Alex Lange Has A Problem, But It Isn't Pressure

[Yirsandy Rodríguez]

Image courtesy of IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Let’s get this much straight: Alex Lange owns a 1-6 record and a 6.33 ERA across 42 ⅔ innings. It is exactly the kind of stat line that gets filed away as a decline after about two seconds of evaluation. But in Lange’s case, the ERA is telling an incomplete story: in save opportunities, he has posted a solid 3.75 ERA over 12 innings; outside of those situations, that number jumps to an ugly 7.34 across 30 ⅔ innings. Opposing hitters are batting just .198 against him from the eighth through ninth innings, but in every other situation, they are hitting .355.

The leverage table explains that gap much better than the save column:

Leverage Index	BB%	K-BB%	HR/9	FIP	xFIP
Low Leverage	13.5%	9.6%	0.00	3.24	4.64
Medium Leverage	12.2%	8.2%	3.60	8.11	4.75
High Leverage	10.0%	15.0%	0.00	2.88	4.83

His walk rate steadily declines from 13.5% to 10.0% as the situation becomes more demanding, while his strikeout-minus-walk rate (K-BB%) reaches its highest point of the season (15.0%) exactly when the game demands his best pitches. This is not a pitcher losing command in the ninth inning. It is a location problem that appears outside those highest-pressure moments.

The spike in Lange’s FIP during medium-leverage situations (8.11, compared with 3.24 in low leverage and 2.88 in high leverage) comes from one specific factor: a sudden jump in home runs allowed, with a 3.60 HR/9 mark. When we turn to xFIP — the metric that normalizes home run rate — the illusion fades: 4.64, 4.75 and 4.83. The league is seeing a pitcher profile that looks much more similar across all three situations than the results suggest; the numbers are mostly reflecting where those damaging home runs happened to cluster.

That is where the repertoire tells the story that innings alone cannot explain. His fastballs are responsible for most of his damaging contact: he is allowing exit velocities above 93 mph in the upper areas of the strike zone, exactly the type of location where mistakes with his fastball become the easiest to punish. Meanwhile, his slider (32.1% usage) and his new cutter (12.1%) have not allowed a single home run this season (0.0% HR/FB). This is not a mental breakdown halfway through a game; it is that when Lange’s fastballs miss, they miss up and over the middle of the plate, and those mistakes have been concentrated in medium-leverage situations.

That is the most important part of the story: this increased vulnerability in the air is the direct cost of a repertoire transition. In 2022, when Lange was built around a devastating knuckle-curve that accounted for nearly half of his pitches, he generated ground balls on 55.6% of balls in play. After eliminating the curveball completely beginning in 2023, his ground-ball rate has fallen to 42.9%.

Lange went from being a pitcher who survived by keeping the ball on the ground to one who now relies more on hitters missing. That approach can work, but it comes with a smaller margin for error when mistakes start traveling in the air.

With Kansas City controlling him through arbitration until the 2027 season, the question for the front office is not the surface-level appearance of a 6.33 ERA. It is whether Alex Lange has stopped being effective or whether he has simply become a different pitcher, with a different set of strengths and risks than the one who made him valuable in the first place.

Everything points toward the latter: his command improves when the pressure rises, his most damaging contact is concentrated in two identifiable pitches, and his xFIP suggests a much more stable underlying profile.

The solution for Matt Quatraro and his coaching staff is not to lose faith in Lange in the ninth inning. It is to understand when his fastball is being exposed and avoid putting him in those middle-inning situations where one misplaced pitch can change the game in a single swing.

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