’s only getting them to whiff 27.8% of the time in 2021. In fact, hitters are swinging at Marquez’s pitches less overall and potentially being more selective. In 2020 hitters swung at 48.9% of his pitches while in 2021 they’re swinging at just 41.4% of pitches. Maybe this is simply a divisional advantage since he hasn’t pitched against anyone outside of the NL West, but it also signifies that maybe hitters are seeing him better (as the other stats have suggested).

I’m a little concerned for Marquez so far in 2021. While this is only three starts, I feel that there’s enough here to warrant a bit of worry for what’s progressed this season. We’re seeing that he hasn’t had quite the control that we’re used to from him, resulting in fewer Ks and more BBs. We’re seeing that hitters are seeing one of his better pitches a little better than we’d like them to. And we’re seeing that a lot of the advanced stats say that he’s getting lucky. While I’m not worried that this is pointing towards him completely losing his touch (he’s not), I am worried that he may not have the same type of season that we’re used to out of Marquez.

Even though it’s early, are you worried about Marquez’s start to the season? Let us know in the comments.