I dug into his pitch fx data a bit ago. The long and short of things is he's throwing a curve ball this year. Previously he'd used a slider as his "out pitch." He's also messed a bit with his 2/4 seam usage. Was like 25/45 now it's more like 35/35. His change up has been pretty good. HR/FB rate is way down. Still walking way too many people. I'd argue that is his biggest current issue though obviously wasn't tonight. Also, while his change up has been a pretty good k rate pitch his other pitches aren't really more than average currently.
Overall my take away was he is still a work in progress. I'm not yet seeing anything that points to TOR potential. I mean his fastball velocity is good but his secondary pitches aren't striking out enough to warrant that sort of talk at present time. But if we put a #4/5 starter hope on him I think he can get there pretty easily. His 3.75/3.84 ERA/FIP is right about what you'd expect. If the walks come down seeing him in the mid 3 range for ERA wouldn't be surprising. Also his soft contact rate is really not bad at 25% and that likely goes up after tonight since I'm looking at pre-tonight data. As a comparison, Hendricks was at 25.0%/49.1%/25.8% last year compared to Butler who's 25.0%/33.9%/41.1%. My guess is largely the difference here is that Hendricks with is better command last year was able to limit the hard contact more than Butler has so far but the fact that both had 25% soft contact rates it's something to work off of.
