Ivan Nova's Starting Debut

Written by Greg Fertel | 24 August 2010

I didn't get a chance to watch Ivan Nova's first career start, as I was at the Staten Island game instead. I still thought it would be interesting to take a look at his Pitch F/X data to see a bit of what I missed. Everyone is pleased with Nova's performance, and I don't think anyone could have expected much more from him.

Nova pitched 5.1 innings, gave up 6 hits, one walk, and one run. He also struck out three and threw just 73 pitches, 44 of which were strikes.

Looking through the data, the thing that jumps out the most is Nova's velocity. When he had two relief appearances earlier in the season, he averaged 92.8 with his fastball. In the offseason, Sean wrote that his fastball sits 91-94, so that fit in. Surprisingly, Nova averaged 94.4 in his first career MLB start, a very large and encouraging jump in velocity.

Pitch F/X got all 73 of Nova's pitches. He threw 47 fastballs, 18 curveballs, and 8 changeups. The curve averaged 82.9 and the changeup averaged 86.9. What I don't like is that Nova got no swings-and-misses on any of the curveballs that he threw. That brings him up to 27 career curveballs thrown in the majors with a 0 percent whiff rate. Batters did swing and miss at three of his eight changeups, though.

This could have been by design, and I don't know the counts that his changeups were thrown in, but only one of them was in the strike zone. As Sean also noted in his prospect profile of Nova, he has trouble throwing his fastball inside to right-handed hitters. We can see that happens here. This is probably Nova's biggest problem at this point.

Overall, I'm happy with what I see from the data. If any of you watched the game and have something else to chime in with, please do so in the comments. I'd be interested to hear more from people who actually saw Nova's debut.

(Edit, 3:50): Commenter Jamal G. fills us in with some things he noticed from Nova last night:

[Nova] definitely showed wildly inconsistent control of his curveball. Quite a number of them were non-spinners up in the zone, also.

I noticed something strange in Nova's pitch f/x but didn't want to just guess what it was. Jamal saying he threw a few non-spinners, which I think explains what I was seeing.

There are those four curveballs way out of place on the right side of those chart. I'd imagine those were the non-spinners. It was Nova's first career start, so he can be cut some slack for now.

Photo Credit: Warren Toda/EPA