Early last year, I wrote two articles exploring the handful of pitchers who decided that, depending on the handedness of the batter they were facing, they should change not just their pitch mix but something more fundamental about themselves as pitchers. Some drastically lowered their arm angle against same-handed batters, while some scooched from one side of the rubber to the other. I mostly wrote about these pitchers because they were fun to watch, but I also dived into the reasoning behind their decisions. It wasn’t hard to understand what they were thinking: All things being equal, throwing from a lower arm angle works better against same-handed batters, while a higher arm angle works better against opposite-handed hitters. I even had numbers to back it up. I ran correlation coefficients between the pitcher’s wOBA allowed and their release point, and I used average velocity as a sort of control variable.

The correlation coefficients in this table are quite small, but they indicate that when the pitcher has the platoon advantage, vertical release point matters a whole lot. In fact, in that sample, it has the same correlation to success as velocity, which is definitely a surprise. When the batter has the platoon advantage, vertical release point doesn’t have any bearing on their success, but horizontal release point does. That’s why some pitchers scooch all the way over to the opposite side of the rubber.

Now that you’re all caught up, it’s time to address the big flaw in those numbers. The problem with my data was that I wasn’t actually using the pitcher’s arm angle. I was using their release point – literally the spot in the air above the mound where the ball leaves their hand – as a stand-in. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: October baseball. As always in the playoffs, I’ve been keen to observe lineup construction and offensive personnel, particularly from a bat path perspective. Over the last few years especially, the matchup game has become more and more important as managers navigate the platoon advantage that comes from switching pitchers in and out of the game.

In 2023 and 2022, I explored how Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) can serve as a proxy for analyzing swing diversity in a team’s lineup. At first it started as a way of investigating why the Astros were so consistent in the playoffs, then it became a way for me to understand which lineups have the most versatility in bat path and handedness. In theory, the more versatility, the harder it is for a pitcher-catcher combination to game plan. If a lefty with a flat bat path hits ahead of a righty with a steep bat path — as is the case with Juan Soto and Aaron Judge — a pitcher is forced to execute two different approaches. If that variance carries through an entire lineup, good luck! Spoiler alert, I’m basically describing the Dodgers, but more on that later.

As I’ve said in countless blogs of mine, VBA is not a catch-all metric for describing bat path. Attack Angle (AA) and Vertical Entry Angle (VEA), among other metrics, are important for understanding the full story of each player’s path. But in this piece, I’m going to stick with just VBA because that’s what I’ve used for this piece in previous years. Here are a few key points that are important to rehash before showing the results.

For left-handed hitters, I made their average VBA negative to account for the fact that they swing from the other side of the plate. (VBA data is provided by SwingGraphs.) For switch-hitters, I multiplied their average VBA by -0.72 because the league-wide rate of switch-hitter plate appearances that come against righty pitchers — when they are batting lefty — is 72%. Additionally, even though I used regular-season VBA data, I included only hitters who’ve recorded at least one playoff plate appearance this year in the sample. By not including guys who didn’t bat during the postseason, the dataset is more representative of each playoff team’s VBA variance based on how its offense is currently constructed. With the remaining group of players, I took the variance of the VBAs on the given team and adjusted it to be a percentage above or below average. The average is set at 100, just like wRC+. Without further ado, here is the update on VBAVar+ for 2024:

As I alluded to earlier, the Dodgers come out on top this year. Their addition of Shohei Ohtani is a big help. Shocker! He comes before Mookie Betts, who is then followed by Freddie Freeman. From a VBA perspective, these three hitters offer immediate variance atop the lineup. Ohtani’s VBA sits around 34 degrees on average (although we know he can alter his swing a ton). Betts offers a very similar VBA at just around 33.7 degrees, but his comes from the other side of the plate, and he is much shorter than Ohtani. After that, Freeman has one of the steepest swings in baseball at just over 40 degrees on average. The different angles are one way to illuminate how different they are as hitters. They force pitchers to execute multiple pitches in different locations because each of them has different strengths or weaknesses due to the shapes of their swings.

