With the continual increases in league-wide fastball velocity each year, we’re beginning to understand that pitcher aging curves are going to change dramatically. As Jeff Zimmerman’s work makes clear, older pitchers are holding onto more of their fastball velocity and shedding usage at the same time. There’s a survivor’s bias in studying the pitchers who have accrued the most innings, but there’s something to be learned about the limits of maintaining velocity from pitchers who exemplify the modern game.

Max Scherzer is an archetype of the modern pitcher: someone who has been all gas and punchouts. But as he ages, he appears to be entering into a slow decline. He’s boosted his K-BB% rate from 23.4% last season to 30.9%, but his fastball has lost 0.6 mph (94.9 to 94.3 mph) off its average and 0.8 mph (97.9 to 97.1 mph) off its max. And while we can argue about averages, what might be most important for measuring arm health is max velocity.

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About a month ago, I wrote about Jack Flaherty and looked at his increased reliance on both his fastball and his slider. I posited that through his first seven starts, Flaherty had effectively been a two-pitch pitcher, with the aforementioned combination of pitches making up about 80% of his total pitches. (His curveball was his third-most used pitch, thrown sparingly at about a 13% clip.)

To investigate if this constituted a negative development and could account for Flaherty’s reduction in strikeouts relative to his career norms, I conducted a series of analyses. I grouped pitcher seasons from 2010-20 and looked at the number of pitches each pitcher had with a usage over 15%. This was somewhat arbitrary; I chose the 15% cutoff so pitchers with mixes like Flaherty’s in 2021 would appear in the bucket with two pitches. I then took each bucket and looked at the group’s strikeout rate, walk rate, FIP-, and WAR per 180 innings pitched. I found that between two, three, and four pitches, there was virtually no difference in any of the measures; the strikeout and walk rates were within a percentage point, as were the FIP- figures, while the prorated WAR numbers were within hundredths of a win. Next, I calculated the third time through the order (TTO) effect for pitchers in each bucket. To my surprise, there again was little difference between the pitcher buckets. My hypothesis was that two-pitch pitchers would struggle to get through the order as effectively as their peers who utilized more pitches. But based on my cutoffs for a relevant pitch (15% usage), this did not seem to be the case.

From there I concluded that Flaherty leaning on his fastball and slider more was not inherently bad; there seemed to be no evidence that being a two-pitch starter was inherently detrimental to striking out batters, preventing runs, and turning over a lineup on more than one, two, or three occasions.

But upon further reflection, I was dissatisfied with my process in arriving at this conclusion. The basis for my dissatisfaction was that my criteria for determining whether a pitcher was a two-pitch pitcher or a pitcher with three to four credible offerings. I chose the criteria, as I explained above, based on the tendencies of a single player I was interested in and in a way that would fit the narrative I was trying to tell. I also felt (anecdotally) there had been an influx of pitchers in the majors who have found success by primarily relying on two pitches; some of those pitchers happened to represent clubs the public deems “smart.” Thus, two-pitch starters were not actually more flawed than their peers with more diverse repertoires.

I will address the latter part of this line of thinking later (spoiler: it is extremely flawed) but this is just how I was trying to rationalize my findings. I have seen the performances of Luis Patiño and Shane McClanahan in 2021 and Tyler Glasnow last year (he added a slider this season) in Tampa with two pitches and thought the Rays may be on to something. Same for the Astros and Framber Valdez, Cristian Javier, and Lance McCullers Jr. (until this year, when he also added a slider). Two of the most surprising break-through pitchers of the past two-plus seasons have been Kevin Gausman and Lucas Giolito, both of whom rely primarily on a fastball/offspeed combination (for Gausman, the pitch is a splitter; for Giolito, it is a changeup). Dinelson Lamet is another pitcher with exceptional results (when healthy) relying only on a four-seamer and slider. As I mentioned above, this is all anecdotal evidence backing up a potentially faulty conclusion. There is no empirical support here. This is not the most rigorous approach to research.

