Matt Kremnitzer: O'Day has been better than ever

Darren O'Day is a very good relief pitcher, but you already know that. You probably also know by now that O'Day was selected to the All-Star Game along with fellow Orioles Adam Jones, Manny Machado, and Zach Britton. All are deserving choices, though plenty of deserving players around the league are left off the team each year. Regardless, it's impressive to have four players on the team overall and two pitchers from the same bullpen.

It's impossible to watch O'Day pitch without marveling at his delivery. There are other submarine pitchers around the major leagues, but there aren't many. And there are even fewer who have had the success O'Day has enjoyed the past few seasons.

Before Dan Duquette was hired a few days later, the O's selected O'Day off waivers from the Rangers. Buck Showalter was (and likely still is) more than familiar with several players in the Rangers' organization, and O'Day was far from the last acquisition from their system. O'Day somewhat surprisingly made the O's opening day roster back in 2012, but he has been excellent since. He's thrown at least 62 innings in each season since 2012 and is on pace to do so again, and his ERA has dropped every season:

* 2012: 2.28 ERA
* 2013: 2.18 ERA
* 2014: 1.70 ERA
* 2015: 1.10 ERA (32 2/3 innings)

O'Day's fielding independent stats are not as impressive, mainly because he isn't in the upper tier of relievers at generating strikeouts. He is also susceptible to the longball at times. But he is pretty good at limiting walks, has generated consistently low opposing batting averages on balls in play, induces a lot of infield fly balls and limits the amount of hard contact against him.

O'Day has also been executing a slightly different game plan with his pitch repertoire. According to BrooksBaseball.net, O'Day throws three pitches: a slider, a four-seam fastball and a two-seam fastball. The four-seam fastball is his best whiff-inducing pitch, followed closely by his slider. The two-seamer/sinker is more of his groundball/contact pitch.

O'Day has opted to throw more four-seam fastballs. In 2012, he threw four-seamers 22 percent of the time; that amount has gone up a few percentage points each season. He's currently throwing four-seam fastballs about 34 percent of the time, while throwing slightly fewer sliders and sinkers. So why is he doing this?

Last week, Eno Sarris of FanGraphs introduced the concept of the submarine riseball. As Sarris described, "The physics of releasing the ball down under makes it almost impossible to get backspin on the ball, and backspin is what gives fastballs 'rise' - backspin helps the ball drop less than you'd expect, given gravity." O'Day is mentioned in the article as a pitcher with this remarkable skill, and an article with Steve Melewski is mentioned in which O'Day discusses throwing more pitches up in the zone.

In 2012, O'Day located his four-seamer fastballs higher in the zone than in any other season. He followed that up by locating the pitch lower in the zone than in any other season. Perhaps that played a part in O'Day striking out only 8.5 batters per nine innings in 2013 -- his lowest season total in Baltimore. The next season, he started elevating the four-seamer a bit more, and he's again throwing the pitch a bit higher in 2015. A main reason why the pitch is higher in the zone is O'Day has steadily increased the amount of vertical movement on his four-seamer in each season since 2012. Perhaps he's figured something out.

It's hard to argue with whatever O'Day has been doing. Among all qualified major league relievers, he ranks sixth in ERA and is tied for 13th in strikeouts per nine innings. He's on pace to have his best season in the majors, and like several other O's players, he's scheduled to become a free agent and hit the open market. Before the 2013 season, he signed a two-year, $5.8 million deal with the O's that could easily have been labeled premature. Instead, it quickly went from questionable to reasonable, and the $4.25 million club option for this season has been a bargain.

O'Day turns 33 in October, and he seems to be in store for a sizable payday. The Orioles, reasonably so, typically do not spend big money on relief pitching, so O'Day very well could be on the way out unless he's open to taking a discount to remain in Baltimore. But he certainly isn't obligated to do so.

Matt Kremnitzer blogs about the Orioles at Camden Depot. Follow him on Twitter: @mattkremnitzer. His thoughts on the O's appear here as part of MASNsports.com's continuing commitment to welcome guest bloggers to our little corner of cyberspace. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.