Being without a healthy Freeman takes a versatile layer out of the lineup. The first baseman is nursing a sprained ankle and bone bruise, an injury that would typically warrant a recovery time of four to six weeks. He did not play in the Dodgers’ 8-0 win over the Padres in Game 4 on Wednesday, but he is in the lineup for Friday night’s Game 5. Either way, he is not at full strength. During his Game 4 absence, Max Muncy moved over to his old home at first base, while Chris Taylor and Enrique Hernández split the third base duties. As the Dodgers showed in their Game 4 rout, they have plenty of other boppers following the three stars in their lineup. It starts with Teoscar Hernández’s neutral VBA of 33-34 degrees. He is followed by Muncy’s slightly flatter swing (31 degrees). Then comes the righty Will Smith with his steeper angle of about 36 degrees. The bottom third is highlighted by Gavin Lux and Tommy Edman, who provide pitchers another different look with their flatter swings (both less than 29 degrees on average). I know, I basically listed the entire lineup, but that’s exactly the point: The Dodgers have a ton of talented hitters with different swing profiles, making it very difficult for pitchers to come up with a concrete gameplan to get them out. Last season, the Dodgers were second in this metric. The additions of Ohtani, Teoscar Hernández, and Edman, as well as the return of Lux from injury, have helped push the Dodgers to the top of the list.

The Yankees also have plenty of star power in their lineup. They’ve struggled offensively thus far through their four playoff games and are just slightly above average in terms of lineup swing variance. Judge is their only hitter in this sample who has an average VBA above 33 degrees. However, as I mentioned earlier, the top of their lineup is all the more dangerous because their two best hitters, Judge and Soto, have completely different VBAs. Judge’s is 41 degrees, while Soto’s is 26, and they also come from different sides of the plate.

The Padres and Royals appear third and fourth on this leaderboard, respectively. San Diego’s placement is largely due to its ability to rotate left- and right-handed hitters. On Wednesday, the Padres’ lineup went like this: L, R, L, R, L, R, L, R, L. There is one spot that sticks out especially: Batting Manny Machado fourth and Jackson Merrill fifth. Machado’s flat swing is geared toward crushing heaters, while Merrill’s steeper swing (and versatility) allows him to hit sliders well. If pitchers want to spam sliders to Machado, they’re forced to adjust quickly and take a different approach with Merrill. Yes, that’s possible. But if it makes things even just slightly more difficult for pitchers, it’s worth it.

Kansas City is quite different from the other teams discussed so far because its offense is top heavy. Bobby Witt Jr. and Salvador Perez are the two key threats. If you’re not going to overwhelm pitchers offensively with a bunch of star power, at least give them varying looks, right? That’s what this lineup does. The Royals have a handful of lefty hitters with different VBAs, ranging from Kyle Isbel (very flat) to Adam Frazier (very steep). The Tigers, the other AL Central team to secure a Wild Card berth, are a similar story.

The Tigers have done just enough offensively during the playoffs so far. They haven’t really had a big breakout game, but their versatility has allowed A.J. Hinch to make pinch-hitting decisions that put his team in a better position to play against the strengths of Detroit’s opponents. A good example of this came in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series against the Houston Astros, when Andy Ibáñez pinch-hit for Zach McKinstry against left-hander Josh Hader in the eighth inning. From a handedness perspective, the move is straight forward; McKinstry bats left-handed while Ibáñez is a righty. But what makes this an especially shrewd move is the fact that, from a bat path perspective, Ibáñez might be an ideal matchup for the Tigers against Hader. Hader has a flat approach angle on his fastball, which he’s trying to keep above the bats of hitters, and Ibáñez has a flat swing — on average, his VBA hovered between 26 and 27 degrees this season — which helps him to avoid swinging beneath higher pitches. That’s exactly what happened. Hader fired a sinker up in the zone, and Ibáñez hammered it for a go-ahead double.

