The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Jose Ceda

Many popular opinions of pitching prospects are formed from general scouting reports. While these reports are invaluable resources, they can’t always be trusted. Hundreds of minor league hurlers are credited with “mid-90′s velocity,” but very few MLB starters actually have that grade of heat, for example. It’s incredibly frustrating to hear about a pitcher with “a mid-90′s heater and plus curve,” only to have him come up to the big leagues and show a fastball that averages 90.5 mph and a slider.

When a pitcher come up to the majors, we can finally get a foolproof reading on what exactly his arsenal is comprised of, thanks to the great Pitch F/X system. In this series, I analyze just that–the “stuff” of recently-promoted MLB pitchers. Now that they’ve achieved their big league dreams and thus factor directly into the MLB picture, it’s high time that we know exactly what these guys are providing.

This time, I’m taking a look at Marlins reliever Jose Ceda.

Unlike every other pitcher who I’ve profiled in this series thus far, Jose Ceda actually did have some brief experience in the major leagues in 2010. Still, he remains a guy who seems mysterious to many.

Personally, I think that a lot of the intrigue around Ceda is based around the fact that he’s a huge guy who was said to touch 100 mph in the minors. I hate to break up the narrative, but he simply doesn’t have that grade of heat. Ceda touched 97 mph once or twice in the majors this year, but most often was at 91-96, averaging 93.3 with his fastball. That’s good, but hardly exceptional for a righthanded reliever.

Okay, so with my “HE DOESN’T ACTUALLY TOUCH 100, GOSH” axe sufficiently ground, let’s actually look at what Ceda provides. After all, whatever his velocity, he put up some pretty impressive minor league numbers on occasion, including a 53/13 K/BB in 39 2/3 innings in Triple-A this year, good for a 1.36 ERA and 1.91 FIP.

The 24-year-old righthander, despite a reputation for being just a pure power guy, actually has a reasonably complete arsenal, with the fastball, a big-breaking 83-88 mph slider, and a diving splitter in the 83-86 range.

Against righthanders, he’s almost exclusively a two-pitch guy, throwing the fastball:

And the slider:

The basic pattern here is “fastball up, slider down,” which makes sense–Ceda’s fastball is pretty straight, and the best asset he has with it is the leverage his delivery and high release point provide up in the zone.

The result is that the slider gets more strikes to righties (69.5%) than the fastball does (62.3%), and even gets a slightly higher percentage of called strikes, but the fastball’s swinging strike rate is 13.1%, which is incredible for a heater, while the slider’s 13.4% whiff rate is merely above-average–not a surprise since Ceda seems to be trying to just throw the slider for strikes and the fastball for whiffs. It’s kind of a counterintuitive approach, but it does seem to work, as Ceda put up a 2.15 FIP against righties in the majors this year.

Since his overall FIP was 3.37, it’s not hard to guess that Ceda had trouble with lefties, and indeed, his FIP rose to 5.88 against them. That’s not particularly surprising–lefties have a better look at the release of his fastball, and sliders have a high platoon split. His fastball strike rate actually rose to 66.7% against lefties, but its whiff rate (10.1%) was worse, as well as that of the slider (11.1%). The slider also saw a big decrease in overall strikes (61.1%).

Ceda’s splitter did prove quite effective to lefties; he only threw 24 (18% of his pitches to southpaws), but five drew whiffs. As is the case with most splitters, he doesn’t throw the pitch for strikes. Like, ever…

Ordinarily, I’d say he should use this sort of a whiff-generating pitch more, but that would increase his already-troublesome walk rate to lefthanders. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Ceda were to occasionally bring the pitch up, though–if he were to throw every third splitter in the zone, he might be able to expand the pitch’s usage and phase out the slider to lefthanders.

Ceda’s mechanics, while they do give him good leverage to throw the fastball up, are kind of a mess, and he’s not going to start painting the corners anytime soon. As you can see from his location charts, he tends to aim for an area rather than a spot, and while his stuff is good enough for him to carve out a role doing that, it’s not so good that he can be elite with this sort of below-average command. He’s a perfect guy to use against tough righty hitters in the sixth through eighth innings (he could throw the ninth too, if it were against mostly righthanders, but few managers would be flexible enough with their bullpen to do a “closer platoon” like that), but will need to take some sort of step forward to be a true back-of-the-bullpen guy.

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