Pitches are hard to classify, and the interactions between them are even more fraught. Mix up a slider and a cutter, and you’ll make the aggregates look all — wait, I started too specific. Let’s back up. Baseball is a game played between two teams, each of whom take turns trying to hit a ball thrown by the other team using a bat. The object of the game is to advance safely — wait, now this is too general. Let’s see if we can hit a happy medium.
Keegan Thompson throws a lot of pitches. Depending on how you count them — and boy, will we get into how you count them in this article, don’t worry — he throws as many as six different pitches, all with distinct properties in one way or another. Need a grounder? Keegan has a pitch for that. Strikeout? Sure thing. Want to beat a lefty, or induce a pop up, or regulate local power plants? Thompson can do the first two of those, if he picks the right pitch for the right situation.
This year, it looks like that previous paragraph is only partly hyperbole. In his 2021 major league debut, Thompson mainly worked out of the bullpen and had mixed success. He struck out an average number of batters but also ran a walk rate of nearly 13%. He went into 2022 without a clear role on the team — we projected him for a few starts and plenty of bullpen work — but with a pressing need for improvement on the command front. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been thinking a lot about two Yankees hitters recently. That’s less common than you’d think for me; out on the west coast, the TV isn’t overrun with Yankees highlights, and there are just so many baseball teams, so many interesting players to ponder. But I heard an announcer discussing one of my favorite baseball tropes, and it brought Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo to mind.
“Hard in, soft away” is a pitching adage, and one that makes plenty of sense. There’s a mechanical aspect to it, for one: to hit an inside pitch on the barrel, a hitter has to rotate more, which naturally takes more time. On the other hand, a slow pitch has the best odds of eluding a batter’s swing, or at least the most dangerous part of the bat, if the hitter swings too quickly; in a regular swing, the barrel gets to the outside part of the plate first (on a plane to hit the ball the other way) before rotating around to the inside of the plate (on a plane to pull).
I’m not a hitting mechanics expert, and that doesn’t describe the whole story. The batter could pull his hands in to try to get the bat head through the zone more quickly, or employ different swings for differently located (or angled) pitches, or any number of counters. But the default assumption – batters want to get the bat around on inside pitches, so pitchers should give them less time to do that, and vice versa – is at least a decent approximation of the physical reality in play. Read the rest of this entry »
Things haven’t quite gone to plan in San Francisco this year. That’s not to say that the Giants have been bad, or even that they’ve been disappointing exactly. At 39–33, they’re squarely in the playoff hunt, and if you go by our odds, they’re more likely to make the postseason today than they were before the season. But after a 107-win 2021, “in the playoff hunt” doesn’t sound nearly as enticing. The same is true for their individual performers. It’s hard to be impressed by a nice season when seemingly everyone on the team had a career year last year.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Logan Webb has been pretty darn good so far this year. In 15 starts, he’s compiled a 3.04 ERA, which nearly matches his 3.03 FIP. That’s roughly a match for his breakout 2021 season, which sounds great, but the resounding roar around the Giants’ unstoppable player development engine over the past two years makes Webb’s success feel almost pedestrian.
It’s not, though. Pitchers with ERAs near 3 don’t grow on trees. Webb is one of the best 30 starters in baseball; that should speak for itself. Since the start of 2021, he’s 12th among pitchers in WAR, 18th in ERA, and fifth in FIP. He’s 32nd in K-BB%, which doesn’t sound quite as impressive until you consider the fact that he gets so many grounders. No starter has allowed fewer home runs per inning, and only human cheat codeFramber Valdez has a higher groundball rate. Read the rest of this entry »
As you might imagine, I watch a lot of baseball for work, and one of the things that stands out to me the most this year is just how dang hard pitchers are throwing. I’m not just talking about that new hotshot reliever your team called up who’s dropping triple digits like peak Aroldis Chapman, though that’s part of it. I’m talking about existing starters, guys I’ve watched for years, adding a little oomph.
Max Fried has topped out over 100 mph this year; his teammate Kyle Wright has never thrown harder. Framber Valdez is up nearly two ticks on average. Carlos Rodón already threw hard, and now he throws even harder. You can’t walk 10 feet without tripping over a pitcher throwing harder than ever – or so it seems to me, a fairly interested observer.
But appearances can be deceiving. I can think of any number of baseball truths that were considered evidently true by observation for years, only to later be disproven. I decided to put my eyes to the test. Have pitchers learned how to throw harder from one year to the next, changing the fundamental truth of how aging works? Let’s find out.
