Is Bailey Falter a Piece?

5-19-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter

Baseball is funny.

If you’re a player who gets drafted high, come up through the minor leagues with little resistance and then look good in your first few starts in MLB, you probably have fans and the team seeing you as a piece.

If you’re a player who wasn’t drafted high, didn’t have a linear path to where you are, you probably never wake up on a sunny morning feeling totally secure about your spot on the roster.

More than that, a guy like Bailey Falter doesn’t throw anything that to the common fan looks like it should get outs. I mean, here in Pittsburgh we just got done watching Jared Jones and Paul Skenes throw absolute gas at the Cubs and toss Pitching Ninja looking breaking balls for swords. Followed quickly by this lanky lefty who looks like he’s playing catch with a toddler at times.

It works, but it doesn’t make sense, and even if it does, you know damn well, Paul and Jared can have a day where they miss spots and their stuff probably makes it ok, Bailey can’t afford to have anything off or everything is.

All of that is actual observation, it doesn’t take into account that Bailey wasn’t seen by fans as someone who should be here. Not good enough, unserious, proof the Pirates weren’t trying to win, trying to prove they were right, trying to salvage a trade, whatever, you’ve heard it all. Overcoming this stuff doesn’t come for most players.

Most fans for one thing aren’t watching every outing Bailey has for the Bucs, so they don’t get the cumulative effect of being able to look back a little and recall how repeatable he looks like he’s worked his delivery into being. Even if they are, there’s just no way he’s ever going to impress you the way some of these other guys are. You can watch him win as many games as anyone on this team and tell yourself he’s great, but you put him in a lineup with 5 or 6 other guys who throw harder and you’ll find it hard to pick him every single time.

So what does Bailey do that makes him click? Or more to the point, this is his 4th season in the Majors, what the hell happened?

When Bailey started out in the league, he was a sinker heavy pitcher and he’s become all about his 4-seam.

This is probably the most extreme illustration of a guy evolving to what the league is showing him and how drastically things can change for a guy when he goes from one organization to another.

I mean, look at what happens right around where the Pirates acquired him for Rodolfo Castro in 2023. The changeup is completely removed from his mix, he barely threw any to begin with, and it was replaced by a split finger that he also rarely uses. Not much of an answer there, guys toy with some kind of a timing pitch all the time, that’s all that is. Slider and curve are pretty consistently just show me pitches. I mean he uses them, and effectively, they’re actually nice pitches, but his 4 seam fastball is so deceptive, it almost becomes self defeating to try to throw a whole bunch else when it’s working.

That’s the real change, how consistently he’s been able to make sure it’s doing exactly that. It’s an incredible pitch and helped by something the Pirates, specifically Oscar Marin values. Extension is a measurement that speaks to how far down the mound the pitcher goes before releasing the ball. Or, think of it this way, the better you are at this, the closer it appears to the hitter you are.

On this one, admittedly tiny subset of a subset of statistical analysis, Bailey Falter is in every sense of the word elite. And that’s like…ALL he’s elite at. Well, how he controls his pitches too.

And the association of that extension number and his ability to control it makes his fastball what?

Yeah, ELITE.

The Pirates traded a struggling rookie infielder with big power potential for a Starting left handed pitcher with one elite skill, from a team that was in the thick of a playoff chase, looking to improve. Bailey Falter had become a project there, a guy who performed well in 2022, and was struggling in 2023, and worse he was out of options. Legitimately, the Phillies and Bailey Falter were out of time. Not unlike the Pirates with Roansy Contreras.

The Pirates were short on starting pitching and grew frustrated with Rodolfo, knew the option situation and dealt with him for the rest of 2023 in the hopes they could work with him in the offseason and maybe find something decent to fill a void.

Marin focused on that extension measurement, they built out a mix of pitches they thought might work and to the credit of everyone involved it’s worked brilliantly.

This year he’s pitched to a 2-2 record, 3.53 ERA in 9 starts. He’s racked up 51 innings already, he could give them as many as 200 this year and with Jones and Skenes being limited, they’ll be valuable. His WHIP (Walks, Hits, Innings Pitched) is pretty impressive, 0.98.

Because of the kind of player Bailey is he’s always going to be on the razors edge. He has one thing that makes him elite and if it falls off in any way, so will he. Lose an ounce of velocity, ouch. Stop getting that elite extension by a fraction of an inch, uh oh.

Even then, he’ll never blow anyone away, nobody will ever look at Bailey Falter and think he’s the best bet when you have hard throwing, high spin arms right there with much more room for error.

This man will be eligible for arbitration for the first time next year. The Pirates, if they so choose can have his services through 2027, and if they do, nobody will care if he did it throwing 75% 4-seam fastballs.

Bailey Falter has become one of the best stories on this Pittsburgh Pirates team in 2024, and that’s a team with two rookie of the year candidates and a recently extended veteran anchor.

If you were one of the few, the proud who thought he’d be this good, or at least love to say you did, congratulations, you, Oscar Marin and Ben Cherington deserve a beer on me. The fact is, Bailey has a very narrow way to succeed, and he and the team have identified it, and executed it.

You never know.

Not that we’ll stop pretending we do.