A serviceable season from a serviceable starter
With the 2024 regular season over, it is time for us to go back and take a look at the players who appeared for the Texas Rangers this season.
Today, we look at pitcher Andrew Heaney.
Andrew Heaney feels kind of like a generic video game pitcher, the type of guy the computer would generate when it needs to provide options for your pretend team to pursue in free agency. He’s one of the guys I’ve tended to forget about when going through who the primary members of the Rangers’ roster are over the past couple of seasons, and now that he’s departed I will probably have even a harder time remembering him.
Andrew Heaney’s numbers for 2024 were fairly pedestrian, back-end starter type numbers. 4.28 ERA and 4.04 FIP in 31 starts and a relief appearance, 160 innings, 92 ERA+. Heaney had a 0.8 bWAR compared to a 2.2 fWAR in 2024, a pretty large split owing in part to his FIP being better than his ERA, though his xERA of 4.46 was higher than either his ERA or FIP was, so that fWAR number would seem to be on the high side.
Heaney’s 2024 was very similar to his 2023 season, when he had a 4.15 ERA and 4.66 FIP in 147.1 IP over 28 starts and six relief appearances, good for a 103 ERA+, with a 4.55 xERA, a 1.3 bWAR and a 1.2 fWAR. In 2024 offense was down league-wide, and the Shed was much more pitcher friendly than in past years, both of which contribute to his ERA+ dropping year over year more than one would expect given the slight difference in actual ERA.
Andrew Heaney as a Ranger was pretty much Andrew Heaney as he has been throughout his career. As a Ranger he put up a 4.22 ERA and 4.34 FIP with a 98 ERA+. In his MLB career he has put up a 4.45 ERA and 4.37 FIP with a 94 ERA+.
Being in ones age 32-33 seasons the same guy you have been throughout your career is generally not a bad thing, since those ages are generally on the backside of a player’s peak years, and you’d generally be expected to do worse in those seasons compared to what you have done historically. So in a way this is fine.
On the other hand, the Rangers signed Heaney on the heels of what seemed to be a breakout season in 2022, when he put up a 3.10 ERA in 72 innings over 14 starts and two relief appearances for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He put up a career high in K rate that year, one of his lowest walk rates, the best ERA of his career, the best ERA+ (by far) of his career, and the second best FIP of his career. His 3.39 xERA was the first time in his career he had an xERA lower than 4, as he put up chase and whiff rates in the mid-90th percentiles.
And while the Rangers weren’t necessarily expecting him to replicate that level of success — nor was any other team, it would appear, given the Rangers signed him on a one year deal with a player option for 2024 after the 2022 season, that guaranteed him just $25 million, and teams expecting him to replicate what he did in 2022 would have offered much more than that — one has to think that they were at least hoping for some of that improvement to carry over.
As you saw from the above, that didn’t happen. Much of his success in 2022 appears to have come from junking his curveball and replacing it with a slider, which didn’t feature a ton of movement but which was effective, generating a .240 xwOBA and a 44.7% whiff rate. That slider made Heaney more effective against lefthanders, and thus more effective overall.
B-R features something called sOPS+, which compares a pitcher OPS split to the league’s split as a whole. For example, in 2022, Heaney had a 101 sOPS+ against righthanded hitters, meaning he was about average compared to the league as a whole, and a 93 sOPS+ against lefties, meaning he was a little above average compared to the league as a whole.
In 2022, against lefties, Heaney was 79th out of 126 lefthanded pitchers with at least 50 lefthanded batters faced in sOPS+ against lefties. Against righthanders, he was 25th out of 59 lefties who faced at least 200 righthanded batters. A little better than median against righthanders, a little worse than median against lefthanders, but since you’re going to face many more righties than lefties you’d prefer it that way rather than the other way around.
In 2023, against righthanders, Heaney was a little worse — 108 sOPS+, 33rd out of 57 lefty pitchers. Against lefthanded hitters, however Heaney was much worse — 120 sOPS+, 95th out of 111 lefty pitchers.