That led me to redo my analysis, this time with more rigor in classifying the “two-pitchedness” of a player. Before I get into my methodology for this determination, I would be remiss if I did not at least introduce the main concept I am trying to measure: the third time through the order effect (which I will denote as TTO for the remainder of this piece). This is a phenomenon that has played a massive part in determining pitching roles and deployment in this era of major league baseball. It consists of the degradation of pitcher performance as he moves through the opposing lineup. No matter how you measure it — wOBA allowed, RA9, ERA — the pitcher population pitches worse the second time through the order compared to the first and the third time through the order versus the second. Generally, the effect is measured relative to the first time through the order. Since I will be using wOBA allowed in this piece, that means the second time through the order effect is the difference in wOBA allowed for the second and first time through the order and the third time through the order effect is the difference in wOBA allowed between the third and first time through the order. For some more background on the subject, I would recommend this piece at Baseball Prospectus by Mitchell Lichtman, which was my introduction to the phenomenon. More recently, Rob Mains did a multi-part series on the TTO penalty for BP. I would also recommend these two articles from Chris Teeter at Beyond the Boxscore; the first link measures the TTO for groundball versus fly ball pitchers and the second gauges the TTO by the type of secondaries a pitcher employs.

Now, onto to my analysis. First, let’s walk through how I grouped pitcher seasons this time around. For every pitcher season from 2010-19 (I threw out the shortened 2020 season) where the pitcher in question threw at least 100 innings, I looked at the percentage of pitches he threw for each pitch type. All the pitches were ranked in descending order based on their usage. I pulled the top two most used pitches for each pitcher and added their usage together. The sum of the usage of the top two pitches was my gauge of the “two-pitchedness” of that pitcher season. To give an example, Walker Buehler’s two most used pitches in 2019 were his fastball and slider. The former he threw 53.2% of the time and the latter he threw 14.2% of the time. Add those two figures together and you get 67.4%. That combined number was the figure I was concerned with for each pitcher season. A pitcher who only has two credible offerings will have a value close to 90%. Pitchers with the most egalitarian mixes will be down towards 50%. So instead of using an arbitrary cutoff to gauge whether a pitcher was a two-pitch pitcher, I used a continuous number that gives us a spectrum that’s not biased in any way (unlike my analysis in the Flaherty piece).

I bucketed the combined usage of the top two pitches in increments of 10 percentage points. All players with a combined usage of their top two pitches greater than 50% and at most 60% were grouped together, then greater than 60% and at most 70%, etc. Note that we are dealing with pitchers who threw at least 100 innings in a season. This means we are considering starters and, in recent seasons, “bulk” guys or pitchers who appear after openers and are tasked with starter-level workloads without the designation of pitching as a starter.

With the pitchers bucketed I went to pitch-by-pitch data from Baseball Savant. Each plate appearance in each regular season game was given the designation of how many times that pitcher faced that spot in the batting order. I appended the information about the pitch usage bucket the pitcher fell into and then collected the data for each bucket.

Before I get to the TTO figures, let me show you the information I described towards the beginning of this article about the performance of pitchers in each bucket, now with the refined pitcher designations:

For the rest of the piece, I am going to neglect the bins with so few players because the generalized results in those bins lack any signal given the size of the sample of pitchers in those buckets. Interestingly, it seems pitchers up to 90% combined usage of their top two pitchers performed best. They tied for the highest strikeout rates and posted the lowest walk rates, lowest park and league adjusted FIPs, and the highest WAR accumulation rates of all the relevant bins. All of these figures steadily decrease as the pitch mixes become less concentrated in the top two pitches.

Case closed! We shouldn’t care if a pitcher throws a useful third and/or fourth pitch, right? I will point out that I made this point in my Flaherty piece. But this is the incorrect conclusion. The pitchers in the 80% and up to 90% bucket faced the fewest batters per appearance, followed by the pitchers in the next lowest bucket. This means that these pitchers are being pulled earlier and do not have to combat the second or TTO penalty as often as the rest of their peers and suffer a degradation in performance. Managers and front offices have realized this effect and naturally have made a conscious effort to pull these types of pitchers before the opposition gets too comfortable in the batter’s box.

So pitchers with only two heavily used pitches post better results than those who leverage more offerings, but we know those performance indicators are biased in favor of those two-pitch pitchers. This performance bias presents itself with the TTO effect, which I calculated for the buckets in the table above.

The second time penalty is the wOBA allowed difference between the first and second time through the order and the last column is the TTO penalty. From the pitcher’s perspective, positive wOBA figures are disadvantageous because this indicates hitters are performing better.

The results here are stark. There seems to be no signal in how well a pitcher performs the second time he pitches through a lineup based on his propensity to throw his top two pitches. The TTO penalty, on the other hand, steadily increases from the lowest bucket in this set to the highest bucket. For pitchers who only use their top two pitches up to 50% of the time, the TTO penalty is worth just 18 points of wOBA. By the time we get to pitchers who are effectively throwing two pitches, the TTO penalty almost doubles relative to the lowest bucket, ballooning to 33 points of wOBA. The magnitude of the TTO penalty increases steadily among the buckets. The penalty for the second bucket (more than 50%, at most 60%) is four points higher than the lowest. The third is three points higher than that, while the fourth is four points higher than the third, and finally the last bucket is four points higher than the third. This is almost a perfectly linear trend. Adding pitches clearly gives pitchers more viable options to eat up innings and go deeper into games. That is not to say pitchers with broader repertoires do not suffer the consequence of the TTO penalty; instead the magnitude of the penalty is muted relative to their peers with arsenals concentrated in just a couple of pitches.

Along these lines and with the TTO penalty results on hand, I tried to determine if adding a pitch in a given season would improve a pitcher’s ability to get through a lineup by dampening the TTO penalty. I took two approaches. The first was more restrictive, where the new pitch in question could not be thrown at all in the season prior. This meant that I took every pitcher season from 2010-19 (with the same 100 innings minimum restriction as before) and for every pitch that pitcher threw, I cross-checked with their prior season and noted if they threw the pitch at all. If the answer to that query was yes, then the pitcher was not marked with utilizing a new pitch. Correspondingly, if the answer to the query was no, I marked the pitcher as having a new pitch. The restrictive nature of this querying and flagging of pitchers and pitches made me skeptical that the results would be relevant on account of the small group of pitchers who add a completely new pitch after not using it the prior year. My skepticism was borne out in the results (Note: a previous version of this table was the exact same as the table you will see later in the article. That mistake has been rectified and the following has the updated results).

In the cases of the second time through the order penalty and the TTO penalty, there is basically no change across seasons when adding a new pitch from scratch, with changes on the scale of single points of wOBA, which is noise. There is also no discernible difference between those who add a new pitch and those who do not, based on this criterion. However, the population of pitchers who truly add a new pitch, one they did not throw prior to the season at hand, is very small.

So I changed the definition of what constituted a new pitch. For the second go around, a new pitch was one the pitcher threw at least 10 percentage points more than the season prior. Yes, 10 percentage points is arbitrary and yes, I talked about arbitrary cutoffs at the start of this piece. But I would offer that the cutoff had to be set somewhere and my choosing of the cutoff was not influenced by the pool of pitchers I was analyzing. Also, I realize that my new criterion does not technically denote a “new” pitch like the first. But the spirit of this portion of the investigation is to flag pitchers who add a pitch the opposing hitter must account for differently in a plate appearance compared to how they would have approached the pitcher in a prior season. So, if a pitcher goes from throwing a pitch 5% of the time in year n-1 to 20% of the time in year n, that is a fundamental change in their repertoire that will have massive ripple effects on how they are scouted and what a hitter is looking for in any count.

The results of my second query were more promising but hardly groundbreaking.

Pitchers who added a new pitch by this criterion shave about two points of wOBA from their TTO penalty while the rest of the population adds about five points year-over-year. One possible explanation for this seven-point wOBA discrepancy is that without making a fundamental shift to your repertoire, major league hitters can get a better handle on you the following season, yielding a more substantial TTO penalty. Another explanation, which goes hand in hand with the fact that pitchers who do not meaningfully add a new pitch actually perform slightly better the second time through the order, is that the population of pitchers who did not add a new pitch includes pitchers who decreased their usage of certain pitches. So this population includes pitchers who became more of a two-pitch pitcher season over season, thus choosing to lean into their best pitches more.

As I said at the top, these two-pitch pitchers perform better on a rate basis but do not pitch as deep into games and suffer harsher TTO penalties. This, at least to me, is the most likely explanation for pitchers who would fall under the designation of the first row of the table improving the second time they go through the order but feel the effects of a more robust TTO penalty. On the flip side, pitchers who make a pitch a more substantial part of their arsenals worsen when they go through the order the second time but make up for it by dampening the TTO penalty.

Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? Would you rather have a pitcher more dominant on a per plate appearance level but who taxes your bullpen more? Or would you want your starter/bulk guy to go deeper into the game? It obviously depends on your roster construction and how often your bullpen has been used leading up to a game, but this is a question front offices and field staff constantly juggle throughout the season and in the offseason when building their teams.

Close to 3,000 words later, what have we learned? First and foremost, when attempting to measure anything or test a hypothesis, upon the conclusion of the research it is important to reflect and ask critical questions of how you approached the problem at hand. After my initial study into the viability of two-pitch starting pitchers centered around Jack Flaherty, I concluded that two-pitch pitchers were just as effective on a per pitch basis and that they suffer no additional TTO penalty. Therefore, I surmised, rostering these types of starting pitchers should have no detrimental effects on how you build your roster and are not a reason to be skeptical of a pitcher as a viable option to churn through an opposing lineup. The issue I found was that my definition of a two-pitch pitcher was flawed, based on an arbitrary cutoff to try to diagnose Flaherty’s lack of strikeouts in the early going.

When I eliminated the arbitrary cutoff and used a more continuous definition of how much a pitcher relies on his top two pitchers, I found that pitchers with more limited repertoires were a little more effective than the rest of their peers, but did not go as deep into games. Furthermore, they suffered a much harsher TTO penalty, which is most likely the explanation for those pitchers not facing as many opposing hitters.

The idea that pitchers with only two viable pitches are better suited for short starts, bulk work, or high leverage innings is not a groundbreaking finding, but I hope putting some empirical justification behind this idea is useful and this approach relatively new (at least on the public side). This confirmation of what many evaluators believed to be true should help us ask critical questions about how players should be deployed and developed, and what sorts of pitchers a roster requires. If the Rays invest in pitchers like Shane McClanahan and Luis Patiño, how should they be used and how does that affect Tampa’s roster? Well, it seems they are following what the research demonstrates: roster a deep bullpen and use these pitchers in three to five inning stints. The same concept holds true for the Astros and Cristian Javier and Framber Valdez or the Padres with Adrian Morejon, Ryan Weathers, and Dinelson Lamet.

Another essential part of this calculus is how we should be evaluating players in the minor leagues or amateurs in the draft. The starting viability of players like Garrett Crochet and Max Meyer has been called into question in recent draft classes; the same goes for Sam Bachman in this upcoming draft. Binning these types of pitchers — with high-end fastball velocity, wipe-out breaking pitches, and a history of starting — as starters or relievers seems foolhardy. Instead, we know pitchers with this skillset can effectively get through a lineup twice but more than that and the manager is playing with fire. Given this breed of pitcher’s effectiveness per plate appearance, actively avoiding acquiring pitchers with only two viable pitches is narrow-minded. Instead, if they make it to the major leagues, teams should be trying to supplement these elite talents with other pitchers who mesh with the roles required to maximize the skills of a Max Meyer or Garrett Crochet type pitcher.

I do not believe this is lost on much of the league. I am merely suggesting two-pitch starting pitchers can be excellent players in the correct environment. But given a TTO penalty almost twice that of starting pitchers with more diverse arsenals, two-pitch pitchers need to be monitored closely. If the league allows teams to carry as many pitchers as they would like, two-pitchedness and flame throwing bullpens are here to stay. Until the rules on pitcher limit take affect, with the correct usage limited pitch mixes will continue to be valuable assets to major league clubs, provided those two pitches are high-end offerings.

Major League Baseball is preparing to crack down on pitchers’ use of foreign substances, which could have important ramifications for how the game is played not just the rest of this season, but for a long time to come. Such a remarkable midseason change in enforcement — one report from ESPN’s Buster Olney suggested that umpires might randomly check baseballs 8–10 times per game — could alter league-wide offense, perhaps to a rather large degree depending on the number of pitchers who doctor the baseball.

Two things seems fairly certain, though. First, foreign substances increase spin rates; second, spin rates significantly impact pitcher performance. An experiment run by Travis Sawchik at theScore demonstrated that certain substances, like Spider Tack, could add as much as 500 rpms to a fastball. One college pitcher, Spencer Curran from Seton Hall University, saw the baseline rpm on his fastball go from 2,096 without any substances to 2,516 with Spider Tack and without any velocity increase — a jump that likely cannot happen naturally.

“It’s probably pretty hard to change that [fastball spin] ratio for an individual,” University of Illinois physics professor Alan Nathan told Sawchik at FiveThirtyEight. “I can see that you could do it for a curveball because a curveball involves some technique, whereas a fastball is pure power. There is no finesse.”

In a comprehensive story published by Stephanie Apstein and Alex Prewitt at Sports Illustrated, one recently retired pitcher estimated that 80% to 90% of pitchers currently use some form of foreign substances. But even with pervasive use, not all sticky stuff has the same impact. As Sawchik showed in his experiment, some substances — like a sunscreen mix he used — may actually decrease spin rates. Some of it may depend on how much time each pitcher has had to experiment in front of a Rapsodo, trying different concoctions until something works to their liking.

In both articles, the authors highlighted some basic stats to show how spin rate impacts batter performance. Sawchik noted that batters are hitting .264 on four-seam fastballs that range from 2,250–2,350 rpms, but just .217 on those above 2,500. That’s a sizable gap, and numbers like that have definitely caught MLB’s attention. As one executive told SI, though MLB is considering many changes to increase offense, he believes that better enforcement of the foreign substances rule already on the books — Rule 6.02(c) — would go a long way.

“I think people would be absolutely shocked if they actually enforced this, how much you’ll start to normalize things without rule changes,” the executive said.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the adoption of the Hawk-Eye tracking system before the 2020 season, analysts and fans alike can directly measure the orientation of the baseball’s spin axis as it heads towards the pitcher. Previously the readings we would see on Baseball Savant were based on the movement of the pitch; the spin axis was inferred. Tom Tango, Senior Data Architect over at MLBAM and author of The Book, delves into the nuances between the spin axis readings here. The differences are derived from the nature of the tracking system before (TrackMan radar) and after (the aforementioned technology from Hawk-Eye, which consists of a series of high-speed cameras placed around the ballpark) 2020. During the offseason, the good people at Baseball Savant rolled out some leaderboards with the new measured spin axis data and compared that to inferred spin axis by pitcher and pitch type. The deviation between the two quantities is the result of the seam-shifted wake effect, a new idea permeating the baseball analyst community. Christian Hook from Driveline has a good piece introducing the phenomenon, as do our very own Ben Clemens and The Athletic’s Eno Sarris; I’d also point you to Barton Smith, Alan Nathan, and Harry Pavlidis’ excellent piece at Baseball Prospectus, as well as Barton’s other work on the subject.

At some point in the future, I hope to add to the discourse regarding seam-shifted wake. For now, though, I want to look into another idea we can analyze with this new access to measured spin axis. Until recently the ability to dive deep into the new spin axis data has been limited. We, the public, only had access to data summarized by pitcher and pitch type. Now, thanks to the wonderful work of Bill Petti and his baseballR package (and MLBAM for deciding to release the information), we can extract the measured spin axis on the pitch level in 2020. With this influx of new data, I re-scraped and stored the pitch-by-pitch data in my Statcast database (which I could not have done without Bill’s tutorial).

With that being said, my first inclination was to look at how pitches paired together in the context of spin mirroring. The idea behind spin mirroring is to deceive the hitter. Two pitches that rotate about the same axis but in opposite directions are hard to discern by the batter. For insight into spin axis and how it differs for different pitch types, I recommend checking out this comprehensive piece from Dan Aucoin at Driveline where he explains the importance of understanding a pitch’s spin axis, how it explains pitch movement, and deviations between axis and expected movement based on the axis via the magnus force. Mike Petriello at MLB.com has also given good insight into how spin axis allows certain pairs of pitches and repertoire’s to yield better results than just velocity and movement would indicate. He specifically dug into Shane Bieber’s diverse repertoire, which lacks elite velocity and correspondingly elite spin. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur looked at the rise of advanced defensive positioning since 2015. It turns out that every position has started playing deeper, but — perhaps unsurprisingly — first basemen have moved the least of all. As Arthur writes, “First basemen have barely budged, which makes sense since they are more anchored to the bag.” But this lack of movement feels like a concession that doesn’t necessarily need to be made. The base is fixed, and the defender has to reach it, but a quicker first baseman would be able to stray farther from the anchor. If the lack of an anchor is allowing these other positions to play in more optimal locations, then some of the range that has always been a prerequisite for playing those positions is potentially going to waste. Let’s get some of those more rangy players over to first base, which doesn’t allow for the defender to be so perfectly placed.

The Right-Handed Shift

One of the reasons I’m interested in the positioning of first basemen is how it relates to the current conundrum involving the right-handed shift, about which folks like Tom Tango, Russell Carlton and Ben Lindbergh have written countless words. The short recap is that the publicly available data suggests that the right-handed shift doesn’t really work. And yet, some of the most data-driven teams are the ones that employ the shift the most.

There are a few things that make the right-handed shift different than the more prevalent left-handed one, but what I’m focused on is first base and the existence of that “anchor” that was mentioned earlier. First basemen can only stray off the bag as far as allows them to return safely in time for the throw. Turns out, that isn’t nearly far enough to cover the tendencies of the hitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Montgomery put together a solid outing on Wednesday night. In 6.1 innings of work, he struck out six Rays and walked only two. He did get tagged for five hits, but avoided allowing any home runs, which made the whole package work admirably. He gave up three runs, but with a little defensive prowess, things could have gone even better; two of those three were unearned.

That kind of game happens all the time these days. On the other hand, that particular game has never happened before. That exact box score line — 6.1 innings pitched, six strikeouts, two walks, five hits, no homers, one earned run and three total runs — had never occurred in the more than 380,000 starts since 1913, the first year where earned runs were recorded, as James Smyth pointed out:

? Unique Box Score Line Alert ?

Jordan Montgomery 6.1 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 6 K

A first out of more than 1.1 million MLB pitching lines in the regular season or postseason since 1901 (thanks @baseball_ref @Stathead)

— James Smyth (@JamesSmyth621) June 3, 2021

I’ll level with you: I had a hard time believing Smyth at first. That line is so middle-of-the-road. Everything about it feels like a common enough occurrence. There are no truly strange parts in that score, nothing that stands out as an obviously rare feat. An easy example: Carlos Martínez also recorded a unique line on Wednesday. His was altogether stranger: 0.2 innings pitched, one strikeout, four walks, and 10 earned runs without a homer or an unearned run. That just sounds like an unprecedented start. Read the rest of this entry »

At the beginning of May, I wrote two articles about the slightly-deadened baseball’s effect on league-wide home run rates. The conclusion was pretty much exactly what you’d expect: A bouncier ball with more drag did reduce home runs, particularly among softer-hit balls at lower launch angles. In 2019, these events were the wall scrapers that barely went out of the yard. In 2021, these events are now doubles and outs, with the increase in fly outs likely contributing (at least somewhat) to baseball’s diminished run environment overall.

There were a handful of outstanding questions that I still had, one of which was the impact of the new baseball on a ballpark-by-ballpark basis. Though league-wide trends are certainly an interesting and informative way to see the effects of a new baseball on run scoring, it is also important to examine in which parks hitters are having a more difficult time getting the ball into the seats. That allows us to understand better how park effects may have been altered to different degrees as a result of MLB’s switch to the new baseball.

But it’s not just the baseball that is contributing here. MLB reportedly added humidors to five stadiums for the 2021 season, bringing the total league-wide to 10. The Rockies, Diamondbacks, Mariners, Mets, and Red Sox already had humidors in their stadiums pre-2021, but which five teams are new to that list has yet to be disclosed. We can only guess which parks now have them, but it is important to keep in mind that the ball is not the only difference.

Also important to remember when looking at ballpark-level data: The players on the home team make a huge difference in determining home run rates. It’s entirely possible that, between 2019 and ’21, a team added home run hitters to its lineup or acquired home run-adverse pitchers for its staff, or the opposite could also be true. To mitigate these effects, I only analyzed a specific slice of fly balls: those hit at an exit velocity at or above 95.0 mph, at an exit velocity below 110.0 mph, and at a launch angle below 30 degrees — the very fly balls most impacted by the new baseball in my prior analysis. I also only included fly balls hit in games on or before May 31 to control for weather effects. (That is why I am comparing 2019 to ’21.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Shildt had a decision to make. It was only the first inning, but the Brewers were all over Daniel Ponce de Leon. They’d already scored three times, and had runners on second and third for number eight hitter Luis Urías. A hit here could break the game open, so Shildt took a risk and intentionally walked Urías. With a pitcher batting next, maybe he could salvage the inning.

There was just one problem: Daniel Ponce de Leon was pitching. His 11.6% walk rate this year has actually lowered his career mark. Not only that, but he’d already walked a batter unintentionally this inning, though it’s unclear whether that’s predictive. Either way, though, whoops:

Maybe that was a strike, and maybe it wasn’t. In any case, it turned into a run, and the game eventually turned into a Brewers rout. The Cardinals scored only three runs; as it turns out, the first inning was all Milwaukee needed. Urías didn’t have a hit on the day, not that that’s a particularly telling statistic.

Normally, I’d break down the pros and cons of Shildt’s decision in minute detail. Avoiding Urías and his career .318 OBP to face a pitcher seems good. Turning a walk into a run with Ponce de Leon on the mound seems bad. It’s certainly not a slam dunk in either direction. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot to dissect when it comes to understanding the increase in strikeouts in baseball. Pitchers at the plate are striking out at a higher clip than ever, but even when filtering out their plate appearances, we’re still seeing yearly increases in strikeout rate. A continued increase in velocity and an improved ability to spot fastballs up in the zone was always going to boost strikeouts, but we are also coming to shifts in pitching approach that are directly attacking long-standing hitter’s comforts, making even hitter’s counts unpredictable.

Since I’ll be going through league-wide pitching trends, it’s useful to take a quick glance at pitch usage for the year.

Fastball usage is holding steady from last year at just over 50%. In addition, the increase in slider usage continues, taking a chunk out of curveball usage. Still, the takeaway is that we’re approaching true 50/50 fastball/non-fastball usage splits over all counts, and it’s probably here to stay. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll spare you the description of how I came up with the idea for this article. There was a lot of Alex Rodriguez’s announcing involved, and this is a family website, so my opinions on that will remain undiscussed. The point is, though, that it made me wonder about something I used to take for granted but have increasingly questioned: how do pitchers change their game plan with a runner on third base?

Depending on who you talk to, it might matter a lot or a little. Maybe pitchers won’t be willing to bounce one. Maybe they’ll pitch to a strikeout (assuming fewer than two outs), trying to keep the run from scoring. Maybe pitchers will completely ignore the runner on third and pitch normally. I’m legitimately uncertain. Not I think it’s 50% likely to be one and 50% likely to be the other — I have absolutely no idea how to weigh the relevant probabilities.

First things first; what about those bounced pitches? This is a classic announcer trope, but it’s a trope for a reason; throwing a pitch in the dirt really is more dangerous with a runner on third. Through the magic of run expectancy tables, we can see how much a one-base advancement costs the fielding team, based on whether there’s a runner on first, second, or third (I ignored other base/out states for brevity’s sake):

With no one out, everything is more or less the same; that runner on third was pretty likely to score anyway, in fact. As the outs pile up, allowing the runner from third to score hurts more and more — quite logical. Read the rest of this entry »