Written by Michael Beller at SI.com
Cole Hamels made his first start on Monday night after spending two months on the DL with an oblique injury, and the results were not pretty. He gave up individual runs in the first, third and fourth innings, before being blown up by Cleveland’s offense in the fifth. By time the book closed on him, he had surrendered seven runs on eight hits and four walks in 4 1/3 innings. Despite the Rangers pounding Carlos Carrasco for eight runs in 3 1/3 frames, they lost 15–9. It was hardly a triumphant return for Hamels.
The season-long numbers on Hamels paint an equally ugly picture. The oblique injury has limited him to six starts and 37 innings, but we can’t simply wave away his performance based on small sample size. He owns a 4.38 ERA, 5.31 FIP and 1.32 WHIP. Most troubling, however, is his sudden inability to miss bats. Hamels has fanned 16 batters this season, the same number that he has walked. His 6.7% swinging-strike rate is befitting of a pitcher like Bartolo Colon or Doug Fister, not one who has struck out more than 23% of the batters he has faced across a 12-year career.
Hamels’s velocity is down significantly for each of his pitches this season. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise for a pitcher in his age-33 season approaching 2,400 career innings, including the postseason, and is clearly part of the explanation for his disappearing strikeouts. At the same time, Hamels was never a pitcher who subsisted entirely on velocity. His four-seamer never sat at an average higher than 93.6 mph for a full season, and it was more in the 91–92 mph range when he was in his heyday with the Phillies. Velocity is definitely an issue, but it cannot be the only issue.
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