Hey, everyone, Welcome back to another edition of the Cubs on Tuesday podcast.

Today is Shoda Emanaga Day.

So over the past week, a lot of discussion has been had about Shoda Emanaga's contract.

Will the Cubs pick it up?

If they don't pick it up, what a Shoda gonna do?

But also what happened to Shoda?

This was a guy who at one point Grek Council described as the Cubs ace and he ended twenty twenty five without pitching in the elimination game.

It was a drastic contrast from what we saw from Shoda in twenty twenty four, what we saw a little bit in twenty twenty five.

Up front when the season started after the injury, really the wheels just fell off.

So over the next twenty minutes, this is what we're gonna do, And as far as the off season goes, I think this will be more or less what you can expect, individual player breakdowns, What were the trends, what we're looking at, if we should be concerned, encourage and so on.

I do want to say upfront, like we can look at all the numbers and dive into all these different trends, but do know, like this is public data.

This is fan driven.

I'm a fan, right, so I don't have the full snapshot, and I'm not gonna come on here and make sweeping conclusions.

I'm just gonna read off notes and kind of talk openly about what I'm seeing, and you know, sometimes it ends up being accurate and more or less a depiction of what's actually going on.

Sometimes you're just overstating conclusions and stuff isn't really there.

But at the same time, we do have fancy new tools and evaluation metrics, some of which are actually customed to this podcast.

So if you want to know what's going on with certain players, I'm gonna try my best here and you can take it or leave it.

I'll tell you why I'm looking at certain things and how I got there, and you can make your own opinion and all unsertain my opinion and my interpretation.

But again, just full preface how I come to.

Some of the conclusions just may not be real, and I acknowledge that, but it's still part of the process.

Okay, So let's begin.

So Showdas started his Cub's career as we know pretty well.

So in twenty twenty four, finish the season with a two point nine e ua pitch one hundred and seventy three innings.

His k per nine was over nine, his walk per nine was under one and a half batters per game.

His FIP was three point seven.

It was a phenomenal year, and we're all thinking crazy thoughts that the Cubs got a cost of four picture for under market value given the production.

The contract at the time was four years, forty three point twenty five million dollars, an annual average value of just under fourteen as a reference point, if you look at what teams typically spend on free agents and just projected wins, you're looking at around you know, give her take nine to eleven million dollars per win.

So for the Cubs perspective, the way they are probably looking at this is that by guaranteeing fifty four million, again give her a take, you're trying to get around five or so wins in four years, or roughly slightly below league average value that you would get on there.

So for the Cups case, absolutely getting three wins in their first year exceeded their expectations, and Jed Hoyer evens that and it almost made up for about half the value.

A little bit more than half the value of the contract in year one.

Fast forward to this year, so what were the numbers at the end of the year.

Eira was actually still pretty good, so one hundred and forty four innings a three point seven ERA, but the difference was just the amount of home runs he gave up.

He gave almost two home runs per start per nine innings.

A lot of those home runs came in the second half, and it was the principal driving reason why he didn't pitch in Game five of the NLDS.

That culminated in what's called a FIP a Fielder independent pitching stat just scaled to ERA it was around five, So that's just reflecting he was giving up too many home runs and not getting the amount of strikeouts he got last season, so more balls in play, and all of those balls and player they were just going for home runs.

That's what now as result of that underperforming second half in overall twenty twenty five, the Cubs have a decision to make.

If they pick up his option, then that contract turns into three years and fifty seven million dollars, so that's around twenty million dollars for the next three year.

If they decline that option, then they guarantee two years at thirty million dollars.

It showed it has the decision of whether to elect free agency instead of coming back for that thirty million guaranteed.

Let's say he does that.

Let's say show to thinks, Okay, I can get more than thirty million on the market, I'm going to elect free agency.

Okay, Well, then the Cubs can counter with a qualifying offer around twenty two million dollars he comes back for on twenty two million dollars.

If he doesn't he goes to free agency, the Cubs get a compensation pick that will be the order of operations.

Just to put this up front, what I think is going to happen is the Cubs do decline that three year, fifty seven million dollar quote unquote extension of this contract for two years at thirty million dollars at the end of twenty twenty six.

Let's say Showhy does really well.

Let's say he replicates what you saw on twenty twenty four.

If you accept a qualifying offer for one year, then you get you know, twenty two million, but not getting thirty million, and you're hoping you rebuild your value that way.

You can at least get eight million for the following season.

I think it makes a lot of sense from both parties to just, you know, just have it be thirty million for the next two years, guarantee revisit this after twenty twenty six and go from there.

