Carlos Carrasco's Near No-No Shines Light on One of MLB's Nastiest Pitchers

If Carlos Carrasco could have gotten just one more out on Wednesday night, we'd be sitting here talking about the third no-hitter of the 2015 MLB season.

Alas, he couldn't do it. That leaves us to talk about the next best thing: how the baseball world just got a really good look at a guy who's quietly one of the sport's nastiest pitchers.

If you missed it, Carrasco took the hill for the Cleveland Indians against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field on Wednesday night, and didn't allow a hit through eight and two-thirds. But then Rays left fielder Joey Butler lined a clean single to right-center, thereby ruining Carrasco's no-hit bid.

Butler's single didn't ruin anything else, though. The Indians won handily by an 8-1 final, and Carrasco's final line featured just the one hit, one earned run, two walks, a hit-by-pitch and a career-high 13 strikeouts.

"Everything [was working]. Every pitch in every count," Carrasco said of his near no-no, per Bill Chastain and Jordan Bastian of MLB.com. "The slider, change and curveball, it was perfect. I set them up with the fastball and everything was there."

Before he settled for chasing a mere no-hitter, it's notable that Carrasco took a perfect game into the seventh inning. Following similar efforts by Cody Anderson and Danny Salazar, MLB Stat of the Day, via Elias Sports, noted that the Indians just became the first team since 1961 to flirt with perfect games in three straight contests.

As for Carrasco's own performance, it saw him add to what's now getting to be an extended hot streak.

Over his last eight starts, the 28-year-old right-hander has pitched 54 innings and racked up a 3.00 ERA with 59 strikeouts and 11 walks. In the process, he's lowered his ERA from 4.98 to 3.88.

And even that may significantly undersell just how good Carrasco has been this season.

Stats like FIP and xFIP try to strip away luck and evaluate pitchers based on what they can control—mainly strikeouts, walks and home runs—and both metrics say Carrasco is actually one of the American League's top 10 pitchers. Though his ERA suggests he's been just OK, he's actually been dominant.

Which really shouldn't be that big of a shocker.

Not for anybody who's been monitoring Carrasco since late last summer, anyway. He may not have hit the big time until Wednesday night, but he's been one of baseball's more overpowering pitchers for the better part of a year.

Let's go back to April 2014. Carrasco was off to an ugly beginning in the Tribe's rotation, having posted a 6.95 ERA in four starts. At that point, he was a pitcher with a career ERA in the mid-4.00s who seemed incapable of translating his immense talent into results.

So, the Indians took him out of the rotation and put him in the bullpen. In time, that would prove to solve everything.

As Carrasco told Terry Pluto of the Plain Dealer this past spring, the move to the bullpen allowed him to take a step back, listen to some advice from pitching coach Mickey Callaway and then-bullpen coach (now Rays manager) Kevin Cash and essentially reboot his outlook on pitching. 

"I stopped thinking so much," he said. "I had to get ready to pitch every day ... 20-25 pitches. Just go in, throw strikes."

Carrasco made other changes as well. He started pitching exclusively out of the stretch, and he also started throwing his slider more often. The combination led to a 2.30 ERA in 26 relief outings and a ticket back into Cleveland's rotation.

Carrasco made his return to the rotation on August 10 at Yankee Stadium. Since that day, he's done this:

Year	GS	IP	K/9	BB/9	H/9	HR/9	ERA
2014	10	69.0	10.2	1.4	5.9	0.3	1.30
2015	16	97.1	10.3	1.9	8.3	0.8	3.88
Total	26	166.1	10.2	1.7	7.3	0.6	2.82

That's a lot of damage over pretty close to a full season's worth of starts. And though there's not a number up there that doesn't stand out, the strikeouts are the window into what's made Carrasco tick.

Exactly how is Carrasco racking up so many strikeouts? The old-fashioned way, of course. He's really good at getting hitters to swing and miss. In fact, you can use Baseball Savant to look up which right-handed starters have gotten the highest percentage of whiffs since Carrasco moved back into the Indians' rotation last August, and you'll get the following list:

1. Max Scherzer: 12.7%
2. Corey Kluber: 12.3%
3. Carlos Carrasco: 12.2%

So, there's that. Since last August 10, the only right-handers who have drawn whiffs at a higher rate than Carrasco are the American League's last two Cy Young winners.

And, mind you, this isn't including all the whiffs Carrasco got on Wednesday night. As noted by Baseball Savant founder Daren Willman, he actually got a historic amount of those:

Carrasco's ability to rack up swings and misses with the best of 'em is partially owed to the improved command he's shown since emerging from the Tribe's bullpen last summer. It's a lot easier to get hitters to whiff when you're throwing more strikes and forcing them to expand the zone.

But more so than that, well, let's not kid ourselves. It's all about the stuff.

With a fastball that averages 94.5 miles per hour, Carrasco is one of the American League's hardest throwers. Per Brooks Baseball, he's also thrown his slider and changeup more than 15 percent of the time since moving into the rotation last August. And even before he went on a whiff rampage Wednesday night, both pitches were drawing whiffs roughly 25 percent of the time.

It's scary enough when a pitcher has one pitch that draws whiffs a quarter of the time he throws it. For a pitcher to have two such pitches borders on being unfair.

And it's really no wonder that Carrasco's slider and changeup are so hard to hit. 

His slider comes in at an average of 88.0 miles per hour, and it has late cutter-like action that breaks in on lefties and away from righties. His changeup also comes in hard at 88.0 miles per hour, and it comes with sharp sinking action and various other properties that Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs noticed make it unique from all other changeups:

"

No one really throws a Carlos Carrasco changeup. Not in terms of its raw traits, and not in terms of how it compares to Carrasco’s fastballs. Though it’s all shades of gray, you wouldn’t be wrong to think of Carrasco’s changeup as being unique. Or exceptional, if “unique” makes you uncomfortable.

"

That's what Carrasco's slider and changeup sound like in words, anyway. Honestly, they look better in a GIF (courtesy of MLB GIFs):

That there's some nasty stuff. And on Wednesday night, it did some nasty things.

And so it goes for Carrasco. A year ago this time, he was quietly finding himself in the Indians' bullpen. That led to a spectacular coming-out party down the stretch, and the party has yet to die down in 2015.

Nor is it likely to anytime soon. The baseball gods favor nasty pitchers, and they don't make 'em much nastier than Carrasco.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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