A similar pattern emerged in 2024. Against righthanders, Heaney was middle of the pack, 27th out of 53 lefty pitchers. Against lefties, Heaney had a 106 sOPS+, 89th out of 116 lefty pitchers.
Since 2019, Heaney has generally had much smaller platoon splits than is normal, including reverse splits in 2019, 2023 and 2024. 2022 was the one year where his splits were almost normal.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Heaney’s slider wasn’t nearly as effective in 2023 and in 2024 as it was in 2022, particularly against lefties. In 2022, Heaney threw nothing but fastballs and sliders to lefties, in a roughly 60/40 proportion, and got a .108 wOBA and .168 xwOBA against the slider (albeit with an ugly .431/.438 against his fastball). That went to a .341 xwOBA in 2023, and .302 in 2024.
To put this into perspective, MLB hitters as a whole had a .253 xwOBA against lefty-on-lefty sliders from 2022 to 2024. 139 lefthanded pitchers threw at least 100 sliders to lefty batters in a season between 2022 to 2024. Heaney’s 2022 season was 19th out of those 9 seasons in terms of xwOBA. Heaney’s 2023 and 2024 seasons were 108th and 126th, respectively.
Weirdly, his slider still seemed to be effective against righthanded hitters, who had a .257 xwOBA against it in 2023 and a .308 xwOBA against it in 2024 — against righthanders, both years, it was his most effective pitch.
Heaney’s fastball, on the other hand, didn’t see such a dramatic deterioration against same-side hitters. During that 2022-24 span, lefty-on-lefty fastballs resulted in a .342 xwOBA league-wide. There were 201 pitcher seasons in that span with at least 100 lefty-on-lefty fastballs. Heaney’s fastball was actually more effective against lefties in 2023 and 2024 (.344 and .384, respectively, good for 113th and 149th out of 201) than in his really good 2022 campaign, when he was 180th out of 201.
Heaney’s lefty/lefty fastball wasn’t particularly effective relative to other lefties in 2023 and 2024, but that’s not a huge issue if his slider is destroying lefties. Once his slider quit working against lefthanded batters, though, the overall result was Heaney being weaker against lefthanded hitters than most lefthanded pitchers. And that appears to be one of the biggest contributing factors to his not maintaining his success from 2022.
Heaney is still unsigned with spring training looming, and despite a strong market for starting pitchers this past offseason. The fact that he opted in at $13 million after 2023 suggested that he wasn’t confident in his market last offseason, and he took a step backwards in 2024, with his K rate dropping to the lowest it has been since 2015.
Heaney is not going to give you a ton of innings — he averaged right at five innings per start in 2024, went more than six innings just twice, and his 160 innings in 2024 and 147.1 innings in 2023 are his second and third highest totals of his major league career. While with the Rangers there was talking of using him in the bullpen, but he doesn’t have the stuff or the out pitch that would play up in a high leverage role. Teams likely see him as a 1-1.5 win pitcher, and the contract he ends up getting will presumably reflect that — something along the lines of one year at $10-12 million, perhaps in early spring when a team is looking at one of its starters being on the shelf for a while and needs a veteran they can plug in. And if he can’t latch on with someone like that, he’ll presumably join a rebuilding team that needs someone to start some games for them for much of the season, and that will look to move him at the deadline.
Overall, Heaney was fine in 2024, assuming your expectations were measured. The Rangers did him a solid by leaving him in long enough in his final start of the season to get four innings and hit a performance bonus milestone, after he didn’t get enough innings in 2023 to vest his player option at $20 million due primarily to his being moved to the bullpen when all the extra starting arms arrived. He had a 3.98 ERA heading into that final game, which was blown up by his allowing seven runs in those four innings he needed for his bonus, but the Rangers won anyway, so it was fine.
And maybe that is the epitaph for Andrew Heaney’s time in Texas. He was fine.
Previously: