Consistently inconsistent
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 Jonathan Hernandez.
Have we discussed the unpredictable nature of relievers? How they can blossom and look good or okay or even dominant for a period of time, and then, suddenly, not anymore?
I feel like this is new territory, something that hasn’t been bandied about before here on the Ell Ess Bee. Right?
Of course not. It is well-plowed ground. Baseball bloggers or fans or media talking about the inevitable, ineffable volatility of bullpens is like a stand up comedian talking about air travel, or Walter Sobchak talking about Vietnam, or AJM talking about pop culture from the late 20th century.
The fact that it is much discussed doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t generally true, and time and again we see examples of this phenomenon. Or these phenomena, if you prefer.
Jonathan Hernandez is our phenomenal subject of said phenomenon today. For a brief moment, Jonathan Hernandez was a quality reliever, a guy who looked like he would be a tremendous setup man for the Rangers. Instead, a few years later, and after 11-plus years with the organization, Hernandez landed on the waiver wire, another pitching casualty.
The most common reasons that these sorts of mercurial relievers don’t maintain their success are an inability to maintain decent command and an inability to stay healthy. Guys who have the stuff to be major league relievers, who have a brief period of success that isn’t sustained, you can usually trace their downfall to one of those two reasons.
Or both, as in the case of Hernandez.
An inability to consistently throw strikes — and throw good strikes — has been Hernandez’s Achilles heel throughout his career. Signed in January of 2013 as an amateur free agent, Hernandez worked as a starter through most of his minor league career, even though his delivery and command were such that he always seemed likely to ultimately land in the pen. Starting, however, gave him the opportunity to throw more innings, the opportunity to work on more pitches, and you can understand not wanting to move a guy to the bullpen unless and until he shows he can’t handle starting.
That point came in July of 2019. Hernandez had started 16 games for Frisco that season, had put up a 5.78 ERA, and was getting knocked around. After a brief stint on the minor league injured list, Hernandez returned to the Frisco active roster and worked out of the pen as a multi-inning reliever. He was successful enough that he was summoned to the major leagues in August, where he didn’t pitch particularly well but, well, he had at least made it into the majors.
2020 was the year where it appeared Jonathan Hernandez had made the Leap. It was the pandemic season, and the Rangers were terrible, and there was little to feel good about that year. High up on the “things to feel good about” list, however, was Hernandez.
In the abbreviated 60 game season, Hernandez put up a 2.90 ERA, a 3.19 FIP, and a 2.64 xERA. His 2020 Statcast page is full of dark red: 98th percentile in fastball velocity, 94th percentile in xERA, 89th and 85th in barrel and whiff rate, 77th in walk rate. Hernandez wasn’t racking up a ton of strikeouts, but sinker/slider guys usually don’t. He was, however, throwing strikes and getting ground balls and avoiding loud contact.
Success was the result. Rangers fans were happy. Texas had a late inning weapon in their bullpen. The future was bright.
Except, no. The future wasn’t bright. The future was…well, whatever the opposite of bright is.
Hernandez didn’t pitch in 2021, the victim of a UCL tear that resulted in Tommy John surgery during spring training. His recovery from surgery took longer than was hoped, finally going out on a rehab assignment in early June, spending six weeks on the rehab assignment, and then returning to the majors for floundering Rangers team, putting up a 2.97 ERA in 30.1 IP, but with peripherals that didn’t support that, including a 5.0 BB/9. 2023 was a roller coaster, with Hernandez pitching well for six weeks, then putting up an 11.17 ERA and 8.22 FIP in a 12 game stretch over a month-long stretch, getting sent down, then returning for the final month-plus and pitching so well that he would have been on the playoff roster but for an injury that sidelined him.
2024 was more of the same for Hernandez. He started the year on the injured list, and was activated in mid-April. After a few decent outings, Bruce Bochy put him into a game in Oakland in the sixth inning, with the Rangers up 15-2. Hernandez had last pitched three days earlier, and his job was to give the Rangers innings, to avoid burning arms in a blowout.
Hernandez did not provide innings. Hernandez faced seven batters and walked five of them, with a wild pitch thrown in to boot. He went to 3-2 on four batters, and needed 42 pitches to get through the seven batters he faced that inning. It was a disaster outing, with the only saving grace being that the Rangers were ahead by so large a margin that it didn’t really impact the end result.
A week and a half later, Hernandez was summoned in relief of Michael Lorenzen in the seventh inning of a game the Rangers were leading 1-0. There were runners on first and second, one out, and Bruce Bochy was no doubt hoping Hernandez could induce a double play ball.
Instead, he gave up a walk, a pair of singles, and then a triple before getting a U3 to end the inning. Four runs came across, and it would have been worse had Mickey Moniak now been thrown out trying to go to third on the second single.
The Rangers lost to the Angels, 4-1, and Hernandez picked up a blown save, one of two he had in 2024. The reason he didn’t have more than two blown saves is largely due to the fact that Bruce Bochy stopped using him when the Rangers had the lead. From the Angels appearance through the end of his time with Texas, the Rangers were 4-15 in games Hernandez appeared in. Hernandez only appeared in three games during that 19 game stretch where the Rangers were ahead. Once they had a three run lead. Once they had a seven run lead.
