For Your Consideration: Erick Fedde

Last year, Erick Fedde returned to the majors after a one-year sojourn to Korea. He signed a two-year, $15 million deal with the White Sox after a rousing KBO performance. Then he started the season in Chicago strong, at the same time the team around him fell apart. By the time he got traded to St. Louis at the deadline, his place in the national eye was fading. When the Cardinals missed the playoffs, Fedde did too, and he played a little worse down the stretch.

Why write about him, then? Two reasons. First, a spate of injuries means that plenty of playoff contenders are hunting around for pitching. With the Cardinals already having announced their intent to retool for the future, Fedde is surely being discussed in front offices across the sport. Second, I was very in on the right-hander last year, and his first-half performance only cemented my view. But his full-year numbers weren’t quite as good. Variance? Confirmation bias? I can’t be sure until I look. In other words, if you’re a fan of a team with playoff aspirations and pitching problems, you should be curious. And since I share that curiosity, let’s find out together.

If I had to describe Fedde in his first major league stint, I’d focus on how he succeeded without standout stuff. To be honest, though, “succeed” overstates it; over 450 innings with the Nationals, he compiled a 5.41 ERA. You can probably picture someone on your favorite team like Fedde even if you don’t remember his tenure in Washington: a kitchen-sink fifth starter getting by on guile rather than blowing hitters away, and even then not always succeeding.

As an NC Dino, Fedde was a much different pitcher. How different? He struck out nearly a third of the batters he faced and won MVP honors. He looked like Korea’s Jacob deGrom, in other words, and I was curious what kind of changes he’d made to his arsenal to achieve those results.

Now for the weird part. Take a look at the PitchingBot and Stuff+ grades for each of his pitches, first during the second half of his Nats career and then in 2024:

Curious! Fedde didn’t seem to change much at all, even if you drill down further than a one-number stuff grade. He still sits around 93 mph with his sinker, and still tops out in the mid-90s. His cutter looks identical. He throws his changeup slightly harder, but it still gets similar action. He switched a curveball for a slider, but that’s about the only change, and both models think the new pitch is about as good as the old one in a vacuum. His swinging strike rate, while higher than his career mark, was still only 8.7%. The league average hovers around 11%. In other words, he’s still not blowing anyone away.

That tracks almost exactly with what Fedde displayed last year, both with the White Sox and the Cardinals. He struck out 21% or so of batters at both stops, pure back-of-rotation numbers. But looking at strikeouts is only part of the equation, even in our stuff-obsessed times. And the rest of Fedde’s game has changed meaningfully.

Want it in one number? PitchingBot and Stuff+ both assign overall command grades that measure a pitcher’s ability to locate. I won’t go into the specifics of how each work – at least partially because the specifics are too complicated to fit into an article, and partially because I’m a writer, not a mathematician. But here’s the upshot: From 2020-2022, PitchingBot gave Fedde a 54 command score (50 is average), while Stuff+ gave him a 106 location score (100 is average). In 2024, those marks climbed to 57 and 111, respectively.

In other words, Fedde got the ball to good locations for a given count more frequently, and that made all the difference. His precision manifested itself partially in avoiding walks. Nats-era Fedde walked almost 10% of the batters he faced. Last year, that dropped meaningfully to 7.2%. And walk rates are just the start of it. Command isn’t just avoiding balls in three-ball counts. It’s also placing pitches effectively to keep hitters from teeing off.

On that front, Fedde also excelled last year. He hit spots just barely off the plate 19.5% of the time when ahead in the count – that number stood at 13% when he was a National. He hit the edges of the zone more consistently when he was behind in the count. He slashed his rate of meatballs thrown when ahead in the count by a quarter. You name a count/location pair you’d consider beneficial, and Fedde got better at it. He used to do a fairly good job of moving his fastball and breaking ball around; now he’s downright excellent.

The key adjustment? Those aforementioned meatballs. League-wide, pitchers throw about 20% of their pitches over the heart of the plate when they’re ahead in the count. Fedde has always been better than average at that skill, but in 2024, he was even better. He left pitches over the middle just 10.7% of the time in that situation. When he got ahead of a hitter, he almost never bailed them out with a crushable pitch.

