Collette Calls: Breaking Down Matt Moore

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Updated on November 25, 2015 9:14PM EST

After taking a short break to do some work for the magazine, the player breakdown pieces are back! I would like to thank each of you that read this column and came up to me during the First Pitch Forums in Arizona to offer your support and feedback to the work here as well as the podcast Paul Sporer and I do over at Fangraphs. I truly appreciate the readership and feedback, especially when fantasy baseball enthusiasts are gathered in one place. Many people asked me about my thoughts about Matt Moore over that weekend and I figured I would make him the focus of this week's breakdown.

While it feels like I've written about him many times in this column, apparently I've done so just twice. The first article was filled with a lot of hope while the second one is rather depressing to re-read as it was also published the morning before his MRI results came out with the bad news. This one will be a mixture of both.

Moore had his surgery in mid-April 2014. Many assume a pitcher will be back a calendar year later, though that isn't the case for everyone, especially a pitcher with the Rays (keep this in mind for Alex Cobb this year). Moore did not take the mound to pitch in a game until June 3 when he pitched against the Fort Myers Miracle in the Florida State League. Moore made three starts for the Charlotte Stone Crabs and worked

Tampa Bay bumped him up to Triple-A Durham over Father's Day weekend and he made two starts – both against the Columbus Clippers. In the first game, he struck out seven batters in 5.1 innings, but allowed seven hits including two home runs. He threw another five innings the next time out and struck out eight while allowing eight baserunners. In between those outings, Moore went to St. Petersburg to work out in front of club officials on June 23. The coaches decided Moore needed one more outing in Triple-A while Moore did not see eye to eye with them on that.

He finally made his 2015 debut on June 2 against Cleveland and did not look good at all, allowing eight baserunners while giving up four runs in 4.2 innings. Sadly, that was about as good as he looked in the six outings he made for Tampa Bay before they sent him back down to Durham. In those six outings, Moore had an 8.78 ERA and 2.06 WHIP. He pitched 26.2 innings in six starts and allowed 42 hits, 26 earned runs, 13 walks, 17 strikeouts and allowed four home runs.

He went back to Durham and made five starts in August and pitched as if that ass-kicking he took in July got through to him. He pitched 30 innings that month, striking out 43, walking eight and allowing 23 hits and 11 earned runs while holding the opposition to a .207 batting average. The Rays added him back to the big league roster when rosters expanded in September and he went 2-1 with a 2.97 ERA and 1.16 WHIP over six starts. Overall, Moore went 4-2 with a 3.12 ERA after his demotion with a 4:1 strikeout:walk ratio and allowed fewer hits than innings (55 hits in 66.1 innings).

There are a few things to look at when trying to figure out how Moore turned things around. One of my favorite stats to look at is swinging strikes, which are a nice judge of stuff because the batter thinks they have the pitch squared up only to come up empty. Moore made his first major league start in late-September 2011 against the Yankees. In that game, he piled up 15 swings-and-misses in 84 pitches. That season, Moore had double-digit swinging strike rates in all but two outings in the minor leagues and five times had at least 20 swinging strikes. In 2012, Moore had double-digit swinging strikes in 23 of his 31 outings, though that number dipped to 12 of 28 in 2013. During his first six outings last season, Moore had just one game where he had at least 10 swinging strikes, as he simply wasn't fooling many batter. He ended up with 44 swings-and-misses in six outings – a total he eclipsed in his final three appearances in Triple-A. Over his final six major league outings, he generated 16 whiffs against Baltimore and 17 against Boston in the middle of the month and had two other outings with at least eight.

Velocity was certainly part of the issue as well, and Moore wasn't the same in July as he was in September.

His four-seamer also showed more life as the season went on, as it wasn't the slow, straight arrow in September that major league hitters enjoyed pouncing on in July.

Increased velocity and movement on his fastball equaled better results. Imagine that!

We don't have the data to pull up all of the indicators from the minor leagues, but the pre and post-demotion splits for Moore hammer the point home:

Month	TBF	CONTACT%	STRIKE%	SWSTR%	ZONE%	1ST STR%	Z-CONTACT%
July	132	81	62	9	46	59	91
Sept	146	76	67	11	55	61	84

Moore was struggling to locate his pitches within the zone, but when he did, there was a lot of contact. That happens for a few reasons: falling behind in the count and having to throw fastballs for strikes. If a pitcher is missing some velocity and falling behind in counts early because they can't throw strikes, batters are sitting dead red on pitches in the zone. Pitch command is always the last thing that comes back for pitchers coming off Tommy John surgery and Moore was no different than the others. After his return in September, his command was noticeably better in the big leagues and so were his results. It truly was a night and day experience for Moore throughout the summer:

SPLIT	TBF	K%	BB%	K-BB%	AVG	WHIP	ERA	BABIP
July	132	13	10	3	.362	2.06	8.78	.400
AAA	121	36	7	29	.207	1.03	3.30	.297
Sept	146	20	7	13	.237	1.16	2.97	.267

I'm not saying to go back out there and draft Moore as you did a few years ago as if nothing ever happened to him. My advice is that his overall numbers hide his progress, and while he may never be a pitcher who works deep into games, he certainly showed improvement late in the season when not many people were paying attention.