So with that being said, what the hell actually happened?

I mean, it really is stark if you consider what we saw and just the words we heard from coaches to the endpoint of him not pitching in Game five, just a weird, weird way to end the season.

So this is what I do when I'm trying to understand different pitching trends.

The first thing I do is I text my pitching coach friends, so have you noticed anything and show hey, look at the video.

Does anything stand out when we don't see stuff that's obvious, which is the response I got when I asked about showed out to some of my friends.

I then turned to everyone's favorite thing, numbers, right, And I know everyone gets a lot of flack about being into numbers and stuff, but listen, we're telling stories over here, and there are limitations numbers.

But when you can't see it with your eyes, at least I need a little bit of a magnifying class.

And that's what the numbers do provide.

So one thing that I start with is a method that reduces every single stat cast number possibly downloadable.

Okay.

When I say reduce, imagine that you're trying to find a pattern.

Okay, and you're trying to figure out among all these different mechanical numbers release point and spin rate and spin axis and horizontal angle, all of that.

Every single thing is overwhelming.

I'm not going to go one by one.

I'm not cycled like that.

I don't have time to be doing that.

I use a method.

If you're in you know, the numbers world, you're gonna maybe roll your eyes.

And because there's limitations to all of this, but I use a method called principle component analysis.

This allows me to at least get a snapshot of global trends by taking every number and I get to reduce it down into two numbers literally number one and number two, two variables, and then I can see which stack cast numbers are most responsible for those two variables.

This is how I zone in on certain trends.

I just find the most what I say, salience or clearly visual trends that differentiate every single pitch show hey, has ever thrown in his career.

So if you consider this, like, let's give an example.

Let's say you're in a high school cafe area.

Okay, typically friends sit next to their friends, right, Typically the popular kids will sit next to the popular kids.

The nerds will sit next to the nerds, and those are what's considered clicks or in this case, populations.

Right, they're similar to one another.

This is kind of how you can approach this sort of analysis.

You're looking for pitches that are similar to each other.

But at the same time, I'm looking for pitches that are dissimilar.

I'm looking for the difference between the popular kids and the nerd kids.

I'm trying to figure out why they're different.

That's what principal component allows us to do.

Visually, I can go into the quote unquote pitch cafeteria and pull apart those clicks.

That's exactly what I did.

So I downloaded every single pitch.

I was gonna say, show, hey, I'm watching the world series over here.

Every single pitch showed it has ever thrown.

And here is what came back.

Number one was release extension.

This was the number one most significant differentiator of his pitches over time.

It's what pushed apart the clicks the popular nerd kids.

In this example of all Showda's pitches, it was release extension.

I'm like, all right, well that's a little bit interesting.

So when you look at the release extension, this is what happened in the second half of twenty twenty five.

He gets injured early on and he misses about I think it was six weeks or so.

It comes back end of June.

After he comes back, you start seeing that release extension shortened, so the distance between where he throws the ball and where the ball ends up at home point to give you a reference point in twenty twenty four.

In the early part of twenty twenty five, he was around six point three to six point five feet of extension.

By the end of the year he was around six point one point five is six point two feet, so he you know, he went down by about four to five inches.

Uh.

That did happen towards the back end of twenty twenty four, just not as significant as this.

The decline for SHOWDA in extension curd about around the All Star break.

You may remember he was throwing really slow against the White Sox in the latter part of July.

That's the point at which you started to see that extension go down.

Okay, so that was a few stars after he came back from that hamsing injury, and then the extension went down.

I'm like, all right, well that kind of makes a little bit of sense.

So then what happened after that?

The splitter?

Weirdly enough, the velocity went up, So the fastball velosity was down for a little bit, but the splitter velocity went up.

So I'm looking at this, I'm like, what the hell is going on?

Or splitter veloscit is going up.

Spin rate on the splitter went up as well.

I'm like, all right, well, the splitter kind of spins at around thousand RPMs shot up to around twelve to fifty thirteen hundred.

By the way, for splitters, you don't want it to spin.

You want to kill the spin.

Don't want spind, you want to kill that spin.

So the splitter VLO going up and the spin going up is probably not what Shoda wanted.

What ended up happening, Uh, splitter moved more.

That's not good for SHOWDA.

When I say it moved more, it moved with more run more tailing action, so that pitch was not north the south.

That pitch did not drop off the table, it kind of moved more horizontally.

You may start to jog your memory, like, you know what, Yeah, like some of the pitches looked like they were leaky, like over the middle of the plate.

That kind of makes sense, and the numbers on the splitter, their run value kind of back it up.

