Eddie Gamboa - the Good and the Not-So-Good

After five seasons in the Orioles' minor-league system, pitching primarily as a swingman, Eddie Gamboa took the chance in 2013 and determined to become a full-time knuckleball pitcher. The Orioles didn't have many options for upper-level starting pitchers, and so put Gamboa full-time into the AA Bowie rotation. On July 10, Gamboa was promoted to AAA Norfolk and has remained there even as the Tides have accumulated seven starting pitchers.

While he was with Bowie, Gamboa made the milb.com front page twice in late June - once for pitching 7 1/3 innings of one-hit ball and once for pitching a seven-inning no-hitter. While with Norfolk, Gamboa impressed observers with a two-hit, seven-inning performance. Unfortunately, I wasn't fortunate enough to see those games and have to rely on others' descriptions of Gamboa's games.

 On the other hand, I have seen Gamboa pitch three times - once for Bowie and twice for Norfolk. And those games were not so good, as you'll see. This article will compare Gamboa's three great games to the three not-so-great games I saw, and see the difference between Gamboa pitching well and Gamboa not pitching well.

Here are the basics of Gamboa's great games:

Date	Opponent	IP	H	R	ER	BB	K	Game Score
June 23	Altoona	7 1/3	1	0	0	3	7	80
June 30	Harrisburg	7	0	0	0	3	5	79
August 5	Gwinnett	7	2	1	0	1	6	76

And the basics of the games I saw Gamboa pitch:

Date	Opponent	IP	H	R	ER	BB	K	Game Score
June 5	Harrisburg	6	9	4	4	1	6	43
July 24	Pawtucket	5	9	4	4	2	3	34
August 11	Rochester	4 2/3	7	4	4	1	1	34

We'll start by looking at Gamboa's pitches in each game. I'll record the percentage of pitches with each result. First, the great games:

Date	Balls	Called Strikes	Swing Strikes	Fouls	In-Play
June 23	44.8%	15.9%	11.2%	14.0%	14.0%
June 30	43.3%	16.3%	12.5%	11.5%	15.4%
August 5	30.0%	23.8%	20.0%	11.2%	21.2%

And the other games:

Date	Balls	Called Strikes	Swing Strikes	Fouls	In-Play
June 5	35.1%	14.9%	14.95	13.8%	21.3%
July 24	35.2%	20.9%	4.3%	18.7%	20.9%
August 11	41.5%	18.1%	4.3%	17.0%	19.1%

I had hoped that there would be some large, obvious difference between the great games and the ordinary games, but nothing jumps out. The great game on August 5 is completely different than the others; for whatever reason, Gamboa controlled his knuckleball substantially better than in his other games. To the extent any conclusion can be drawn, in Gamboa's bad games batters made contact with his pitches (fouls + in-play) more often than in his good games.

From this limited data, it's dangerous to draw any conclusions. I expect that if we looked more closely at a bigger data set we'd find some pattern that would correlate with Gamboa's success. It's also possible that whether or not Gamboa has a good game depends upon the opponent or some other factor he has no influence on.

In an earlier post, I dismissed Gamboa (and Zach Clark) with two sentences. At the highest level, those comments remain valid - he's a previously-stalled pitching prospect trying to salvage his career with the knuckleball. However, his three outstanding starts make him slightly more interesting, and there's a better chance that he'll develop into a major-league pitcher.