And sometimes, you have similar personnel who are all playing so well that having variance doesn’t matter all that much! That is exactly what’s happening in Queens. Almost the entire Mets lineup is within five degrees of VBA. The only exception is J.D. Martinez, who has a steeper path in the high 30s. I don’t think the Mets’ position all the way down on this leaderboard is a bad thing; good hitters are good hitters regardless of their swing paths. Putting together a lineup with a high VBA variance is just one way to build a winning team, but it’s far from the only way.

This is the third year I’ve done this exercise and it’s one of my personal favorites. The more context that can be added to a team’s lineup, the better you can understand matchups and managerial decisions. In the small sample of the playoffs, teams have to flex whatever competitive advantage is available. When you have the personnel to make life harder for your opponents, you better exercise it.

Martijn Verhoeven wears many hats. As the research lead for the Twins sports science department, he is in conversation with all sorts of people, including baseball operations staffers, coaches, hitters, pitchers, and the medical staff. Verhoeven is armed with biomechanical data from KinaTrax, and the insights from the data help all these people do their jobs.

For understandable reasons, the Twins want to keep these insights private. Baseball is a zero-sum game — only one team can win the AL Central, and so the Twins would prefer their divisional opponents not know what they’re thinking.

But there is one area where this tendency for teams to hunt competitive advantages might be working against their interests: identifying solutions to the pitcher injury crisis.

“We have this massive injury epidemic,” Verhoeven told me. “There are times where I wish [teams] could share more and collaborate more because ultimately I think everyone would benefit from just having the best players on the field longer and more often. You can tell that people who’ve worked with this data for a long time are sort of moving toward [asking], ‘What can we do from a collective point of view in terms of making some of this understanding available?’” Read the rest of this entry »

This all started because I hate losing. Especially to Ben Lindbergh.

Just before the season started, I took part in the annual Effectively Wild preseason predictions game, in which Meg Rowley, the Bens (Lindbergh and Clemens), and I each made 10 bold predictions about the 2024 campaign. The listeners voted on which ones they thought would come true, and we’d be awarded points accordingly — the more outlandish the prediction, the greater the reward if it happened.

One of my 10 predictions was that Spencer Strider would strike out 300 batters in 2024. As my predictions go, this one felt pretty conservative. Strider had struck out an absurd (and league-leading) 281 batters in only 186 2/3 innings last season. I attended Strider’s Opening Day start in which he debuted a new breaking ball and punched out eight Phillies in just five innings. I was feeling good.

Then Strider’s elbow started barking in his next start, and by mid-April it was announced that he’d need Tommy John surgery and would take no further part in the 2024 season. Scorekeeper Chris Hanel marked that prediction down as incorrect, and took 42 points from my score. Read the rest of this entry »

In the pre-PitchCom era, major league teams had more rigorous protocols for protecting their signs than your bank has for securing your account. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some teams’ custom PitchCom audio clips are read in a modified pig latin created by a pitching strategy staffer. That the hitter doesn’t know what pitch is coming is considered a huge advantage for the pitcher. And it’s not only pitchers who think so — just ask the 2017 Astros.

Sign-stealing aside, hitters stand in the box pondering which pitch might come hurtling their way mere seconds later. What that pondering looks like depends on the hitter. There’s Nick Castellanos and his “glorified batting practice” approach, in which he looks for the ball and hits it as hard as he can. But there’s also Carlos Correa, who starts his day studying pitcher tendencies in the video room.

For their part, pitchers set the difficulty level on the hitter’s guessing game. That terms like “fastball count” and “pitching backwards” exist tell us that pitchers follow (and, at times, purposefully upend) conventional tactics to sequence their pitches, and believe that certain pitch types are optimal in certain counts. Strategies become standard practices because they’re effective, but an over-reliance on one or two strategies can lead to predictability. Become too predictable and a pitcher effectively sets their opponents’ guessing game on “easy” mode. But does making it easy for the hitter to sit on a certain pitch automatically make the overall task of hitting easier? Does keeping a hitter guessing always ensure effective pitching? Read the rest of this entry »

“People underestimate the power of nostalgia. If baseball can use it to get people to care about that worthless sport, then I can use it to get my siblings to care about the farm. Nostalgia is truly one of the great human weaknesses – second only to the neck.”

