Scouting the Trade Market: Sonny Gray

If you go back and review Part 1 of the Giants Pitching Depth Chart, I think you will see the Giants need to bolster the pitching rotation if they have designs on competing in 2019.  While the free agent market has several interesting possibilities, almost every team can use more pitching and the prices may be high.  That's why ears stood up when the Yankees announced that Sonny Gray is not in their plans for 2018 and they are looking to trade him, a highly unusual pronouncement which is almost certain to suppress his trade value.

Bay Area fans know Sonny Gray well.  The A's drafted him #18 overall out of Vanderbilt in 2011.  He made his MLB debut in 2013 with immediate success posting a 2.67 ERA over 64 IP.  The next 2 seasons were ace-like with ERA's of 3.08 and 2.73 with over 200 IP each season. He was limited by injuries to 117 IP in 2016 and his ERA ballooned to 5.69.  He rebounded with an ERA of 3.43 in 97 IP in 2017 prior to a deadline trade to the Yankees.  Yankee Stadium and the AL East are both very unfriendly pitching environments, so not surprisingly his ERA bumped up to 3.73 after the trade. What is surprising is just how badly 2018 went for him.  He struggled all season, especially in Yankee Stadium and got demoted to the bullpen after getting booed off the mound while giving up 7 runs in 2.2 IP on August 2. After the season, Yankees GM Brian Cashman stated, "We're entering the winter open-minded to relocation....It's probably best to try somewhere else."

I starte to write this as a Trade/No Trade Smackdown.  After digging into the data a bit, I decided it really wasn't much of a contest as the evidence for Sonny Gray as a bounceback candidate almost anywhere but Yankee Stadium is almost overwhelming, so much so, it's hard to know where to start.

Let's start with the ballpark.  Yankee Stadium is an extremely difficult place to pitch, more so for RHP's due to the short porch in RF.  Although it inflates runs by a small factor of 1.025, it inflates HR's by a whopping 1.3.  Gray's Home/Road splits show an ERA of 3.62 on the road compared to a 7.71 at home.  It appears that the difficulty of pitching in Yankee Stadium got to him more than most pitchers for some reason.  When you factor in other AL East ballparks Boston, Toronto and Baltimore, it is apparent that simply getting out of New York and out of the AL East would probably fix Gray without any other adjustments.

That brings us to repertoire.  Sheryl Ring wrote up a nice article for Fangraphs back in April about how the Yankees were likely ruining Sonny Gray with their pitching philosophy.  It seems that the Yanks don't like their pitchers throwing fastballs.  Since joining the Yankees, Gray's FB usage plummeted from over 50% to around 25% with compensatory increases in Cutter and Curveball usage. Ring's theory, without really offering proof, is opposing hitters were not offering at breaking balls out of the strike zone because they weren't seeing enough FB's to set them up which increased his walk rate and forced him to come into the strike zone with FB's after falling behind in the count.  Beyond that, Gray's FB velocity held steady at 93.8 MPH, he maintained a strong GB rate and a steady K rate.

So, there you have it.  Get Sonny Gray out of Yankee Stadium and the AL East then take the leash off his fastball and you have the perfect bounceback candidate.  There may be other teams thinking along the same lines and the Giants probably can't win a bidding war for prospects to send to the Yankees, but they definitely need to do more than kick the tires on Sonny Gray.