He’s gotten the results he’s wanted in his first pair of starts, but his stuff hasn’t backed that up in the slightest.
In his return to Boston’s starting rotation a little under a month into the season, Brayan Bello has held his own in his two starts thus far, at least results-wise. But after five scoreless innings to start his outing against the Guardians yesterday, Bello Bello’d as we’re used to him doing, giving up a free pass before allowing a dinky single to set up Nolan Jones’ three-run home run in the next at-bat. Prior to that, a shutout performance is obviously impressive from a guy who’s had serious ups and downs at the major league level both in individual starts and over the span of his career. But the sixth-inning mini-implosion is really a microcosm of Bello’s offerings so far this year.
While these results are positive and something Boston will definitely take as it looks to get its rotation completely healthy for the first time this season over the next couple of weeks, the underlying numbers behind it all aren’t great. Bello was definitely trying out some new things in yesterday’s start, as he interestingly used a four-seam fastball a whopping 25% of the time yesterday, after using it jsut 5% of the time last year, and 6% of the time in his start against the Mariners. I really don’t know why this was a strategy that was employed, especially considering Boston’s general aversion to the usage of four-seamers. He only threw 32% of these pitches in the zone, as it seemed he was using the pitch moreso as a temptation opportunity in certain counts. But Cleveland’s offense, which was nearly dead all day, was not at all tempted, swinging at only 18% of these pitches out of the zone.
Another not very positive thing with Bello’s entire arsenal yesterday afternoon was the 94% contact rate on pitches in the zone that were swung at. And while the majority of them were fouled off or induced soft contact, Bello was missing zero bats with pitches thrown as strikes. This isn’t a great outcome when throwing 44% of your pitches in the zone, nor is a 29% swing percentage on your pitches (56%) thrown outside of the zone.
Now all of this is really just a lot of numbers to say that while the results are something the Red Sox are definitely pleased with, and something fans have been happy to see, Bello isn’t going to keep these results going for long if his performance stays at it has been. This is clearly evidenced by his current 7.13 xERA and identical K and BB% through the first two starts (13.6%).
So far, his Zone% is the lowest it’s ever been since his short stint in the majors in 2022, and his Chase% (9.8%) is 20% lower than it’s ever been in a season, including the 997 pitches he threw in 2022.
Baseball Savant
His first pitch strike percentage is down nearly 30% from what it was last season, and his xOBP and Barrels are both in the bottom 5% of the league. So while Bello is getting possibly the best results (over a very small period) he’s had in his time in the majors, it’s unfortunately not coming from his own performance and ability on the mound. Likely, Bello has benefited from Carlos Narvaez’s defensive abilities behind the plate and just general luck. We all know that Bello has some nasty breaking pitches, and even saw a few of those today, and he needs to get back to this and leave behind some very hittable four-seamers if he wants to boost his performance from here on out.
So please, please, please stop throwing that four-seamer, Brayan Bello, and I hope you can have a good chat with the pitching coaching staff this week on how to get those chase rates back up and contact rates back down.