My method is fairly simple. I took every starter who threw at least 10 innings since pitch-level data began in 2008. I took their average four-seam fastball velocity, but only in games they started; I didn’t want to have swingmen who changed roles within or between seasons in my data. From there, I looked at every pitcher to see if he’d thrown in the majors the previous year, and if so, the change in fastball velocity from one year to the next.
In this way, I got a yearly sample of how much every returning pitcher in baseball’s velocity changed, on average, every year. As a quick example, there were 176 pitchers who compiled at least 10 innings as a starter in both 2013 and ’14. On average, they threw 0.21 mph slower in 2014 than they did in ’13. I found those pairs for every year, which gave me a yearly average of velocity changes over time. Read the rest of this entry »
Frankie Montas took the mound to start the eighth inning yesterday afternoon with a chance at history. He hadn’t allowed a hit all game, and looked to be picking up steam; his last pitch of the seventh inning hit 99 mph on the stadium gun, one of his hardest pitches of the day. He cut down the first two batters of the eighth in short order – four pitches, two grounders – leaving him only four outs from the first no-hitter of his career.
Montas is one of the best pitchers in baseball. A year ago, he put together his first full season, 32 starts of 3.37 ERA excellence. This year, he’s cleaning things up around the edges: fewer walks, more grounders, and more innings per start. His 3.21 ERA, 3.15 FIP, and 2 WAR are all in the top 20 among starting pitchers.
One small downside: Montas plies his trade in Oakland. That 2 WAR is more than every other player on the A’s has amassed combined (that rest-of-roster total comes in at 1.8 WAR, if you’re keeping score at home). Baseball is a team sport, even if many of the interactions feel individual; Montas sports a 3-7 record despite his sterling numbers. Read the rest of this entry »
Ask pretty much any major league hitter, and they’ll tell you that they earn their paycheck with runners in scoring position. A base hit means a run, and you have to score runs to win games. An out — particularly a strikeout — squanders an opportunity to score, and those come vanishingly rarely these days, what with every pitcher in baseball throwing 100 mph with a wipeout slider and all. It’s the highest-leverage spot you can hit in; succeed with runners in scoring position, and your team will probably win, but fail, and it’s going to be a long night.
As far as we can tell, success in those situations — runners in scoring position, high leverage, you name it — isn’t predictive of future success. But that doesn’t mean approach isn’t predictive of future approach, and as you might imagine, hitters behave differently when they can smell an RBI opportunity.
One easy way to conceptualize this change in approach is to think of the edges of the zone and the area just outside of the strike zone — the Shadow Zone, in Statcast parlance — as a good test of what a hitter wants to do. On pitches down the heart of the plate, swinging is a clear best choice. On pitches nowhere near the zone, taking is the only right choice. But pitches that could go either way? The best strategy depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
With runners in scoring position and no one on first — in other words, a situation where a walk is far worse than a hit — major leaguers have swung at shadow zone pitches 56.4% of the time (in the last two years). On the whole, they’ve only swung 52.9% of the time at those pitches. In other words, they increase their borderline pitch swing rate by 3.5 percentage points when the gap between a walk and a single is the largest.
That’s a rather unimpressive number. It’s the clearest time to swing that you can imagine, and batters are hardly changing their behavior. But that’s logical, when you think about it. Walks aren’t suddenly worthless just because you could drive in a run; juicing up the bases for the next batter still has value. And swinging at borderline pitches is hardly the best way to drive in runs; taking borderline pitches and waiting for a mistake, or for the pitcher to challenge you, might be a better decision. Read the rest of this entry »
You can call the Rays unlucky, if you’d like. After amassing the second-most WAR from position players in all of baseball last year, 2022 has been a huge step back. They’re 18th in the league, with an aggregate wRC+ below 100, and injuries have taken a huge toll on the lineup they planned to run out at the start of the year.
Wander Franco, their wunderkind shortstop, hasn’t played since May 30. Brandon Lowe, perhaps the best hitter on the team, has been out two weeks longer than Franco. Manuel Margot had been picking up some of the offensive slack, but now he’s out with a knee injury that may cause him to miss significant time, and fellow outfielder Kevin Kiermaier hit the IL the same day. Mike Zunino was ineffective and is now hurt. Josh Lowe and Taylor Walls, two of the team’s top reinforcements coming into the year, have a combined 51 wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »
Eli Morgan is one of the best-kept secrets in baseball. He’s not a high-leverage reliever for a marquee team. He’s not even the best or most famous reliever on his own team. Heck, he was a middling five-and-dive starter in the majors just last year. But none of that matters anymore, because now he has a cheat code:
That changeup is absolutely ludicrous. It looks like no other pitch in baseball. It’s slow, much slower than the rest of Morgan’s arsenal. Every other one of his pitches is in the vicinity of league average, while his changeup is the slowest in baseball. That makes for huge separation from his fastball; if the two started on the same trajectory, the changeup would fall 30 more inches than the fastball on its way to home plate. That’s nearly half an Altuve. Read the rest of this entry »
On Wednesday, the Astros easily handled the Rangers. They won, 9–2, with Luis Garcia’s strong start backed by a typically robust offensive performance. The Astros are very good. The Rangers are significantly worse. There are baseball games like this every day, multiple of them even. But this game stands alone, for one singular feat.
