Emerson Hancock might be cookin’
A Hancock chalk talk
For giving up a run in the first inning of Emerson Hancock’s last start, Wednesday against the Angels, it was a pretty good inning. He located his pitches well, pounding the edges of the zone, and he picked up a couple whiffs, which has been the missing piece for Hancock. The three hits he allowed–all singles–only came off the bat at 77, 81, and 85 mph. He followed that up with more of the same in the second, including throwing a sinker with so much run that the lefty-batting Gustavo Campero ducked out of the way only for the pitch to run back into the zone for a called strike. Suddenly I found myself thinking, “What is this? What is happening? Am I enjoying watching Emerson Hancock pitch?”
Turns out, yes! Emerson Hancock had become fun to watch. Although he’d been the highest draft pick of the Dipoto Era (at number six overall in 2020), Hancock had struggled to live up to his elite pedigree. And as time has wound on, he’s settled into a role as Seattle’s sixth starter rather than the top-of-the-rotation piece many envisioned. But he’s refined his arsenal to the point that I’m no longer that worried about the Mariners throwing him out there when they have to.
The Hancock roadblock remains an inability to miss bats. To be sure, there are signs of life on that front as well, having picked up eight whiffs against the Angels and 12 against the Red Sox in his start before that. It’s hard to be too encouraged by that however, since those two teams are running the second- and third-highest swinging strike rates in MLB this year. (Don’t look up who’s fourth.) A pitcher who doesn’t miss bats can make up for it either by getting more called strikes—which Hancock has improved a bit—or by inducing weak contact. And it’s this latter point that’s got me doing the Hancock sweet talk.
No longer getting the results against his four-seamer that he did as an amateur, he’s really worked on his sinker to make it the foundation of his arsenal. He’s throwing it almost 45% of the time this year, up from below 30% in each of the past two years. One reason why is that while it’s always had good horizontal movement, Hancock is now in rarified air. He’s got it up to 19 inches of arm-side run. A little more carry could turn the pitch into something truly dangerous, as right now it stays on a pretty flat plane. So considering that it does just stay on just the one plane, it’s all the more important that the pitch runs all the way across that plane. The result is a Hancock wind sock, pointing due west, with the eighth-best run among the 368 hurlers throwing a two-seamer. There goes the Mariners Pitching Factory again, working to create elite traits on a starter’s fastball.
Amplifying that, Hancock has added a new arrow to his quiver in the form of a sweeper. That’s a great pitch to complement a sinker since it moves in the opposite direction. He’s only thrown 14 of them thus far, so the jury’s still out on just how good of a pitch it is on its own. But the idea makes perfect sense to pair with the improved two-seamer. Watch Trevor Story. Hancock started him off with a sinker. And so here he is, ready to keep his hands in for something that’s going to move toward him, instead flailing at this sweeper that floats away instead.
The combination creates a Hancock spatchcock, splitting the zone open. Horizontal movement tends to improve a pitcher’s batted-ball quality, and for Hancock, it’s got batters’ average exit velocities way down. They might be swinging in the right plane, and thus able to connect, but they’re often getting the handle or the tip of the bat on the baseball rather than the barrel. That profile can go awry, since batted ball luck is a fickle mistress. Indeed, in Hancock’s first start this year, he couldn’t make it out of the first inning, despite an average exit velocity of 88.3. But consistently generating weak contact is going to work more often than it won’t, and, especially with a much-improved infield defense, the Mariners can afford the risk.
Still, when you’re giving up a lot of contact and things do go wrong, you can find yourself having surrendered a run or two and traffic on the bases. And as much as Hancock’s pitching has improved, his profile makes it especially important to prevent an inning from snowballing. The mindset ought to be exactly what Hancock told Kate last week: “You can’t control broken bats and where the ball goes from there. The only thing I can control is the intent and the commitment when I throw it, and after that everything else is out of my control.” But that’s easier to say than to do. So, since it’s especially important for a contact manager, I’m strongly encouraged by Hancock’s visibly improved mound presence.
Take Wednesday’s start. In the third inning, he got Camparo to check his swing on another sinker, but baseball is gonna baseball, and Camparo’s bat made contact with the ball by accident. The ball dribbled down the third base line slowly enough that Camparo reached first safely and he somehow got to third on a 74-mph single. When Zach Neto then hit a humpback line drive, Leo Rivas deliberately let it drop right in front of his glove in an attempt to try to turn two. If that had worked, the inning would have ended, but Neto’s contact was so weak (59.8 mph) that the defense couldn’t get the second out. Instead, Camparo crossing the plate from third counted for a run. It was a frustrating sequence of events, and Hancock lost it a little, walking the next batter on four pitches.
This is where Hancock has gotten into trouble in the past. Particularly during his time in AA, a couple bad things would quickly turn into Hancock shell shock, and the whole inning would spiral. But on Wednesday, Hancock showed a new maturity, recovering to get a weak grounder, which ended the inning and allowed him to cruise through another two frames. Asked after the game about what he’s learned, he said, “You just have to keep attacking, keep throwing strikes. You can’t fall behind guys. You get a couple baserunners, give up a couple hits here and there, your only option is to just keep going after them, trust your stuff and try to make the best pitches you can.”
Certainly, there’s still aspects of his game for Hancock to unlock. Having upgraded his east-west profile with the sinker-sweeper, I’d like to see him do the same on the north-south axis, which is where you miss more bats. He’s got the right pitches for it with a four-seamer/change up combo. And he’s commanding his change up as well as anyone in the game right now:
But to really take advantage of this, I’d like to see more four-seamers on the top rail, and even above the zone, whereas so far he’s been landing them just below the letters. That should make the pitch better all on its own, since a high fastball would take advantage of low arm slot to create a flatter vertical approach angle. But combine that too with playing off the change up, and his four-seamer could really start getting guys swinging under and over the ball, adding strikeouts to his weak contact generation. If he pulls that off on top of the improved horizontal pitches and his matured mound presence, you just might start to see his starts look like a Hancock cake walk.