Parker Messick Wins American League

In a world defined and cheapened by soulless and repetitive performance, The Cleveland Cavaliers are undeniably themselves. Make no mistake, the mistakes and shortcomings of the watchdogs are the result of that same illegal capitalist power; they are trying to compete with teams with less strong owners in trendy areas. Those limitations have shaped the Guardians into something gnarled and strange and sometimes unsightly, like a tree with knots growing on a rockface, or an octopus that has evolved to live in the dark 10,000 feet below the ocean.

It’s not always traditionally good, but it’s different.

Here it is, in mid-May, and Cleveland has regained first place in the AL Central. (Don’t look at anyone’s track record in this category, I’m making a point.) Not everything has gone well for the Guardian so far this year, but they’re getting contributions where it counts. Especially from Parker Messick.

In Detroit, they make cars. In Seattle, they make airplanes. In Cleveland, they turned first-round college guys into reliable major league starters. Shane Bieber has been the most successful example, but think again: Tanner Bibee, Aaron Civale, Zach Plesac, many Logans Allens… and now Messck, who is the second player coming out of Florida State in 2022.

Messick is far from an unspoken prospect; he made it to the majors last year and posted a 2.72 ERA in seven starts, while staying one under the rookie eligibility limit. His fastball clocked in at 93 mph, which is about average for today’s baseball, even for a left-hander. But Messick has plenty of quality pitches and throws plenty of strikeouts (only six walks in 39 2/3 innings last year), so his 2.72 ERA is backed up by a 3.06 xERA and 2.98 FIP.

That doesn’t mean everything in less than a quarter of a season, but it’s encouraging.

And Messick didn’t slow down in his proper rookie season. Eric Longenhagen and Brendan Gawlowski rated Messick as Cleveland’s no. 5 prospect (and No. 82 overall) this offseason. Messick’s 50-FV mark put him on par with Travis Bazzana and Khal Stephen, among others.

Their prediction for Messick was that he was a high-level, different kind of prospect, because of his command and ability to change speeds. Sometimes those skills are treated as an afterthought because they’re not as flashy as watching Jacob Misiorowski throw 115 mph, but if you can throw strikes and change speeds, you can pitch successfully in the majors with a low-90s fastball.

The question is: How much can Messick do?

First, though, he’s a fun striker to watch. In one legal episode, Eric and Brendan described him as “tricky athlete” and “husky but very loose.” (If I were single, I would put “husky but super loose” in my Tinder bio.)

Messick is listed at 6 feet and 225 pounds, and unlike his taller, spidlier counterparts, he has short legs and a torso shaped like a Jersey barrier. Athletes with this body type don’t usually worry about fastball speed and offspeed stuff; you often hear terms like “pad level” and “back line of the ball” in their inspection report.

He wears tight pants and his sweater is loose; he cut the sleeves of his undershirt below the elbow, pulled up the socks and moved them up to his knees. All this increases the illusion of cubicality, and makes him look like a swingman in the 1950s. His delivery starts with an exaggerated arm swing and progresses to a powerful drop-and-drive combo.

But once the ball is out of his hand, Messick’s straight front leg arrests his forward momentum and his other three limbs do more or less what they will. I clicked on “Random Video” on Messick’s Baseball Savant page and the first pitch I saw made him end up like this.

Finishing like an angry goose, with the sleeves cut off, Messick reminds me of Bob Gibson, if that’s not an insult to say.

Good. Give me 100 more Messicks than a 6-foot-4 lab-grown right-hander from the Metroplex. This is a guy with college talent who still maintains the energy of a college boy.

Like most modern big league starters, Messick has a diverse arsenal of hitters on both sides of the plate. For lefties, it’s a four-seamer, sinker, slider, with occasional curveballs and a changeup. With righties, a four-seamer, a cutter, a switchup, and the odd sinker thrown in to keep everyone off balance.

All things considered, that’s pretty orthodox. Last week, I wrote about Davis Martin’s pitching progress; when you plot the two-plane motion profiles of his offerings, Martin’s arsenal looks like an arch, with his curveball closed alone.

So does Messick, although he has a clear separation from one pitch to the next.

If I had to choose, I’d say Messick’s best pitch is his four-seamer machine. That might sound absurd, for a six-pitch starter who only throws in the low 90s, but this isn’t like most four-seamers.

Messick, being short and stocky of a pitcher, and since he makes a three-quarter arm angle from a low delivery, produces a baseball from an angle hitters don’t often see. Of the 318 players who have thrown 250 or more pitches this season, Messick is 240th in strikeout average. But his arms ratio, 43.1 degrees, is 100.

There are 78 pitches with a lower vertical release point than Messick, and 99 with a higher arm angle, but only four have both. His four seamers also have an inch more rise and three inches less arm break than the average fastball of that velocity. So hitters who look for fastballs and good guesses will see this rising, cutter-like thing coming at them.

And they don’t hit well. Messick’s 4-seamer has a whiff rate of just 0.3 points less than Tarik Skubal’s. His strikeout rate for four players, 31.4%, is among the top 30 in baseball. He is also in the top 30 in xBA for his four-seamer, and in the top 15 in xwOBA and HardHit%.

Opponents are hitting just .170 on Messick’s 4-seamer, but here’s the thing: They’re not hitting better than .250 on any of his six pitches. His only pitch with a HardHit% over 29.0% is his sinker, which is only played 22 times.

There are three things at work here that made Messick difficult to beat. First: His Command. Not just in the sense that he doesn’t go with anyone, but in the sense that he can find his different platforms where he likes in and around. Pitching is like real estate, says Bill James: The three most important things are location, location and location.

Second: Messick can change speed and movement to both sides of the plate. In addition to his four-seamer machine, he has two outfielders who swing arm-side in different speed bands, and second basemen who break down the side’s gloves — including a cutter, new this year — in three different speed bands. That’s a lot of real estate for a hitter to cover, on three axes.

Mainly because – and there is none. 3 – nothing Messick throws moves in general. I’ve talked about his unusual rise and cut fastball from a strange combination of release point and arm angle. It’s not that the fastball has crazy action in any direction; it’s a little weird.

All of Messick’s pitches are like that. He throws six pitches, each breaking in two directions. All six of his pitches have at least two inches of deviation from normal in at least one axis; three of them have a difference of at least two centimeters in both.

So even if a hitter finds his pitch and repeats it well, he can swing where he should change and miss the barrel, if not the entire at-bat. Messick’s breaking balls both land below the average pitch of that velocity, but both have great arm-side movement.

Check out Messick’s headshot on MLB.com. He smiles. And it should; this is the face of a guy who knows he’s about to knock over anyone who walks into the box. It doesn’t look normal, and it probably won’t work forever. But it’s working now, and that’s enough for Cleveland’s purposes.