Danny Coulombe was one of the moves that Chris Young made at the trade deadline to try to help the Rangers make a playoff push.
It didn’t work out, but Coulombe was a solid bullpen arm for the team. Now let’s dive into the numbers.
Performance Last Year
Coulombe performed well before arriving in Texas with a 1.16 ERA in 41 innings with 9 walks compared to 31 strikeouts. This all came out to a 1.6 WAR.
Then he arrived in Texas and those numbers hit a wall. He posted a 5.25 ERA in 12 innings with 9 walks and 12 strikeouts. He posted a negative 0.2 WAR over this time.
This makes it look really bad for Coulombe, but it doesn’t tell the full story. Six of his seven allowed runs came in two games in meltdowns against the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Angels. Other than another appearance, he was scoreless.
That makes him scoreless in 9 of the 12 innings that he pitched, which seems pretty good to me.
While Coulombe is not qualified according to baseball reference, his page is still pretty impressive.
The only things that jump off the page as really below average are his fastball velo and his extension. That isn’t too big of a deal as he figures out how to get hitters out with needing to overpower them.
His average exit velo, chase rate and barrel percent are the stats that are bordering on being great. He is getting over a third of the batters that he faces to chase, which is awesome for a guy that doesn’t throw too hard. It shows that he has touch that can leave hitters guessing.
His average exit velo is only at 87.5. So when hitters are making contact they aren’t squaring it up which leads to a lot of weak contact and that is backed up by the fact that the barrel percent is only 5.2 percent.
He is a crafty lefty that is able to use his finesse to generate chases and weak contact from hitters.
Pitch Mix
He throws five pitches with a cutter, sinker, 4-seamer, sweeper, and a curve.
He threw his cutter the most thrown pitch with a 40.3 percent usage rate and he throws it 85.2 miles per hour. It is far and away his best pitch with a whiff rate of 36.2 percent and a put away percent of 26.5. He is holding hitters to only .197 average against that pitch. It has also racked up 27 of his 43 strikeouts on the year.
His second most used pitch is his sinker with just a usage rate of 19.6 percent, this marks a huge drop off from his cutter with it being thrown less than half of the cutter. This was the pitch that batters had the most success against with a .276 batting average. It did have his lowest whiff rate with 9.6 percent and it was his put away pitch 12.5 percent. The pitch had some success, but it also a pitch that got hit hard.
Next up is 4-seamer with a 19 percent usage rate. He allows a .217 batting average. It was used the second most as the put away pitch with 21.9 percent. It generated the second most whiff rate with 25.9 percent. The expected batting average on the pitch was .283, so Coulombe was getting a bit lucky.
His sweeper comes in with a 18 percent usage rate. It was the pitch that hitters hit the worst against with a .125 against it, the expected average was not too better with it being .194. It generated a pretty good whiff rate at 22.5 percent and had a put away percent of 9.6.
His final pitch is his knuckle curve with a 2.9 percent usage rate. This pitch generated a pretty good whiff rate at 22.2 percent, however it had a put away rate of zero. He gave a batting average of .250 with it, that is a bit misleading as he didn’t throw the pitch a lot. He only allowed one hit on it in four at bats.
Verdict
Coulombe is someone that the Rangers should consider bringing back as you can never have too many arms in the bullpen. Acorrding to Spotrac, he is expected to get $4.3 million AAV. That isn’t too much in terms of the price tag, but the Rangers have talked about wanting to bring their payroll down.
I think that they could bring Coulombe back or they could choose to go another direction to bring back a couple of other arms. I don’t think there is wrong choice either way.