So in the latter part of twenty twenty five, his weighted on on base average with that pitch was around three hundred.

Just to give you a reference point, when he was at his best, his weight on base average on that pitch was around two hundred.

So again we're jumping up here by about you know, thirty percentage points of lost run value.

Whiffs were down by about ten percentage points as well from twenty twenty four.

Not good, not good at all.

The fastball did follow a similar path, so the extension, of course, was not just because of the splitter.

The extension was across all of us pitches, and for Shoda, the carry on his fastball was also affected, and his forcing fastballs tended to have more run on them.

It was not as north to south as we were accustomed to the scene, or at least point was slightly higher.

But you're looking at a fastball shape that had more run and a splitter that had more run.

Both those pitches lost or north the south profile.

In the fastballs case, the vello was inconsistent and was down.

For the splitters case, it was much higher.

That is really one of the definitions of his second half.

And when we got to the playoffs.

I started noticing in September, and I swear to god, I was texting Corey this.

I do the Cesgo Cubs podcast with Corey, been doing it for a long time.

I texted Cory this, I'm like, why is he throwing so many sweepers.

I may have mentioned this on their show too.

I'm like, I don't know why they're throwing so many sweepers.

And they were throwing sweepers to rities.

I'm like, what is going on here?

At the time, I wasn't really in tune to what you Shoto was going through.

And by the point of the NLDS he had to increase his sweeper usage threefold.

That from September in the majority of twenty twenty four and he started throwing sweepers more to right handed batters.

Why is that important?

Sweepers were his pitch type that he threw to lefties.

He needed a pitch that evaded the barrels of lefties.

He didn't really throw that pitch to right handed batters.

So the fact that he was throwing that pitch more in to Riety's, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense to me.

He had given up no home runs with sweepers or right handed batters.

In the second half of twenty twenty five.

He gave up six home runs with the splitter and fifteen home runs with the four stem fastball.

Obviously, his attack profile against Raty's was damage.

Whether it be confidence or just a lack of feel, it was damaged.

So it's possible, And if I were to draw some conclusions here, again, you would always want to ask, you know, the coaches and Hordity and you know, show to himself.

It's possible that they went more sweeper because the splitter shape wasn't there.

You saw that in Milwaukee in the game where he gave up the home run to Andrew Vaughn.

Go look at that replant.

Do you want to know what pitch that was?

It was a sweeper inside to Vaughn Inside, actually off the plate inside that Vaughn turned on.

It was the only home run show that gave up to a right handed batter on a sweeper the entire year.

I'm like, you gotta be kidding me right now.

Of course, it comes off of that.

He just didn't bury the pitch that much, and that's the risk profile with a pitch like the sweeper to opposite handedness that doesn't have as much bite.

That's always the risk, and that's the risk they played.

He also threw, you know, a splitter, and he got hit pretty hard as well.

I believe the contraris for someone else that I think my mind blanked after that.

Okay, so let's review what we saw from Shoda.

So I first started with ask some coaches, you see anything on Shoda.

Nothing really stood out to the eye test.

The second thing I did was I just downloaded every single pitch he's ever thrown.

I used a data reduction technique to take every one of his stackcast numbers to tell me which ones are most salient or in the example I gave, which ones separate out his individual pitch types over time the most.

The answer to that question was release point, and it was too slight differences in the movement profile of his pitch, but mostly release point and mostly the velocity differences between the fastball and the splitter.

So then when you look at the splitter in the fastball, the splitter velo went up over time as his release succession went down.

Over time, the splitter spin rate increased, likely unintentionally, that led to more run on the pitch.

That led to fewer whiffs led.

The more pitches inside the zone led the more damage, more power, more run given up.

The fastball had a difference in shape profile as well.

Like the splitter wasn't moving north to south, it was moving more horizontally, tons of damage on the fastball.

Overall, what you can draw from this is that the pitch shapes were not what we saw in twenty twenty four at all, So now cannot be rectified.

And I don't have an answer for that.

I don't know.

He wasn't moving off the mound like he did in twenty twenty four.

Now, clearly the first thing that comes to mind is, well, did the injury come into play?

Came back from the hamstring injury, you know, three four starts later then he started seeing everything kind of just go off the deep end.

The mechanics were out of sync.

He wasn't even in sync before that, So you're talking about layering on stuff that he was dealing with before the hamstring injury.

I think that's fair too to question that.

And again, the coaches and showed the are going to be the ones who would provide that feedback.

So let's say it is somewhat injury related or just not injury directly, but just the consequences of not having the ability to correct mechanical problems because of dealing with you know, rehab and the injury.

Well, if that's the case, then you're still looking at an aging pitcher who just turned thirty two, will be thirty three by next postseason, and we know what happens when aging pictures just can't get off the mounds as fluid or as capable as they once showed.

The most recent guy that comes to mind is Jake Arietta.

Jack area very different mechanics, so it's not an Apple See Apples comparison, but Jake just couldn't get off the mount like he used to super crossfire Jack Arietta and he saw the effectiveness basically immediately, So we're dealing with age related risk profiles with Shoda one that's difficult to parse out if the hamstring is related to the potential age or it's just an anomaly.

If it's an anomaly, then by spring training.

I'm looking at that shape, I'm looking at what he's talking about, and I'm hoping that we can get some type of profile that we saw in twenty twenty four.

At the same time, I'm assuming he's coming back on that two year, thirty million dollar guarantee fifteen million per year.

If it's not going to come back at that and your paying showed a twenty two million dollars on a one year contract, I don't think the cops are going to spend that money or risking that.

I think they're going to use that twenty two million that would be again that qualifying offer.

They're going to take a risk on a different profile.

They're not going to take a risk on a profile that's going to result in a thirty three year old with two pitch types that are very sensitive to slight mechanicals differences.

Maybe maybe I'm wrong, and of course everyone has their own opinions on how to project some of these weirdness in these trends.

But that would be what my gut would tell me is they're not going to spend twenty two million on show, Hey fifteen million and the guarantee.

Yeah, that's that's fine.

You get depth the other way.

Now, the question is, well, what is my gut tell me if this is fixable or not?

I honestly don't know.

And you may hear me say, oh, I'm not copying out.

I really don't know.

I don't know if this is injury related or not.

I'm not comfortable with this.

Frankly, I'm not comfortable with it because he has limited margin for error.

So if he's going to be out of sync with this mechanics this slightly and it results in so much damage given up, that doesn't really sit well with me.

Right, Like, we're talking about just a little difference in a released extension, and who knows what's causing that that manifested in a splitter that wasn't north to south, that had more velo, that had more spin unintentionally that that was getting hit and a fastball that was hardly not that's being dramatic, a fastball that was slightly different in shape in twenty twenty four in the form of more run that resulted in fifteen home runs in the second half.

Like, like, that's just a profile.

That's very it's risky, it's risky, and yeah, it just kind of sucks to think out loud that that's what it's resulted in.

It doesn't mean I don't think Shoda can rebound, right, Like, he's a brilliant guy.

I mean, they call him the pitching philosopher in Japan for a reason.

So at the same time, am I going to bet against Shoda?

No?

Absolutely not.

I mean maybe he even knows what needs to be addressed and who'll address it, Like maybe this is a nothing.

I mean, he's thirty two years old.

It's not like he's thirty eight years old.

He's not like he's you know me, can't wake up in the morning without back paying.

Like he's a professional athlete.

So he could very easily come back in January and February to Mesa looking like his normal.

It does highlight though, in general, just the value of having harder stuff showed this stuff is spectacular when it's at his best.

That that Carrie foreseeing from a low release point with that splitter, that just ghosts and evades bats, but you can see when mechanics get out of get out of sync.

Not having the extra three to four miles per hour of velo hurts him because you just you don't have any margin for air.

Or not having a tight breaking pitch at ninety miles per hour would have helped him in this case, would offset some of the power he gave up.

And you just don't see that.

I'll end it there.

Yeah, disappointing from showed it at the end.

I mean, I know he's trying his best.

Disappointing from his perspective too.

It just sucks that he couldn't bitch in Game five.

I'm like watching that game, and as as valuable as Colin Ray was in that second half, I'm watching the game.

I'm like, you gotta be kidding me, Like the season's on the line.

We got Colin Ray facing the heart of the order in the fourth inning.

How the hell did we get here?

It was a weird season, and I think showed as kind of a microcosm of the bad that happened in the season, whereas Colin Ray was a microcosm of the unexpected good.

But unfortunately that good just wasn't good enough.

I'm gonna leave it there.

We'll talk next week.

Different player will come up.

Hopefully that gives you kind of an overview of how we're gonna go about just looking at these players.

I just want to take it down.

I got my notes out over here.

I'm trying to do the best I can to tell the story.

And then maybe when spring training rolls around, you can hear Tommy hottaf you talk about this stuff, or show to talk about this stuff, and you'd point back, like, you know what, I remember them talking about the glitter and the shapes and the RPMs and the spinner and a Vilo and all that stuff.

That's what I'm hoping to do here.

Talk with you next week.

Go cops,