Houston Astros: Will Joe Musgrove Be Their Fifth Starter, or Nah?

If spring training is good for anything, it's the position battles. Each team seems to have one or two positions unsettled as we march closer to Opening Day. The Houston Astros are no exception to the rule, as the back-end of their rotation is still loosely-defined, even as we move closer to the start of the 2017 season.

As of right now, the Houston Astros rotation will be headlined by Dallas Keuchel, Lance McCullers, and Collin McHugh, according to Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle. After those three, Charlie Morton has the inside track at the fourth spot in the rotation, once again according to Kaplan. The fifth spot is up for grabs, however. While some Houston Astros fans might have visions of Chris Devenski flashing before their eyes, given his 4.01/1.61 ERA splits as a starter/reliever respectively, Devenski will almost certainly be in the bullpen to start the season.

That leaves two candidates for the Astros fifth spot: Mike Fiers and, our man of the hour, Joe Musgrove. Fiers is a 31-year-old who has been in the league for six seasons already, so the Stros can pretty much know what they're getting if they take that tack (career ERA+ of 103). Musgrove, on the other hand, offers a bit more intrigue, with both the positives and negatives that go along with a player of his age/experience. To decide whether Musgrove is truly an MLB-level starter, let's take a closer look at the man.

Background

Joe Musgrove was taken in the first round (46th overall) by the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2011 MLB Amateur Draft. Musgrove immediately made the Blue Jays top prospects lists, coming in as the 20th-ranked Blue Jay prospect after the 2011 season, according to Baseball America. Despite the solid pedigree, Musgrove was traded at the 2012 trade deadline, one piece of many in a Blue Jays and Astros swap centered around Francisco Cordero and J.A. Happ. Musgrove only threw 17.0 innings in 2012 and 33.2 innings in 2013 before amping things up a bit in 2014. Thanks to a 2.81 ERA over 77.0 innings at New York-Penn Short Season, Musgrove jumped back into the prospect rankings, coming in as the 19th-ranked Astros prospect after 2014. 

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Musgrove's star only rose in 2015, as he moved from Low-A to High-A to Double-A with spiffy ERAs at each stop (0.70; 2.40; 2.20). He ended the season as the Astros' sixth-rated prospect, per Baseball America, and the buzz was building. After a solid start to 2016 (0.34 ERA in Double-A; 3.81 ERA in Triple-A) Musgrove got the call he's been waiting for his whole life, making his MLB debut out of the bullpen on August 2.

Musgrove turned heads in his MLB debut, throwing the final 4.1 innings of a 2-1 loss to the Blue Jays but striking out eight while only allowing one hit and one walk to the hard-hitting gents from Canada. With the flashy debut, Musgrove was quickly moved into the rotation, making ten starts from August 7 to September 25, going 4-4 with a 4.37 ERA as a starter (4.06 ERA for the season). So breaking down these starts a bit further, what can we learn?

Ten Starts in 2016

Here are the 11 appearances (10 starts) that Musgrove made at an MLB-level with the Houston Astros in 2016, thanks to Baseball-Reference:

A few things stand out. The first two starts Musgrove made were his best. Musgrove faced a pair of tough opponents in a pair of tough environments and shut them down. He even tallied strong strikeout totals in both games. In these two starts, Musgrove was quite reliant on his fastball, 46.9 and 57.6 percent of the time respectively, per Brooks Baseball, two of the three highest fastball occurrences for Musgrove in 2016.

The next four starts for Musgrove ended up accounting for over 64 percent of his total runs allowed in 2016. An eight-run blowup in Baltimore was the worst of the bunch, with a trio of home runs doing a good chunk of the damage. Interestingly enough, in Musgrove's 4.1 IP, 5 ER turd of an outing against Texas on September 3, he had the second-highest fastball usage of his 2016 starts, debunking the "fastball usage for success" that we small-sample-size-set-up in the previous paragraph.

Finally, Joe Musgrove seemed to find his groove a bit, ending with three quality starts in his final four, with an ERA of 2.55 during that stretch. Musgrove really went away from the fastball towards the end of the season, relying on his four-seamer just 21.4 percent of the time in his final outing of 2016.

While this general trend downward in fastball usage may simply be a product of an 11-game sample size, it is worth noting that Musgrove reached a career-high in innings in 2016, reaching 127.1 innings over Double-A, Triple-A and the big leagues after never topping 100.2 innings in a season before. The increased use of his slider during that time would seem to go against the idea that his arm was getting tired, but it's definitely something worth monitoring in 2017.

Peering Behind the Curtain

We'll start with the obvious caveat: 11 games a pitcher does not make. The best advanced metrics (which we'll get to in one second) can tell us more than simply Musgrove's win-loss record and ERA, but there will still be a lot of uncertainty. That said, let's take a look at some of the contact Musgrove allowed and induced in 2016 and see what that can tell us.

Musgrove's fly ball and ground ball rates are very close to league average.

It's the batted ball profile where Musgrove differs a bit.

The soft hit ball rate is similar, but the over three percentage point difference in hard hit ball rate is noticeable. It is also slightly troubling. Looking at pitchers like Robbie Ray or Michael Pineda (two pitchers who flash extreme potential at times), some of their inability to match their fielding independent pitching (or high prospect rank if you're more of a scouts-than-stats fan) stems from allowing hitters a higher-than-average hard hit ball rate throughout their careers. If Musgrove is going to be the type of pitcher who can induce plenty of swing and miss but makes enough mistakes with his command (not his control per se) that he is leaving pitches over the zone, he's going to get hit hard regardless of how good his stuff is.

Repertoire

Joe Musgrove has five pitches available, including a funky "one-seam sinker" about which Eno Sarris wrote last fall. Trying to apply values to each of those five offerings is still tricky, as there is no way the FanGraphs pitch values have had time to stabilize. Using some of Brooks Baseball's Usage and Outcomes statistics can show us a few trends (struggles with the curveball, success with the slider), but, again, over an 11-game sample size it's tough to truly know what we're dealing with here. 

More from Call to the Pen

Given that Joe Musgrove has solid-but-not-special speed on his fastball (around 92 mph), command is going to be key for his success. Musgrove showed very solid control in his 11-game sample of 2016 (6.3% walk rate for Musgrove to 8.2% for the league), but as we have tattooed on our inner forearm: control does not equal command. As noted above, a lack of command can play a role in a higher-than-average hard hit ball rate, especially coming from a pitcher who might seem more dominant at times than the numbers show. Musgrove had a faint whiff of this type of pitcher in 2016, but I'm remiss to write him off already.

Conclusion

Although we don't have a ton of data to work with, Joe Musgrove deserves a spot in the Houston Astros rotation to start the season. He has a strong pedigree (first round pick, upper-tier prospect) and did nothing in his 2016 debut to temper the expectations that go along with said pedigree. Musgrove's floor is basically what he did in 2016 (4.00ish ERA/FIP). That's more than enough for a fifth arm in the American League these days, and it's better than the results for which Mike Fiers is projected (4.25ish ERA/FIP).

With Joe Musgrove, the potential is even higher. If he is able to piece together a few tricks to throw off hitters with his five-deep pitching repertoire, or if he is able to command the zone well enough to lower that hard hit ball rate, we could easily see Musgrove jump into the 3.50ish ERA tier, a tremendous boon out of the fifth spot of the rotation.

Teams tend to favor the safe route, so it wouldn't shock me if Fiers got the fifth spot to start the season, with Musgrove beginning the year in Triple-A, but with a team as close to contender status as any in the AL, the Astros shouldn't be wasting any time thinking that way. After all, they have a title to win this year (cough, Sports Illustrated, cough) so they can't be frittering away games in April. Musgrove is a big-league talent and deserves his rightful spot at the backend of the Astros rotation to begin the 2017 season.