Catching Up to a Fastball
Sometimes announcers state that a player is not able to catch up to a fastball. Common sense states that the faster the pitch the harder it is to hit. I decided to look at the results of every fastball swung at to see how the results changed as the speed increased or decreased.
Fastballs generally have a 20 MPH difference in speeds (80 MPH to 100 MPH) at the major league level, so a baseline of what happens at every swing needed to be created. I took the results of every fastball over the last 4 years. I divided them up by in 1 MPH intervals (except for those >100 MPH which were grouped together). Then, I divided up the results further into those pitches missed, fouled off, hit into an out or hit for a hit. Taking all the data, I got the following results:
Here is a look at each line:
Miss: The trend is to have more contact until the 89 to 90 MPH range. At this point the swing and miss % increases as the speed gets lower.
Foul: A nice even downward curve from near 50% at >100 MPH to 35% at 80-81 MPH.
Out (in play): At higher speeds, the out rate is at its lowest (20%). It increases to 30% until 89-90 MPH where it steadies out.
Hit: The percentage of hits goes from 10% at >100MPH to 17% at 88-89 MPH. After that point, it slowly declines to 15%.
The main idea to take from this data is the 88 to 90 MPH zone. Above this point, hitters are more likely to miss the pitch and not get a hit. At speeds below this level, the chance for an out (in play) or hit stay the same. Speed, at the major league, seems to help a pitcher for speeds over 90 MPH. Fastball speeds below 88 MPH don’t generally get worse results as the speed gets slower and slower.
To extend this data a bit, here is a look at how hitters with over 350 PAs on the Cardinals and Rangers ranked according to the percentage chance of getting a hit in 2011. I looked at the fastballs over 92 MPH:
Just a few notes on the data.
1. If Albert Pujols is going swing at these faster fastballs, he is going to put the ball in play 50% of the time. Matt Holliday and Nelson Cruz put the ball in play just 25% of the time.
2. Mike Napoli and Daniel Descalso have the greatest problem with making contact on these faster fastballs.
The faster the fastball, the better the result for a pitcher, but the results even out once a fastball goes below 90 MPH. The difference in how batters handle fastball can be seen in the World Series batters. When some announcer states that some hitter can’t caught up with fastballs, you will have a general idea if they are correct or not.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
I would hypothesize that the reason it evens out below 88 or so is that pitchers who throw a <90's fastball generally have something else going on with their fastball (superior location, better pitch selection/sequencing, crazy movement) that makes up for the slow speed.
Especially with a Wakefield type where the majority of his pitches are within the 48-60 MPH range, enabling him to get away with a high-seventies to low-eighties fastball.
Yeah. With classic knuckleballers like Wakefield or Dickey who also throw a 70-85MPH straight pitch 10-20% of the time to change speeds and keep hitters off balance…well, we call that pitch a fastball, but it may be more helpful to think of it as a changeup in terms of how it works in their repertoire.
There’s that.
Also, looking at the jump in whiffs in the 80-83 MPH range, I wonder if a lot of those pitches are misclassified. Also wonder what the sample size is there.
Not only that but just because a pitch is slower doesn’t mean it’s easier. If you’re a major leaguer, and you’re used to hitting 90-93, someone comes in throwing 80-84, you’re over aggressive and roll over/pop out a lot. It’s timing.
What I want to see is a trend or graph next to it with the “average” fastball speeds. My hypothesis is that anything that’s not within say the first standard deviation of “average” is more effective. You see more ks at a higher speed, and more in play outs at a lower speed. It’s a disruption of a hitter’s timing.
Good stuff, Jeff. Thanks!
Is there any way to also analyze the percentage of fastballs taken, especially for strikes? It stands to reason, although not always true, that fastballs with higher velocities are more likely to just be taken.
Also, it seems to me that more often than not a fast pitch ends up taken, as opposed to swung at. But that may be confirmation bias as we don’t get the speed called as much to our attention if the ball is in play.
The high velocities being on the left hand side of that graph confounds me.
Interesting. I would like to see this as a difference in speed between their fastball and their other pitch with the added dimension of location. The NYT did a nice piece on pitch location versus results a while back.
Matt Holliday’s pitch values against fastballs are very good.
In othe words, when he does hit a fastball, he hits the poop out of it.
I’m always amazed at how often he swings through an average fastball early in the count. Granted it’s probably a timing issue with his leg kick and such … but he eventually does catch up.
these graphs are sexcellent
Just a matter of time before FG hears about something called photoshop and these graphs resemble the ones at BTB.
That’ll be the “sweet spot” of data presentation.
do you have something against excel?
or am i just feeding the troll?
I don’t see Rasmus – who appears to hit the fastball a paltry 8% of the time – on the Cards post-season roster. O wait! Crap! He’s a Blue Jay now!
La russa must have forgotten that he was traded and put him on the scorecard. Give him a break its not like La russa writes Colby’s name much.
I don’t see any Blue Jays on these post season roster stats. O wait! Crap! They didn’t make the playoffs again!
Fascinating stuff, any chance this could be tied to BABIP or other attributes?
I think if you were really gonna get into this, or compare to other pitches, you’d want to know Total Bases. All Hits are not created equal.
But this is still awesome.
I’d like to see how often when the guys who struggle even putting the ball in play(like Cruz and Napoli)hit these plus fastballs out of the park. Cruz hit a Verlander fastball that was 100 mph out of the park in the postseason, and Napoli hit 30 homeruns in 369 at-bats this past season. Throw in the 25 doubles he hit, and he’s the anti-Joe Mauer.
And Freese has a pretty small sample size, I’m guessing… I’d like to see what it’s been in the playoffs since he’s crushing everything while hitting around .500…