Er, well, dual feat. In the second inning, Garcia was simply too much for the Rangers. He faced Nathaniel Lowe, Ezequiel Duran, and Brad Miller, and wasted no time in setting them down:
That was the 107th immaculate inning — nine pitches, three strikeouts — in baseball history. It wasn’t the most recent one for long, however. In the seventh, Phil Maton came on in relief of Garcia and got right down to business. He faced Nathaniel Lowe, Ezequiel Duran, and Brad Miller, and wasted no time in setting them down:
Hey, that was really convenient! I got to use the exact same sentence again, because Maton exactly repeated Garcia’s feat; he tore through the three Rangers in only nine pitches for the 108th immaculate inning in history. It was, as you’d expect, the first time the same team has accomplished the feat twice in one game, as well as the first time it’s happened twice on the same day, to give you an idea of how out of the ordinary this was.
You didn’t need FanGraphs to tell you that was remarkable, though. Everyoneelsealreadyhas. Instead, I thought I’d take a look at perfect strikeouts — three pitches, one strikeout, no beating around the bush — and see whether this game still stands out if we remove the “innings” part of immaculate innings.
Garcia had those three perfect strikeouts in the second inning, but he actually managed another one in the game. It was, in fact, the next batter he faced: Leody Taveras went down on consecutive pitches before Marcus Semien took a first-pitch ball to end Garcia’s streak. Four three-pitch strikeouts in a game sounds quite impressive, but it’s not even the most in a game this year. Zach Eflin reeled off six perfect strikeouts in his start on May 22. Six other players have notched five such strikeouts in a game, including Garcia himself on April 22.
Extending our lens backwards in time to 2007, the earliest year in the pitch-by-pitch database I used, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Max Scherzer holds the single-game record. On May 11, 2016, he tied a far more visible record with 20 strikeouts in a nine-inning game. He also struck out nine batters on exactly three pitches. Scherzer might just have a knack for this; he also notched two separate games with seven three-pitch strikeouts (May 26, 2017 and September 20, 2018).
There have been 11 games since 2007 where a pitcher recorded seven or more three-pitch strikeouts. No one else has more than one. Scherzer, it turns out, is the master of the efficient strikeout. Other good pitchers have approached those heights, but only rarely. Here are those 11 games:
That’s neat, but focusing on that fact highlights only Garcia, and not particularly well at that. If we’re focusing on team perfect strikeouts, the Astros mustered seven; Garcia’s four and Maton’s three were the only ones of the game. That’s part of a three-way tie for most in a single game this year. The Rays notched seven on April 14, and the Astros did it again on April 24. If you’ll recall from above, that’s the game where Garcia had five perfect strikeouts. He’s the standard-bearer for the feat this year.
Zoom out, and things get Rays-y. On August 17, 2019, they struck out ten batters on three pitches apiece, the only team (!) to eclipse Scherzer’s nine-strikeout effort. Houston pitchers certainly looked dominant yesterday, but they needed an entire extra immaculate inning to match the standard Tampa set.
Are you less interested in the specific game and more interested in Garcia’s three-pitch-strikeout prowess? He has 17 of them on the year, which certainly sounds impressive, but only places him in a tie for seventh among pitchers in 2022. Shane McClanahan is first, with a whopping 23. Nestor Cortes, of all people, has 18. Scherzer has 15, and he hasn’t pitched in a month. Garcia is certainly one of the best pitchers in baseball when it comes to going right after the batter and setting them down, but he’s not the best in the business.
Did I succeed in exhausting everyone’s interest in three-pitch strikeouts? Who knows! I find them quite interesting, but then, I find a lot of things about baseball quite interesting. I found yesterday’s Astros feat amazing, but giving it a little more context just makes Scherzer’s feats stand out even more. The three-pitch strikeout is the ultimate expression of pitcher dominance — no waste, just three straight strikes, next please — and it stands to reason that the marquee strikeout pitcher of our generation is also the marquee three-pitch-strikeout pitcher of our generation.
