Red Sox Have A Craig Kimbrel Problem, But Is It Temporary?
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- Do the Boston Red Sox have a Craig Kimbrel problem?
Certainly, if one were to only look at the work of the closer in the first three weeks of the season, the answer would be a resounding yes, with Sunday night's serving of a gopher ball to Colby Rasmus providing the exclamation point.
Of course, Kimbrel is not an unknown commodity. He's got seven years experience in the big leagues. He's led the NL in saves four times. He owns a career 1.71 ERA and 0.932 WHIP. He routinely touched 98 mph on the radar gun. So in the long haul, he'll probably be all right.
But in the interim, it hasn't looked good for the Red Sox' new closer, whose ERA ballooned to 5.00 after Sunday night's performance.
Yet while the closer was not happy with the result, Kimbrel said he threw the right pitch to Rasmus.
"I wouldn't say it was a bad pitch, but it was a bad pitch to him," Kimbrel said. "He's swinging the bat good. It was down, kind of into his swing, and he put a good swing on it and tied the game."
The pitch was a 98 mph heater down in the zone, but it caught much too much of the plate, allowing Rasmus to tie the game with a 433-foot blast to right-center field. Catcher Ryan Hanigan said Kimbrel just wasn't comfortable with his breaking ball (he threw just four curveballs compared to 15 fastballs), but even with that being established, the pitch that got sent out of the ballpark wasn't a terrible one.
"Really, the ball Rasmus hit was down, it's 98, just tip your hat," Hanigan told the Boston Herald.
The discrepancy between the fastball use and the curveball use is in line with the season as a whole, as he's used the fastball 79 percent of the time, and the curveball just 21 percent of the time. It's typically been closer to a 70-30 split in his career. But again, just because he wasn't feeling the curveball Sunday night doesn't mean he couldn't have retired Rasmus with a well-placed fastball. He just simply missed.
"That's the question any time you get beat -- should you have thrown a different pitch? No," Kimbrel told the Herald. "That was the pitch I should have thrown. It was just a bad location. Any time you leave it over the plate, it's got a chance to get hit, and it wasn't where I was trying to throw it."
As for Kimbrel going forward, the results certainly haven't been there, but the pitches have. Per Fangraphs, the 27-year-old is averaging the highest fastball velocity (97.2 mph) and the highest curveball velocity (87.5 mph) of his career. He's given up fly balls at a much higher rate (68 percent) than his career number (35.8 percent), while his strikeout numbers remain intact (16.00 K/9).
While Kimbrel does have five walks in nine innings, his walk rate (5.00 BB/9) isn't significantly higher than his career mark (3.40 BB/9).
So, really, it's a matter of improving location, something that can result in fewer walks and more bad contact, which will turn many of those fly balls into ground balls and, thus, turn some of those hits (and home runs) into outs. And there's reason to believe he should be able to do that: In his career, he has a 3.03 ERA in April, the highest of any month of the season. His career ERA in May is 2.76, it's 1.29 in June, and it drops to a sick 0.84 ERA in July and 0.76 ERA in August. He's someone who has tended to get better as the season heats up (and in Atlanta and San Diego, it got quite warm).
In that sense, it's probably not worth overreacting to some shaky outings in the early going for Kimbrel in Boston. It's worth monitoring, yes, but when you combine the track record with the fact that he hasn't lost any velocity, it's fair to believe Kimbrel will pitch at the All-Star level he's established since 2011.
And while the bad outings have been without a doubt bad, it's not as if he hasn't had some dominant showings. Sunday night was the first time he's allowed multiple hits in an outing, and he's only allowed a single hit in three of his other nine appearances. He's had four outings in which he didn't allow a base runner at all, and even in his ugly outing Sunday night, he struck out two batters.
The Red Sox do have a Craig Kimbrel problem in the sense that he has not been wholly dominant in his first 10 outings. But just like with David Price, for now the smart move is to look at the pitcher's entire body of work to gauge expectations going forward, rather than try to attach some sort of outside influence (new league/division, the "pressure" of Boston, etc.) to explain the up-and-down start to the season.
You can email Michael Hurley or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.
