As Fastballs Fade, Establishing the Fastball Rides On
Last week, pitching prospect Grayson Rodriguez was asked a great question on The Baseball Barb-B-Cast. Rodgriguez is ranked third in an excellent Baltimore system, and as a player who was drafted in 2018, his tenure with the club spans both the Dan Duquette and Mike Elias eras. The question was: How has the organization changed over time?
Rodriguez started his answer with, “Everything about the organization changed but the name.” He touched on technology, pitch development, and the turnover in the coaching staff, but the part I want to focus on came right at the beginning, when he was describing the Duquette era: “Our pitching philosophy was, it was like, ‘Hey, you know, as a starter we’re going to go out in the first three innings and we’re just going to throw nothing but fastballs, and we’re going to see if that works.’ And, like, terrible. Terrible idea.”
Yup. That does indeed sound like a terrible idea. It also made me wonder whether teams are as focused on establishing the fastball as they once were. A reduction in first inning fastball rate would make sense for a couple reasons. First, fastball usage has dropped overall as teams have learned that pitchers should throw their best pitch more often, and fastballs themselves have become less effective:
Second, starting pitchers go fewer innings these days. The less likely a pitcher is to go deep into the game and face a lineup for a third time, the less sense it makes to hold something back for the late innings. Here I should admit that before I considered those reasons, establishing the fastball just struck me as the kind of received wisdom that so often gets challenged by advanced analytics. Does it work, or is that just the way it’s always been done?
To measure the potential change, I pulled data specifically for starters and compared the percentage of fastballs (specifically sinkers and four-seamers) they threw in the first inning and the fourth inning. I also included the overall percentage:
There are a few takeaways here, but the headline is that establishing the fastball is definitely alive and well. As the overall fastball rate has declined, the rate in the first inning has dropped ever so slightly faster than the rate in the fourth. Before we dive into the data, however, I’m going to be totally honest with you. At a certain point I got kind of carried away with the beauty of the graphs, so I decided to keep things going. I pulled fastball percentage for every inning just so I could watch the pretty lines curve together. After all, we’re not just FanGraphs. We’re also GraphFans:
Ok, back to the baseball. My data visualization digression turned out to be useful. It made it clear that the fourth inning is the right choice for our comparison. Fastball percentage increases in each of the first four innings, with the fifth tracking right along with the fourth. After that there’s a small gap, then the sixth through ninth track pretty closely together. Establishing the fastball is not just about the first inning, but also about the first time through the order.
It’s a bit hard to see on the charts above, but as I mentioned earlier, the gap between fastball rate in the first inning and the fourth inning is shrinking ever so slightly, especially over the last 10 years:
In 2022, the average starter threw 8% more fastballs in the first inning than they did in the fourth, but the distribution wasn’t perfectly normal. Most players were concentrated in the 4-9% range, with many more players above that range than below it. There are several players for whom the difference is so big that it should probably inform a batter’s approach against them:
| Player | 1st Inning | 4th Inning | Differential |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merrill Kelly | 61% | 41% | 20% |
| Aaron Nola | 66% | 48% | 18% |
| Noah Syndergaard | 57% | 40% | 18% |
| Triston McKenzie | 68% | 50% | 18% |
| Cole Irvin | 70% | 53% | 17% |
| Charlie Morton | 55% | 39% | 16% |
| Cristian Javier | 69% | 53% | 16% |
| Chris Archer | 45% | 29% | 16% |
| Alex Wood | 54% | 39% | 16% |
| Jameson Taillon | 56% | 41% | 15% |
| Justin Verlander | 57% | 43% | 14% |
| Ranger Suárez | 67% | 54% | 14% |
There are a couple patterns on this list. First, five of the top six players throw both a sinker and a four-seamer, so it could be that they just need to get a feel for both early on. All the same, if you’re facing Aaron Nola, you want all the help you can get. It could really make a difference to know that in the first inning he’s way more likely to throw a fastball, especially a four-seamer, and that he rarely throws a changeup.
As for Triston McKenzie and Cristian Javier, you’d rarely be wrong if you sit four-seamer against them in the first inning. I have to imagine teams are aware of this, but I don’t know whether it’s actually affecting anyone’s thought process when they’re at the plate.
Cole Irvin is an interesting inclusion on the list, as he had the second-highest jump in differential from 2021 to 2022, just behind Jordan Montgomery. In 2021, Irvin threw his fastball 63% of the time in the first inning and 59% of the time in the fourth. His overall fastball rate only increased by 1%, but when he used them changed dramatically.
Irvin brings us to the second pattern, which is that a lot of these players have excellent fastballs. Kelly, Nola, McKenzie, Irvin, and Verlander all rank in the top 21 on our fastball pitch value leaderboards; Syndergaard and Javier also had excellent fastballs in 2022.
On the other hand, Morton, Archer, Wood, and Taillon all had mediocre fastballs in 2022. Did it affect their performance? The evidence certainly points that way:
| Player | ERA | FIP | xFIP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charlie Morton | +1.43 | +0.53 | +0.07 |
| Chris Archer | +0.64 | +0.77 | +0.19 |
| Alex Wood | -2.04 | -0.24 | -0.66 |
| Jameson Taillon | +1.06 | +1.66 | +1.07 |
Everyone but Wood was significantly worse in the first inning than they were for the rest of the game. They should strongly consider dropping their fastball usage in the first inning closer to their levels in the rest of the game.
