The first outside the organization transaction by the Tampa Bay Rays this offseason was done on Tuesday, sending 2b Akinoria Iwamura to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Jesse Chavez, a right-handed reliever. Basically a salary dump at a crowded position by the Rays and in return, getting a young middle reliever with a live arm. Here, I will take a look at the newest Rays through the eyes of stats, scouting, and pitch f/x.

Stats

In his second career season in the Majors, Chavez sported an okay run, appearing in 73 games and throwing 67.1 innings. The reason for his high ERA and FIP was likely caused by an average strikeout rate at 6.3 K/9 and a fairly high home run rate at 1.5 HR/9.  Good control having a low walk rate, command needs a little work and the high BABIP might be bad for 2010. He wasn’t used too heavily in high leverage situations, but at 26, he has room to grow into them. An interesting thing to note about Chavez is his platoon split:

The Rays could use a right-hander who can get lefties out. They would obviously want Chavez to get right-handers too but having a reliever who won’t be affected by a platoon split let’s Joe Maddon have a little more freedom of putting him against multiple hitters.

Scouting

I am not much of a scout, but I will try anyway. Chavez’s delievery looks pretty clean with a nice and easy motion and timing his separation of the hands during the leg lift. The thing that scouts will drool about is the fastball coming in the mid-90s even reaching the upper 90s. He includes two off speed pitches a slider in the high-80s and a changeup with good tailing action. The smooth and simple delivery isn’t going to be too deceptive to the hitter. However the separation on the velocity of his pitches is where Chavez get his deception.

Pitch f/x

Not too much in depth with Jesse Chavez and pitch f/x as I learn more about him. For now, we can look at the basic Gameday data for Chavez. His fastball averages about 94 mph, topping out around 96-97 mph. His slider comes in hard at around 88 mph, hitting 90 mph at times. And finally his most used off speed pitch, the changeup, averaging 85 mph which would be a 9-11 mph separation from his fastball.

The run values per 100 pitches from Fan Graphs has the slider as Chavez’s best pitch at 3.16 runs. The fastball is in the negatives at -.72 and the changeup also in the plus range at .89.

Although I should have corrected the pitch types, we can see those three pitches of Chavez by their spin movement.

Average four-seam, changeup, and slider movement with obvious bleeding in the classifications by Gameday. Note that Chavez likely throws four-seamers over 90% of the time. Expect that to change very quickly as he transitions under Jim Hickey next season.

Here is how he spreads outs those pitches.

As with most right-handed pitches, the changeup is thrown more so to left-handed hitters than right-handers. His changeup must really be good since he pitches against right-handers so well. The slider is good pitch as we will see in these next charts which show Chavez’s location of his off-speed pitches.

The changeup location which includes in play and swinging strikes marked.

Chavez does show he has command of the changeup, regularly getting it low and away to lefties and able to get contact on the outer half of the plate. For right-handers however, it might be a show me pitch since Chavez has left some up in the zone, but he did get some hitters to whiff outside.

Now for the slider.

Not as precise as the changeup. The slider does get a lot of hits in play on the lower half of the plate, and then some swinging  strikes off the plate against right-handers. Then there those swinging strikes to lefties that appear to those sliders which barely miss the batter’s back leg.

That is it for now with Jesse Chavez and pitch f/x. I need more time to get to know him in order to analyze him fully.

Although the trade favors the Pirates greatly in terms of the value of the players, both teams do acquire players they need. For the Rays they save half a million and get a young reliever with a nice arm. And the Pirates are being the Pirates.

Stats from Baseball Reference and Fan Graphs