Nick Martinez Doesn’t Need Strikeouts

Picture peak Kyle Hendricks. He didn’t blow hitters away, but he sure recorded a lot of outs, deceiving hitters with a flurry of cutters, sinkers, and changeups. All of those pitches traveled in a similar tunnel; hitters couldn’t help but hit the ball with the thin part of their bat. Even late-period Hendricks manages to sit atop the hard-hit rate leaderboards in spite of a 87-mph fastball. His ability to do so is a function of his arsenal, which is designed to keep hitters off balance and off barrel.

They’re the same age, but Nick Martinez just spun up a peak Hendricks season, reliably generating yucky contact on balls in play. Those results earned him a qualifying offer of $21.05 million from the Reds, which he reportedly accepted on Sunday.

When the Reds initially proffered Martinez a QO, I saw a hefty helping of both consternation and skepticism around that decision, but I think it holds up well. Sure, Martinez doesn’t strike out a ton of batters. But who needs strikeouts when you’ve got routine fly balls?

To think Martinez is unlikely to deliver $21 million of value for his club in the 2025 season, you have to believe that the ability to generate weak contact is fluky, subject to the vicissitudes of randomness. But that belief might be misplaced.

As Eno Sarris and Derek Van Riper discussed on a recent Rates and Barrels episode, defensive independent pitching statistics theory, or DIPS theory, might be heading to its grave. DIPS held that pitchers lacked control over batted ball outcomes, leading to statistics like FIP, which sites like FanGraphs use to define pitcher value. But analyses early in the Statcast era found there to be some predictability in managing contact, and recent advances in pitch modeling suggest that certain pitch shapes are strongly associated with batted ball outcomes. DIPS might not be dead yet, but on the whole, it appears that individual pitchers are responsible for far more than their walks, home runs, and strikeouts.

For anecdotal evidence, look no further than Martinez’s 2024 season. Name a statistic that measures hard contact suppression, and Martinez ranked near the top. He ranked in the 96th percentile in hard-hit rate and the 94th percentile in average exit velocity. His infield fly ball rate was 10th among all pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched. I also invented some niche contact suppression statistics, and Martinez ranked among the best in those too. He induced the third-most “mishits,” which I defined as non-bunted batted balls with an exit velocity below 65 mph. And in terms of harmless “donut hole” fly balls, nobody did better than Martinez. Nobody allowed more fly balls with a launch angle between 22 and 28 degrees and an exit velocity between 80 mph and 92 mph, also known as the place where fly balls go to die:

Was it luck? It’s unlikely. Martinez’s arsenal is designed to produce these outcomes in a couple of different ways. One way to look at it is by looking at each pitch in isolation. He throws six separate pitches, and each of them works to produce weak contact from both left-handed and right-handed hitters.

There’s the cutter in on the hands of lefties, for example, which he executed to perfection on this 0-1 pitch to Jake Cronenworth. (Unfortunately, Jonathan India’s execution was not as good):

There is the sinker he can run in on the hands of right-handed hitters, as we see here against Andrew McCutchen:

And his best pitch, the changeup, can get both righties and lefties to open up way too early, forcing them to just throw their bat at the ball. This is Martinez’s main whiff pitch, but it also works as an emergency swing generator, as we see here against Anthony Volpe:

Even his four-seam fastball gets hitters swinging way underneath, owing to all the backspin he generates with that over-the-top arm angle, as seen here against Alec Burleson:

Each of these pitches works to suppress hard contact individually, but there is also a multiplicative deception effect produced by the interaction between these pitches. Martinez’s three fastballs and changeup travel through similar tunnels, and he throws them all with virtually identical frequency. A 2D plot of Martinez’s offerings illustrates the similarity of the pitches’ movements:

These pitches also move on similar trajectories in three-dimensional space. There are nascent ways to measure this effect — as I mentioned in a previous article, earlier this year Driveline’s Jack Lambert and Marek Ramilo debuted Match+, which measures the extent to which a pitcher’s arsenal travels on a similar trajectory, and Baseball Prospectus‘ Stephen Sutton-Brown will soon introduce an update to their pitch models that incorporates a similar logic.

My methods are cruder, but when I looked at this a few months ago, no pitcher in baseball overlapped their release angles like Martinez does. His curveball pops out of his hand at an upward angle as most curveballs do, but all his other pitches emerge from a similar spot, sowing confusion in the mind of the batter:

Because Martinez runs a below-average strikeout rate and sits 92 mph with his fastball, it is tempting to wave him off, dismissing his season as a run of unsustainable BABIP luck. Can you count on a pitcher who can’t blow batters away? And strikeouts are great, to be fair. The xwOBA on a strikeout is roughly zero, after all. But the xwOBA on a fly ball struck between 80 mph and 92 mph with a launch angle above 22 degrees isn’t that far above zero, and Martinez showed last season that he can generate those types of batted balls better than nearly anyone.

The big elephant in the room relates to Martinez’s command. As I mentioned in his blurb for our recent Top 50 Free Agent rankings, his 3.2% walk rate was a complete outlier relative to his career norms. In addition to what I mentioned there — that some evidence points to command improving as a pitcher ages — I believe you’d be justified in believing that Martinez can keep running low walk rates in the 2025 season.

George Kirby is the quintessential example of a guy who doesn’t walk anyone because of his ability to bully hitters with the fastball. He throws heat on the corners, which works great as a challenge pitch. Martinez does not have that same luxury, but he does have the ability to throw any type of pitch for a strike at any given time. It isn’t the traditional definition of aggressiveness, but whether Martinez is ahead or behind in the count, he is willing to go with any of his six offerings.

Baseball Savant has a tool that shows pitch selection on each count for any given pitcher. Check out Martinez’s division of pitches in counts like 2-1 or 3-2 — it truly looks like a random number generator. When the pitch out of the hand could be any pitch, it allows Martinez to attack the zone like someone with a killer fastball:

Martinez doesn’t have ace stuff. But there’s good reason to believe that he will continue to frustrate hitters with his grab-bag mix of pitches, something in the style of 2024 Seth Lugo. Don’t be surprised he received the largest pitcher salary in Reds history — there is more to Martinez than meets the eye.

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