The third time, in Hernandez’s penultimate Rangers appearance, he was summoned to protect a 5-4 Rangers lead in the bottom of the 6th inning in Toronto. He got three ground outs, with a hit by pitch mixed in, in the 6th. In the 7th, he went infield single, hard hit double, intentional walk, and sacrifice fly, then got lifted, having gotten charged with his second blown save of the year.
His final outing was in relief of Jon Gray, two days later, still in Toronto, when Gray left the game with groin tightness before he ever threw a pitch. Hernandez allowed five runs in 2.1 IP, including a pair of home runs. He only walked one batter, but he was getting hammered, with a lot of hard contact, and generated just one swinging strike in 36 pitches.
At the trade deadline, Hernandez was designated for assignment, and was claimed by the Seattle Mariners. After three games with Seattle, he was DFA’d again, waived, and outrighted. After an unsuccessful 13 game run with Tacoma, the M’s AAA team, Hernandez became a free agent.
One way at looking at Hernandez is that his career was de-railed by his UCL injury, that he never really got back to where he was before undergoing Tommy John surgery. From that point of view, he’s just another guy who was a victim of the strain that pitching puts on one’s arm, just another guy whose future was sunk by an arm injury.
As we mentioned at the outset, though, relievers like Hernandez have unpredictable careers. Things can click for them for a period of time, only for it to be unable to be sustained, usually due to inconsistency of command.
Hernandez had a 6.4% walk rate in 2020. He had a 16.7% walk rate in his time in the majors in 2019, and a walk rate that varied from 10.2% to 14.6% from 2022 to 2024 in the majors. Hernandez had a 2.3 BB/9 in 2020. In the minors, in full season ball, his best BB/9 prior to that season was 3.5, between two A ball levels in 2017. In both the majors and minors, from 2022 through 2024, Hernandez has walked at least 4-5 batters per 9 at each level, for each team. This past winter, in the Dominican Winter League, Hernandez walked 11 of 67 batters faced in 14.2 IP, against 12 Ks.
As we have discussed before, command is about throwing quality strikes as much as (or more than) throwing strikes. With an effective sinker, the heat map should show a heavy concentration of pitches at the very bottom of the strike zone, hugging that low horizontal line. A sinker that’s not at the bottom of the zone tends to get hammered.
Looking at Hernandez’s heat maps, during his major league career at least, he has not located his sinker consistently down. He has struggled to throw quality strikes with his sinker, with the heat maps showing way too many pitches left too far up in the zone.
Not surprisingly, Hernandez has been below average with his sinker all five seasons he has appeared in the majors — even in 2020, his breakout year. His success in 2020 was due primarily to his slider and changeup being untouchable, with a .181 xwOBA and .078 xwOBA, respectively. Hernandez’s sinker lagged behind, with a .357 xwOBA, a 47.9% hard hit rate, and a -2 run value that year.
Every other season, Hernandez has allowed an xwOBA over .400 on his sinker, which is not good. The league average xwOBA on sinkers, during Hernandez’s time in the majors, is .351. 206 pitchers have had at least 250 plate appearances ending in a sinker for the period from 2019-24. Hernandez’s xwOBA of .420 is the fourth worst of those 206 pitchers. His xSLG of .530 is the 10th worst.
Hernandez’s inability to command his fastball consistently has been his downfall. It leads to more walks, it leads to batters not going after his (quality) secondaries, and it leads to his giving up too much loud contact. Whether Tommy John surgery led to the loss of command, or if he was never going to be able to maintain the degree of command he showed in 2020, is an open question, but its clear that even when he was having success his fastball command was just barely good enough. He didn’t have enough of a margin of error for his command to regress and still be successful.
Looking through the list of B-R’s similarity scores and the pitchers most similar to Hernandez, the top pitcher on the list, the one most similar to Hernandez, is former Texas Ranger reliever (and Opening Day starter) Tanner Scheppers. Also on the top ten are former Ranger relievers Guillermo Moscoso (acquired with Carlos Melo from the Detroit Tigers for Gerald “One Man, Five Tools” Laird) and Ian Gibault.
Scheppers, Moscoso and Gibaut each had one good season (though Moscoso’s, it should be noted, was as a starter). Each of them struggled to throw strikes and to stay healthy in every other season but that one good season. Each of them ended up with relatively short careers.
Gibaut and Hernandez, I will note, are each still active. Each is currently in a major league camp on a minor league deal, Gibaut with the Reds, Hernandez with the Rays. Each has a chance to recapture their past success, perform well enough to stick in the majors for a while, extend their careers, separate themselves from Scheppers and Moscoso and any number of other, similar pitchers in MLB history.
The initial reaction to seeing Hernandez being with Tampa is that they’ll turn him around, get a quality season or two out of him and then flip him. And that may happen. But one of the things that Tampa has preached, that has led to success with some other reclamation cases, is for pitchers to trust their stuff and throw it down the middle.
And for Hernandez, throwing it down the middle has been one of his big problems.
Previously: