Let’s address the elephant in the room to get it out of the way. Yes, Noah Cameron has had some luck go his way so far in his MLB career. I will be covering what’s been happening in that regard and how much it matters later in this article, but without spoiling it, he is not a product of the batted ball fortune he’s had. There’s much more here than just a guy who’s riding a hot streak. The idea here is to figure out the kind of pitcher we can expect him to be when said luck levels out.
That said, let’s talk about the pitcher in question. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Royals pitcher come up as a rookie and have a stretch like this. A sub-2 ERA through his first seven starts. Only one outing in which he allowed more than one run, which was against a powerful Yankees offense. Furthermore, how often do we see a rookie pitcher with no immediately obvious eye-popping traits do this? The lack of unique high-level skills in Cameron’s toolbox probably isn’t helping his reputation as a guy who’s just getting lucky. I promise, there’s more to him than meets the eye. Let’s break down what he offers.
The Arsenal
We unfortunately have to start with his weakest pitch because it’s the one he throws the most: his fastball. The good news is that he only throws it 27% of the time. It’s a beautiful thing to see a rookie pitcher who is already aware of his fastball’s limitations and has accounted for them. He throws 92.0 mph on average from a high arm slot with pedestrian movement. It’s not a great fastball, and it has been hammered on contact. This is especially problematic because it does not miss bats at all. His 6’4″ release height is not high enough to create a unique angle that is difficult to hit, especially not with only 16.1” IVB. It does, at least, provide something for the rest of his pitches to play off of.
His slider is about as good as an 84 mph gyro slider can be. Near-perfect replication of his fastball mechanics, with a tight shape at -1.4” IVB and 2.6” HB. His high release creates an extra steep angle for this pitch, making it harder to get under if you can get the bat on it at all. His aggression with this pitch has netted him called strikes, whiffs, and ground balls at will. A perfect breaking ball for a lefty to have, this should theoretically be his equalizer in platoon matchups, but he uses it more against lefties than righties. It’s his least-used pitch against righties. While his whole arsenal is geared for platoon matchups, it’s very strange to me that a slider this good finds itself on the back burner in those spots, but becomes his most-used pitch in lefty-lefty battles. The fact he’s using it that much in those situations shows it’s not that he doesn’t trust the pitch, he just doesn’t seem to like using it against righties. That’s strange to me, but I’m not going to argue with it when it’s working.
Cameron’s changeup is fascinating. It has very little depth, which isn’t the most surprising for a pitcher with an arm slot as high as his, but it’s like he’s not even trying for depth. He doesn’t spin it on an axis much further down than his fastball, it doesn’t get much in way of SSW, and it has much higher spin efficiency than his fastball. It’s not even sold that well; his arm angle drops substantially on release. He creates the same release height between his fastball and changeup with his body, but the arm angle is a full 7° lower, and the actual release point itself is a half foot further toward first base. On the surface, it seems like an unoptimized pitch. And yet… It’s working. The only thing I can think is that it spinning on an axis close to the fastball, and the unique lack of depth shape is creating a look hitters aren’t used to. The velocity separation being more than 10 mph is also very good, but is that enough to be getting these results? So far, apparently, yes. I’m not 100% sold on this pitch, but until it stops working, I will mark it as solid even if I don’t fully understand it.
Cameron’s curveball is the primary reason I’m not going to complain at length about him not using his slider against righties very much. A true 12-6 hammer at 81.3 mph with -10” of IVB and 2.7” HB from his release point is a great breaking ball. It’s not world-class movement or velocity, but the angle it comes in at and the way it fits into his arsenal elevate it. His execution of this pitch could be better. I like that he zones it for strikes, but he has a habit of missing in bad spots with it. It hasn’t burned him yet, but it will eventually. The funny thing is, I don’t mind the ones at the top of the zone. They look like sailed fastballs that break down into the zone, and it’s difficult to adjust to that as a hitter. It’s the ones that miss waist-high that I have an issue with. Clean those up and get it below the zone more for chases, and we’ve got a great breaker here.
Cameron’s last pitch is a cutter that stands on its own more than it bridges the fastball and curve. While it does function well in the bridge role, his goal with the cutter is clear and simple. He wants to be mean to right-handed hitters with it. Consistently burying it right under their hands, just off the plate in a dead zone for most hitters. They think they’ve maybe got a high fastball to hit, or a curve that isn’t getting low enough that they can get under and slug. Then it doesn’t break like either of those, and instead darts inside toward the small part of the bat. Missing in the zone with a pitch like this can be costly, but his other pitches have been keeping right-handed hitters off balance enough that he hasn’t gotten burned on it. This is the pitch he’s had the least amount of batted ball luck with, and even then, it hasn’t hurt him much.
What’s Luck Got to Do With It?
Cameron’s detractors will point to the gap between his results and his expected numbers and say, “he’s been lucky”. This is somewhat true. His ERA is well below the estimators, and his batted ball results are near universally below his underlying metrics.
I am intentionally leaving the numbers that add better context out of that table so we can look at them on their own, ignore the difference between his underlying metrics and his results for a moment, and appreciate that they’re pretty good in their own right.
So yes, his comically low BABIP is a ludicrous number that won’t hold. But he’s inducing so much bad contact that his expected BABIP is still in the 98th percentile for starters. He’s given up a lot of pulled balls in the air, which is to be expected from a slow-throwing north-south pitcher, but if you look at the individual batted balls, you’d see a lot of low liners, popups, and soft hit fly balls. Only 4 of the 26 he’s allowed have traveled far enough to even make it to the foul poles at his home ballpark. His expected numbers still read like a premier contact manager who has excelled in most facets of the game, even if he is due for some regression.
I understand the argument that he will likely eventually start giving up more barrels due to the way he pitches and his flaws. His line drive rate is unsustainably low as well. My counterargument to that is that he pitches in a home run desert half the time. The Royals’ ballpark has the third-lowest home run factor in the league. While their massive outfield can make it difficult to sustain low batting averages against, Kauffman is where bare-minimum barrels go to die. You need to really connect to get the ball over the wall in Kansas City, something that will play to Cameron’s advantage. Even if he’s allowing excessive amounts of batted balls in the air, he’s in less of a position to get burned for homers. Not to mention, he’s inducing a lot of generally unimpressive batted balls that don’t present a threat even in the K’s endless outfield.
What We Should Expect, and How He Can Grow
This may come as a shock, but I don’t think Cameron will maintain his 1.91 ERA forever. The important thing to remember is that regression to the mean in performance is not the same as regression of skills. There is a promising pitcher here with room to grow further and get better, even if the current performance is a statistical outlier for him.
Looking at what he could do to improve, the obvious and unhelpful suggestion would be to continue sharpening up the arsenal and limiting mistakes. He has solid command, but he could stand to miss in bad spots a bit less. The fastballs off the glove side and the secondaries that land down the middle are things to avoid in the future. Oddly, he’s seen some success throwing the changeup in the zone, but that pitch already puzzles me, so I don’t know that I should question it. If it starts getting him into trouble in the future, just zone it less.
Looking at his fastball, it being his biggest flaw that he’s already working around rather well, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way to further address it. It’s already not his most-used pitch against either handedness of hitter. It’s only his most-used pitch overall because it factors in a relevant way against all hitters. I don’t think limiting the use any further to be replaced by non-fastballs would do much for him; he’s already pitching backward. So what is there to be done about it?
Between the 89% active spin and backwards spin-movement deviation (it moves in a direction slightly down the axis from its initial spin direction), as well as his high release point, Cameron seems like a good candidate for picking up a sinker of some kind. Even if it didn’t have a good shape in a vacuum, his high release would make it harder to punish, and it would fit well into his arsenal. I’m not saying it needs to become his primary fastball, but I’d love to see what he could do with one. With how much he loves working toward his glove-side against everyone (99th percentile), tossing a few sinkers in there for called strikes and setting up the cutters and sliders off the zone could be a nice bonus.
Enough of that kind of speculation, though. For the other kind of speculation, we try to project what we think Cameron could be going forward. Looking over his skill set and everything he does and does not do well, I see a bit of an oddity. A contact manager who uses a kitchen sink approach with a mostly vertical arsenal. This is abnormal. Most pitchers who fit the former categories do so with an east-west approach. This is not Cameron, who throws directly over the top and creates very little horizontal movement in his pitch mix. With that in mind, it’s a bit more difficult to envision how he’ll fare against major league competition long-term.
I think it’s entirely possible that even when his batted ball results regress, they continue to be above average. He keeps hitters guessing with the full use of his five-pitch mix, and he uses it in ways that allow them to play up beyond their raw stuff. It looks different than other pitchers who try this, but that doesn’t preclude him from being able to pull it off. His arsenal suggests some room for improvement in the strikeout category. He’s capable of getting consistent whiffs with three of his pitches, and they do tend to be what he leans on in two-strike counts, but his execution of the changeup and curveball has led to less success getting chases in those situations than he’s had with his slider. His putaway rates with them are all good, but it would be nice if he could get more of those to be strikeouts instead of relying on bad contact to get the job done.
Cameron strikes me as the kind of pitcher who could develop into a solid middle-of-the-rotation guy. The fact that he’s already showing the intelligence to pitch the way he does as a rookie rather than rely on a subpar fastball speaks well to his ability to adapt. Due to his approach, his strikeout rate will probably always leave you wanting a bit more when you see how many whiffs he’s capable of getting. Even if his strikeout rate improves, you still might look at his stuff and think there’s more to squeeze out there.
Unfortunately, the drawback of kitchen sink pitchers is that they usually tend to strike out fewer hitters than it seems like they should. In Cameron’s case, it’s likely because hitters are expecting non-fastballs in 2-strike counts and can better adjust for the timing of his other pitches. But as hitters adjust to being ready for anything he might throw, they can’t sit on a single pitch consistently enough to hit them well, especially when his non-fastballs are good pitches on their own. That’s how the contact management can work for him, even if it looks a bit unorthodox. Even if he never becomes a strikeout machine, mowing hitters down at will, keeping them guessing and off-balance can be just as effective.
