KANSAS CITY — Shane Bieber threw only 166 pitches before his season abruptly ended. Gavin Williams has thrown zero. Triston McKenzie’s next start will come against the Toledo Mud Hens.
Despite a mess of a starting rotation — a rare development for a longstanding pitching factory — the Guardians reached the midpoint of the season on pace for 104 wins, which would rank second in franchise history.
Williams will make his long-awaited return to the big-league staff this week with a start against the White Sox. He’ll replace McKenzie, whose search for answers will shift two hours south to Triple-A Columbus.
“I don’t think he’s far off,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said Sunday morning in the visitors dugout at Kauffman Stadium. “I think he needs to go down there and take a breath and get back to being himself. We see the stuff. The stuff is there. It’s the command.”
McKenzie totaled only 16 innings last season because of shoulder and elbow injuries. He opted to rest and rehab a tear in his right UCL rather than undergo Tommy John surgery. He has insisted all season he hasn’t felt pain. Vogt and team president Chris Antonetti also contended that health isn’t the issue for McKenzie.
“Our medical staff works with him every day,” Vogt said. “Triston is healthy. He feels great. We see it. The velocity is up. The stuff is there.”
McKenzie topped out at 95.6 mph on Friday, his oomphiest fastball of the season. His past three outings, he registered his three best average fastball velocity marks of the season: 92.2 mph, 92.9 mph and 92.6 mph.
It hasn’t mattered, though, because the pitch continues to get pummeled. Hitters have posted a .303 average and .652 slugging percentage against McKenzie’s fastball this season.
2021: 16 home runs allowed on 1,216 fastballs
2022: 13 home runs allowed on 1,575 fastballs
2024: 16 home runs allowed on 683 fastballs
McKenzie boasts a devastating curveball and slider, but he hasn’t had the fastball — and, more to the point, the fastball command — to set them up properly. Three metrics that all tie together tell the story of his 2024 season: walk rate, chase rate and barrel rate.
He’s falling behind in the count a ton, hence the 14.4 percent walk rate — more than double his walk rate from 2022, when he was a borderline ace — which ranks in the league’s 3rd percentile.
First-pitch strike rate in 2022: 62.5 percent
First-pitch strike rate in 2024: 52.9 percent
League average rate in 2024: 61.0 percent
Hitters aren’t chasing his pitches out of the zone.
Chase rate in 2022: 32.0 percent (75th percentile)
Chase rate in 2024: 22.2 percent (4th percentile)
As pitching coaches like to say, a breaking ball with a bunch of movement is only effective if the hitter will chase it. It’s easier for a hitter to resist a curveball that plummets out of the zone when ahead in the count. And if they can resist it, they know they’ll set themselves up to get one of those juicy fastballs they can obliterate.
McKenzie’s barrel rate: 13.0 percent
League average barrel rate: 7.0 percent
Hitters are feasting on the fastball when they know McKenzie needs to throw a strike. They’re making contact on his pitches in the zone 87.1 percent of the time, an extremely high rate.
Salvador Perez and Hunter Renfroe go back-to-back for the @Royals. pic.twitter.com/5BanzTqqaZ
— MLB (@MLB) June 29, 2024
The end results: a ton of walks, a ton of home runs and a ton of questions about a guy who was a trendy Cy Young Award pick before last season. In his past three starts, McKenzie has totaled 7 2/3 innings, 12 earned runs, 11 hits allowed (five home runs) and 11 walks.
“It needs to get better,” Vogt said. “Triston knows that. He’s aware of it. He wants it, too.”
A midseason reset in the minors benefitted McKenzie in 2021. He delivered a seven-start stretch in August and September of that year in which he logged a 1.76 ERA, with a .385 opponent OPS.
The Guardians are hopeful this trip to Columbus will pay similar dividends because their rotation needs every ounce of help it can receive. McKenzie isn’t the only shaky starter; Logan Allen and Carlos Carrasco have higher ERAs and have similarly saddled the bullpen with extra work.
Cleveland’s rotation ranks last in the majors in fWAR, 22nd in ERA and 26th in innings. The hard-throwing Williams is a welcome addition, though Antonetti said he’ll initially be on a restricted plan.
We have signed LHP Matthew Boyd.
Welcome to Cleveland, Matthew!#ForTheLand pic.twitter.com/wOFiGNlLPJ
— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) June 29, 2024
The club signed veteran lefty Matthew Boyd to a major-league deal, but he isn’t expected to join the active roster until sometime in August as he completes his recovery from Tommy John surgery. He’s throwing live bullpen sessions and will eventually ramp up to rehab starts. It’s an interesting union, with Boyd trusting the Guardians to restore him to health and set him up for free agency this winter and the Guardians confident he can offer a lift to the staff for seven or eight weeks.
It’s too early to forecast how the July 30 trade deadline will shake out. Boyd arms the Guardians with another option for later, a dose of insurance. Only a handful of teams have emerged as surefire sellers at this point, so price tags for starting pitching — the top priority for many contenders — are high. That’s not unusual at this juncture on the calendar. As the deadline nears and teams feel more urgency and the identities of buyers and sellers become clearer, more productive dialogue will take place.
That’s a few weeks away, though. The Guardians can’t bank on the trade market to serve as the remedy to everything that ails them. They need a more reliable rotation to help them survive the second half, let alone navigate the postseason. A confident, strike-throwing McKenzie would go a long way.
“We’re the best team with Triston on it,” Vogt said. “We need Triston.”
(Photo of Triston McKenzie: David Richard / USA Today)