There are also plenty of mysteries in these numbers. Over the last 15 years, pitchers throw more fastballs on the road than at home in the first inning (61.7%, compared to 61.2%), but their wOBA allowed on them is significantly lower (.353 to .378), and I can’t begin to tell you why.
Listening to Grayson Rodriguez, my first thought was that if teams started deemphasizing first-inning fastballs, some would have done so sooner than others. I pulled data for each team over the last 15 years, but I couldn’t find any such pattern. I did see a few trends: the Nationals dropping their fastball usage much later than the rest of the league, and the Phillies ramping up their first-fourth differential as they assembled a stable of multi-fastball starters like Nola, Suárez, and Zack Wheeler. But in general, inning-by-inning fastball rate is too crude a tool to let us pick up on multi-year shifts in an entire organization’s pitching philosophy. That said, there is a decent amount of year-over-year stickiness, both on the team level and the individual level, with r-values between .30 and .44, depending on what and how you’re measuring.
The last thing I did was look for a correlation between first-fourth differential and overall pitching performance. Once you adjust for league average in a given year, the correlations become so small as to be statistically insignificant, both for teams and for individual players. If establishing the fastball is hurting anyone, it’s not doing so much damage that they need to upend the way they think about pitching.
Davy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician and a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @davyandrewsdavy.bsky.social.
The second to last paragraph really struck my eye, and I wonder if part of the discrepancy in teams is difference of Starters vs the Bullpen. If a teams starters are significantly better than their bullpen (2010’s Nationals) then it would make sense to emphasize possible in-game longevity of starts. A couple of questions I would wonder is whether FB% differential is correlated to length of start, differential between the starters FIP and Bullpens FIP, or performance against starters breaking balls/off speed 2nd/3rd time through the order. Basically are some pitchers more incentivized to attempt to establish a fastball than others (for a variety of reasons)
Despite what some people might say, it makes all the sense in the world to not show all your pitches right away as a starter if you’re trying to, you know, have something left in the tank past the fifth inning. If you’re going to face batters three (maybe four, if you’re dominating) times in the same game and you show em everything you have the first time they see you, you have nothing to surprise them with afterwards.
This is also part of why I’m such a huge fan of SPs who throw more than one fastball type. Anything that allows you to throw off a batter’s timing and miss the fat part of the barrel even if you can’t overpower him = good.
This seems counterintuitive. If hitters know you wont use your full arsenal, wouldnt they get better results thus lessening the chance of you being in the game for long? Also, at this level they all pretty much know what every pitcher is throwing, so there shouldnt be an element of surprise there. A hitter *thinking* you’re willing to throw every pitch available gives a pitcher a huge advantage.
Thank you. The idea that the hitters don’t have access to all these same data points and rely on “seeing the pitches” on game day as opposed to having a game plan is ludicrous. It is simply received wisdom again and again that has to constantly be pushed back against. You’re fooling joiner by holding your change up or sweeper until later on.
I wonder whether hitters benefit from “seeing” pitches the first time through the order if they’ve never faced the pitcher before
Maybe this logic checks out for guys who have good fastballs, but it doesn’t make sense for guys who don’t. If hitters know you’re not going to use your offspeed stuff in the first couple innings, then they’ll just sit on your hittable fastball early on (which is part of Davy’s point). Worrying about how surprised they’ll be later on is putting the cart before the horse
I am a Fan of these Graphs.
But there is no graph of the fans
When will GraphFans shirts be available in the shop?
>Everyone but Wood was significantly worse in the first inning than they were for the rest of the game. They should strongly consider dropping their fastball usage in the first inning closer to their levels in the rest of the game.
Most pitchers perform worse in the first inning, if only for the fact that they always face the top of the lineup. Three out of four pitchers being worse in the first inning is hardly an evidence of anything.
Really interesting piece! Thanks for supporting GraphFans!
I don’t know that this is “establishing the fastball”. I think it’s more (1) establishing that you’re throwing strikes and (2) reluctance to use breaking balls early. The second could be split into (2a) frequently doesn’t have the breaking ball/offspeed feel early, or (2b) simply wants to restrict showing nonfastballs to hitters early. 2b is an old-school strategic approach for when starters were expected to face hitters 4 or 5 times every time out.
This article dovetails interestingly with LaMar Gibson’s piece today on Pitcher List about Josiah Gray fastball troubles, in which LaMar posits that Gray might do well to throw more breaking stuff early in counts, rather than trying to establish his fastball, noting that Kyle Wright found success when he similarly changed his approach. (I’m way oversimplifying, but it’s worth a read.)
I find a basic premise of this article to be very questionable and that is that fastballs have become less effective. With contact at all time lows and with the MLB batting average at .243, even without pitchers whacking a few points off, the true answer is that everything is more effective but fastballs have not quite matched the assortment of other deliveries in silencing bats. I think the reason is that the modern 95+ heater thrown up in the zone is actually the reason breaking balls and off-speed stuff are more effective than ever. The hitter of today simply to has to gear up so much to try to catch up to the fastball that they are helpless against any change of speed. In this scenario the pitcher has an enormous edge and, with the hitter forced to sit dead red, can utilize his slower stuff more easily than when 90 was considered high heat. From the hitters perspective, because they are geared up to hit heat, they can handle it a little, not much as the decline in contact shows, but have a better chance relative to softer stuff. I am afraid that the feeble attempts to improve offense are futile and only diminishing the effectiveness of velocity, that has never been seen before and is only going to get faster, by moving the mound back is the only real solution.