For years, when you thought of the St. Louis rotation a guy named Adam Wainwright came to mind. For years to come, it’s looking like Jack Flaherty is the name everyone will know. He flashed some glimpses of stardom in 2018, but in 2019, he got even better. His 11-8 record doesn’t do his 2019 campaign justice, but a 2.75 ERA, 10.59 K/9 and 2.52 BB/9 surely do. He posted a sub-1.00 WHIP (0.97) and behind his strikeout stuff and improved command, he posted the 12th-highest strikeout to walk ratio among qualified starters last year.
Despite his ground ball rate dropping for the second consecutive year, he was able to induce more soft contact than ever before, and his average exit velocity was in the top nine percent of the league last year. Overall, barrel rate was slightly elevated, but not enough to be concerned about. He continues to ride his fastball, but has a good slider, curveball and sinker to work behind that.
His fastball is elite and one of the game’s best, and that was on full display in 2019. His velocity with the pitch continues to tick up, and his heater improved in the categories I like to look at, which are O-Swing%, Z-Contact%, and SwStr%. The first one, O-Swing%, is more so with offspeed pitches, but it applies here as well. All of the aforementioned marks improved from the years prior, and with his fastball, I love seeing the zone contact rate drop from 84-85 percent in 2017 and 2018 down to 81.6 percent in 2019. Additionally, the 9.8 percent swinging strike rate is above average, which is awesome.
His curveball took a step back in 2019, but it doesn’t mean that the pitch is terrible by any means. In fact, comparatively speaking, it still generates a whiff rate well above average. Since he entered the league in 2017, yes, albeit a very short stint, his O-Swing% and SwStr% for his curveball in 2019 were career-lows, and in three more at-bats ending with a curveball compared to 2018, it registered five less strikeouts. However, the one positive thing with his curveball in 2019 was that it was hit for a fly ball just 6.9 percent of the time, easily a career best mark.
The sinker might be a weapon he wants to utilize more. It resulted in a 77.8 percent contact rate in 2019, and opponents chased it out of the zone with frequency. Of course, that led to an uptick in swinging strikes on this pitch, which is key.
| O-Swing% | Contact% | SwStr% |
2017 | 27.3% | 87.0% | 5.4% |
2018 | 32.6% | 83.9% | 7.3% |
2019 | 37.3% | 77.8% | 11.3% |
Courtesy of FanGraphs
Could this be a product of throwing the sinker a bit harder and achieving a higher spin rate? I believe it’s possible. Again, the 2017 numbers a bit misleading, considering he only logged 21.1 innings on the mound that year.
| Pitch Velocity | Spin Rate |
2017 | 92.6 | 2107 |
2018 | 91.1 | 1989 |
2019 | 92.0 | 2009 |
Courtesy of Baseball Savant
All in all, he has an elite arsenal that boasts not two, not three, but FOUR pitches that are above league average in terms of whiffs per swing. Take a look for yourself at the chart below, courtesy of Brooks Baseball, using the good ol’ Z-Score to give us a measure of his pitches against the average.
| 2019 Whiff/Swing |
Fastball | 1.15 |
Sinker | 3.24 |
Slider | 1.50 |
Curve | 1.29 |
Courtesy of Brooks Baseball
Overall, it was a great year for Flaherty, but it wasn’t great from start to finish. His numbers were saved by a second half that can only be described as historic. In the first half of the season, which were his first 97 innings of the season, he posted a 4.64 ERA (17th worst among qualified starters) and 7.9 percent walk rate (27th-worst). Home runs were also a problem, seeing as only Reynaldo López , J.A. Happ, and Dylan Bundy had a higher HR/9 in the first half of the season than Flaherty.
In the second half, it was a different ballgame. He posted a sub-1.00 ERA, a vastly reduced hard contact rate and that was only the beginning of it. See the rest for yourself:
| ERA | AVG | K% | BB% | BABIP | HR/FB% | Hard Contact % |
1st Half | 4.64 | .234 | 26.4% | 7.9% | .273 | 20.0% | 40.8% |
2nd Half | 0.91 | .142 | 33.9% | 6.3% | .206 | 6.2% | 33.6% |
Courtesy of FanGraphs
It was a historic run over his final 99.1 innings of work for 2019, but can he parlay that into a full season in 2020? It took him a bit to get going, but he displayed that fantasy ace everyone was hoping he could develop into at the game’s highest level.
That strong second half catapulted him up draft boards, and his overall ADP at time of writing comes in as the sixth starter off the board. He’ll likely cost you a second-round pick, or perhaps an early third if you’re lucky, and he’s routinely coming off the board ahead of guys like Shane Bieber , Stephen Strasburg , and Blake Snell .
You can’t forget that the first half completely happened, but that second half is enough to have me all aboard the Flaherty hype train in 2020. Is there some risk, sure, but no more than some of the other guys behind him. Chase the upside here with Flaherty.
Statistical Credits:
fangraphs.com
baseballsavant.mlb.com
brooksbaseball.net
nfc.shgn.com/adp/baseball
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