You could argue that Julio Urias is the most effective starter on the Dodgers staff this season. In fact, you could posit that he’s been the team’s most effective pitcher, period, going back to last season. Urias keeps improving, and his ERA keeps dropping…but can he become an elite pitcher? I’m going to make the case for it here (with one caveat).
We’ve heard a lot about hard-hit balls lately, especially when it comes to Corey Seager. He leads all of baseball with 28 hard hits. The next closest is Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr., who has 26 (Although that might’ve changed by the time you read this). When a ball is hit into play with an exit velocity of 95 miles per hour or more, it’s considered a hard hit. Pitchers are also affected by this stat, as I’ll explain further on.
Not every pitcher is going to have a high whiff (swinging miss) rate to help mow down their opponents. So they have to rely on other methods to keep batters from reaching base and scoring runs. Some pitchers force a lot of ground balls to produce outs. Others induce tons of fly balls that stay in the yard.
Whatever the method, the pitcher has to keep the hitters off balance. If batters can guess pitches correctly while consistently maintaining an accurate swing path, there’s a good chance the skipper will make a mound visit with a finger point toward the bullpen.
Every pitcher will generally get their outs in a particular way (ground ball, fly ball, strikeout, etc.). Urias, statistically speaking, is the most balanced on the Dodgers staff. How so? Going back to 2019, Urias has a 25.1 strikeout percentage and an 8.4 walk percentage. Both stats sit in the middle of the ranks among Dodger pitchers with at least 40 innings pitched since the start of the 2019 season. His line drive, fly ball, and ground ball rates also lie in a similar zone. These stats signify that he can’t really be categorized as any kind of specialist when it comes to getting outs.
What puts him ahead of everyone else on the pitching staff is the number and rate of hard hits he’s allowed. Urias has given up the fewest hard hits among all Dodgers starters this year, and his hard-hit rate is the fourth-lowest among the whole pitching staff. This goes back to last year, where he had the fewest number of hard hits per batted balls in play among the 17 pitchers on the team with at least 100 batted-ball events. Urias sat within the top one percent in hard-hit percentage in 2019. So far this year, he’s in the top six percent.
It should go without saying that hard-hit balls have a higher chance of leaving the yard. Since 2019, Urias is tied for third lowest in home runs allowed per nine innings and second lowest in home runs allowed per fly ball among pitchers with a minimum of 90 innings pitched. Only six pitchers (including Zack Greinke, Liam Hendriks, and Frankie Montas) fall in the top ten of both of those categories. Among that group, Urias’ 2.47 ERA is the second lowest.
Urias has been able to keep batters from squaring him up, reducing the chances of giving up the long ball, which in turn has helped keep his ERA low. But how does he compare to others in batting average and slugging percentage against? Has keeping hard contact at a low rate translated to keeping runners off the bases?
Using the sample size of at least 90+ innings going back to 2019, Urias is ranked seventh in MLB in BAA and 18th in BAA with balls in play (BABIP). Most impressively, he’s ranked second in SLG% out of 152 other pitchers.
So, Urias is good. He’s better than good. He’s one of the more proficient pitchers in all of baseball, and he’s flying below everyone’s radar. Why is that? Bear with me, there are a few more stats to come, but empirical data equals validation.
Julio Urias has 31 starts in his major league career dating back to 2016, when he made his debut in New York at Citi Field against the Mets. In just over half of those starts, he was able to record at least 5.0 IP. He’s only gone six innings in six starts! In fact, the furthest Urias has gone is 6.1 IP. That’s it.
To be fair, it shouldn’t be overlooked that he dealt with a shoulder injury that caused him to miss nearly all the 2017 and 2018 seasons. The injury also meant the front office reined in Urias’ playing time in 2019, using him largely out of the bullpen (albeit with occasional spot starts). In total, he’s only racked up a total of two years and 117 days of service time. So, in essence, we’ve only gotten a small taste of what the 23 year old can do.
This year is the very first time Urias has been slated as one of the main cogs in the Dodgers rotation. Three games in, he’s averaging five innings an outing, better than the sub-four innings per start in 2019. But, if that average should drop, even with extended rosters and a stellar bullpen, it will be a problem. Worst-case scenario, it might see him back in the bullpen. Although his last outing was for only four innings (the lowest this season), Doc saw it as a blip on the screen.
Urias’ inability to extend his outings was summed up in Doc’s presser following Friday’s game. “He worked a little harder than he needed to,” said Roberts, “[Urias] wasn’t pounding the strike zone; getting ahead as much as we would like.”
Urias has fallen behind more batters than any other pitcher on the team this season. Of the 61 batters faced, he fell behind 24 of them (nearly 40 percent). To put it simply without being too elaborate, he hasn’t had much control of his off-speed and breaking pitches. Urias can pinpoint where he puts his fastball, but his secondaries just aren’t landing in or near the zone much. That will be something to keep a close eye on, not only this season, but moving forward in his career. The movement on his secondary pitches is nasty. Once he can command them, it’s going to be a ton of fun watching him.
Oskar is a writer for Dodgers-Lowdown. Follow him on Twitter @2Rawsko94. Photog credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea (USA TODAY Sports)