Colorado Rockies: Is Germán Márquez tipping pitches? The stats suggest he is

Now, none of these numbers are great. Germán Márquez has a career wOBA of .318 as a starter for the Colorado Rockies, so each of these numbers are already elevated. But those jumps are pretty drastic. In his career, his splits look like this:

• No one on – .314
• Runners on – .324
• RISP – .329

For more frame of reference, here’s where league averages are for the 2022 season on each of these splits:

• No one on – .299
• Runners on – .320
• RISP – .320

So it’s not a shock to see hitters hit better with runners on. That trend is pretty consistent through the last five seasons also, generally seeing an increase in wOBA of between 12-15 points from 2017-2021. And we’re always going to have outliers, but Márquez’s gap is just too significantly large to ignore.

Now whatever Márquez is doing to tip pitches is happening most obviously when runners are on, but I believe he’s also giving up something when he’s in his windup that’s maybe not quite as noticeable for hitters but they’re still picking it up.

Let’s go back to his start on Wednesday against the Miami Marlins. In the top of the 3rd inning he faces Miguel Rojas with no one on and gives up a home run on an 0-1 slider. Check out the video from the Marlins’ broadcast and watch him talk to Willians Astudillo in the on deck circle after he rounds the bases:

These kinds of conversations on the on deck circle usually only consist one type of subject matter and it’s usually summarized by “Here’s what the pitcher’s doing” or “his pitches are moving like this” or something along those lines.

With how Astudillo reacts, it’s telling me that Rojas likely said something along the lines of “X means fastball, X means offspeed” and then something else that gives Astudillo that strange reaction.

Why was that conversation important for Germán Márquez and the Rockies?

After the Rojas’ homer, we see Jacob Stallings hit a single off of Márquez in the very next at-bat. This puts a runner on, but not in scoring position, which is where Márquez is his worst and where I believe he’s tipping his pitches the most. Astudillo is the next batter and hits the first pitch, a 93 MPH sinker, out for a home run to left field.

In the fourth inning, we have a similar result happen. Márquez walks Jesus Aguilar and the next batter, Jesús Sánchez, hits another home run off a 1-1 sinker. Márquez would go on to give up two more runs that inning, aided by fielding errors, and then have a clean fifth inning to finish his night.

So knowing all this, it begs the question: What is Márquez doing when runners are on to tip his pitches?

And I don’t have that answer, but I think I’ve found a correlation that lines up with the splits we’ve seen earlier.

When Germán Márquez is in the windup (no one on) he takes signs from the catcher. When someone’s on first, Márquez takes signs from the catcher. When someone’s in scoring position, Márquez and Serven/Diaz uses PitchCom.

Think back to Márquez’s splits here.

His wOBA is nearly 50 points lower with runners in scoring position compared to just having runners on.

I believe this points to the idea that whatever Márquez is doing when he’s taking signs from the catcher is a major factor in him tipping pitches. It could be the way he shakes his head, whether he looks into his glove or not, whether he looks over to the runner at first or not, whether he’s taking a deep breath or not, whether he fidgets with the ball in his glove or not.

Whatever it is, he’s at least not doing it as much when he’s getting the calls from PitchCom. And it’s certainly more noticeable when he’s pitching out of the stretch rather than from the windup.

This is pretty consistent through his recent starts too. He always takes signs from the catcher with no on one, always takes signs from the catcher with a runner at first and always switches to PitchCom once someone’s on second base. And after reviewing this closer, I think he should always be using PitchCom with runners on no matter what.

In today’s game, teams will do whatever they can to find an edge or find a tell with a pitcher and may go to great lengths to figure it out. There’s at least one National League team this year (that I’m aware of) that’s using facial recognition technology to figure out if pitchers are tipping pitches. If teams are taking those sort of measures to figure out a tell, they’ll find it.

Márquez needs to do whatever he can to limit the amount of times he’s tipping pitches. He’s still got a multitude of issues to figure out to get back to his normal self, but tipping pitches will only make positive progress that much harder to obtain.

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