You want that in terms of math? Before 2024, Fedde wasn’t very good at managing contact when he was ahead in the count. He allowed a .493 slugging percentage (.529 xSLG) and .337 wOBA on contact (.373 xWOBACON). Neither of those marks are good, especially for a pitcher who doesn’t strike many hitters out. But in 2024, he became a contact suppression genius. Hitters managed a paltry .330 slugging percentage (.361 xSLG) when they put the ball in play while behind in the count, and a .252 wOBACON (.263 xwOBACON). Those are tremendous numbers, both in terms of results and Statcast-expected results.

Think of it this way: If you’re a hitter facing Fedde, you’re going to want to swing. He doesn’t miss bats, but he has good command. When you’re behind in the count, swinging probably sounds even better. What, is he going to blow one by you? Not likely, but if you keep the bat on your shoulders, he might pick off a corner. So batters attack, and Fedde throws them pitches in tough locations. Even better for Fedde, he got ahead in the count at a career-high rate, and at a rate comfortably higher than league average. In other words, he figured out how to pitch while ahead, and also figured out how to get ahead more than ever.

This isn’t how you’d draw up a pitcher from scratch. Making a living off of letting your opponents put the ball in play comes with downsides. Fedde is prone to the occasional blowup game. He’s going to give up his fair share of home runs. But there aren’t better alternatives. At 32, it’s not like he’s going to develop monstrous stuff out of nowhere. He’s fully formed at this point on that front, so approach and location are his best tools to stand out.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a batted ball luck mirage, at least not totally. Sure, Fedde’s 3.30 ERA is probably an overstatement of his talent. But what about his 3.86 FIP, or his 3.91 xERA? His 4.12 xFIP and 4.19 SIERA aren’t even that bad, and they’re the worst of the ERA estimators. Is he an ace? Obviously not. But a third starter? Certainly, based on how well he pitched in 2024.

The real question is whether he can do it again. Command-based breakouts never seem as solid as overpowering, stuff-driven improvement. No one watched Cole Ragans shave two runs off of his ERA in 2023 and said, “Nah, don’t believe it.” All you had to do was watch him throw one fastball and one slider. But with Fedde, the improvements don’t jump off the screen the same way, and they feel less permanent. It doesn’t help that he had a much longer track record of mediocrity than Ragans, and that he didn’t figure it out until age 30. ZiPS and Steamer both look at his track record unfavorably; they each project him for an ERA and FIP around 4.25.

I completely understand why the models are skeptical. Did you hear the part where I described his lengthy pre-KBO career? Did you hear the part where he has subpar stuff and doesn’t strike anyone out or miss bats? Can a computer model reasonably look at a 32-year-old with a career 4.82 ERA and buy in? Probably not.

But I’m not a computer. And I’m willing to believe in late-career or oddly timed breakouts as long as I can sell myself on a narrative. This one is easy for me to pitch. Fedde went to Changwon to play for the Dinos and came back changed. Maybe facing KBO competition emboldened him to change some things about his pitching. Maybe he just got better at commanding the ball where he wanted to. Maybe his new slider – his best pitch by results despite the mediocre model grades – made all the difference in the world. I’m not here to tell you which of these claims to believe. I’m just here to tell you that something changing for the better is eminently believable.

So should your team trade for Fedde? Let me put it this way: I’d want my team to go get him. He’s on a bargain basement contract. He’s coming off a season when he finished 24th in the majors in pitching WAR, and that’s using FIP – he was 11th in RA9-WAR. He could be a lot worse than that and still be miles better than your current fifth starter.

The cost? I have no idea. There’s sure to be smoke around Cardinals pitchers, but until a trade happens, we’re all in the dark. But I think that Fedde is good enough to help a contender this year, and with the seemingly annual spike in pitching injuries during spring training, plenty of contenders have a need for exactly what he’s likely to provide: solid, dependable innings in good quantity at a reasonable price.