Cleveland Indians: Josh Tomlin Has Become a Problem

After posting great results for the Cleveland Indians, Josh Tomlin is doing just the opposite

For a while this year, Josh Tomlin looked like he had finally settled into the major leagues. The 31-year-old had spent many years shuffling back and forth between middling results with the Cleveland Indians and better ones with the Columbus Clippers, but this year marked a change in that trend. Through the All-Star break, he owned a 3.51 earned run average. 

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Still, there were warning signs that things were not truly as good as they appeared. In fact, I warned Cleveland Indians fans to beware the Josh Tomlin trap one month ago. Despite his results looking great on the surface, especially to those who favor the win, advanced metrics suggested that his work was a mirage. This discrepancy left the Cleveland Indians in a precarious situation: any trades for a replacement would be highly unpopular, but a collapse would be even more so.

The team decided not to land any starting pitching depth, whether it come in the form of a Quad-A player or a solid starter, and no one thought anything of it at the time. Now, it appears to be a regrettable decision, as Josh Tomlin has collapsed. Since the All-Star break, he owns a 6.44 earned run average – which is a whopping 54 percent worse than the average pitcher – and opposing batters have slugged a devastating .516 against him.

To make matters worse, he has been shelled in his last two starts. Allowing a total of 14 runs in just 8.2 innings, he has tanked his seasonal earned run average from respectable levels to a pitiful 4.18.  Even projection algorithms foresee the misery continuing, with both ZiPS and Steamer envisioning poor results down the stretch.

Another problem with his last two starts is that they were not against teams with excellent offenses. In fact, the New York Yankees have one of the worst batting groups in the American League, and the Washington Nationals have only been slightly better than the average team. Tomlin even got to face pitchers when playing the Nationals since it was an away game.

Most concerning of all is that there are no glaring changes in his pitches. Brooks Baseball is a great resource for finding PITCHf/x data, and its velocity chart for the right-hander shows no big drops for either start. If anything, his pitches actually had better velocity for those games. The same can be said for his horizontal and vertical movement – his stuff moved the same way during both his good and bad starts.

Since we cannot find a culprit in his pitches, let’s see what he has to say himself. During a post-game interview with Jordan Bastian of MLB.com, Tomlin noted that the long ball came back to haunt him during his most recent start against the Nationals. He commented that they usually come with no one on base, but that has not been the case as of late.

Here lies the crux of the problem. As I noted last month, Tomlin had been lucky with having balls land in gloves that usually would not have. Now that these rates have normalized, there he has been unable to prevent baserunners at such an impressive rate. So instead of allowing many one- or two-run home runs, he has been allowing much more damaging dingers.

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This is not to say that Tomlin will continue to allow seven runs each start for the rest of the season. He will probably still have some good starts and some bad ones, but it is unlikely that we will see results along the lines of what happened during the first half of the season. While this will definitely hurt the Cleveland Indians in their playoff hunt, it is unlikely that it will completely derail their season.