– Dwight K. Schrute

On August 9, in the fourth inning of the Guardians-Twins game, Carlos Santana loosed a ferocious cut at a 3-2 splitter from Alex Cobb. As the bottom fell out of the pitch, Santana’s bat caught the very top of the ball, redirecting it almost straight down into the ground. With the runner on first base breaking for second, catcher Austin Hedges turned and rose from his crouch, leaving a clear path for the foul tip to bounce up off the dirt and, with a loud thud, directly into home plate umpire Jim Wolf. The concerned Hedges whipped around immediately.

HEDGES: Oh God, are you ok, Wolfie? Did that get you in the nuts?
WOLF: Neck.
HEDGES: Neck?!
WOLF: Neck.
HEDGES: God. Let me give you a second.
WOLF: Hmm. Adam’s apple.

As Minnesota trainer Nick Paparesta deftly pressed his fingertips to Wolf’s collarbone to check for a fracture, the play jarred something loose in my memory. I remembered a baseball card I had when I was a kid. It was a Steve Decker card, catcher for the Giants, and on the back it said that Decker had once been hit in the throat by a foul tip. Not only that, but the ball had gotten lodged there, requiring hospitalization. Being a child, it never occurred to me that the ball had been trapped in place by Decker’s mask. I thought that it had somehow hit his throat hard enough that it had just gotten stuck there. I remember it clearly because it was such a jarring thing to read on the back of a baseball card, right next to his batting average and his two career stolen bases. As it turns out, I am also remembering it incorrectly. I checked every single Steve Decker card on the Trading Card Database. No such card exists.

Figuring that I simply had the wrong name, I checked every other card from Giants catchers when I was a kid. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did learn from a 1991 Kirt Manwaring card (printed, for reasons passing understanding, by the electrical company PG&E) that July is the best time to go bargain hunting for a new refrigerator. Next, I tried searching online for articles about Decker getting hit in the throat. I didn’t find them; I was definitely wrong about the catcher in question. There is no indication that Decker ever got decked in the throat. What I did find was even more interesting. I found out that short of reading the back of every catcher’s baseball card from 1990 to ’98, I would probably never figure out whose card I actually had when I was a kid, because in order to find it, I would have to wade through an ocean of stories about the exposed throats of catchers and umpires. They were everywhere.

The most famous ball to the throat in the history of baseball happened during Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Pirates center fielder Bill Virdon hit a chopper to shortstop. Shaded up the middle in double-play position, Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek ranged to his right, but a high hop hit him directly in the throat. Kubek collapsed to the ground, and though he tried to remain in the game, he was taken to the hospital.

However, I was looking for something more specific. I was interested only in situations similar to what happened to Wolf: a pitch or a foul tip that bounces up off the ground and up into a throat. I didn’t think I would find many plays that met such narrow criteria, but I was very wrong. I found funny anecdotes about Hall of Famers and heartbreaking stories about children, starting last week and stretching all the way back to the 1860s.

When the 1989 World Series was disrupted by an earthquake, the A’s decamped to Arizona to practice against instructional league teams, and Terry Steinbach took a foul tip to the neck. During the 1984 Japan-U.S. College Baseball Championship Series, future superstar Will Clark fouled a pitch into the neck of Japanese catcher Shinji Hata. In 1953, Southern League umpire Vic Delmore swallowed his tongue after being hit in the throat. Luckily, pitcher Al Bennett had seen the exact same play happen six years earlier, and knew how to remove it. On Sunday, Giancarlo Stanton’s bat somehow broke off at the handle as he finished his follow-through, flying backward and catching umpire Nick Mahrley squarely in the side of the head. The terrifying freak play ended with Mahrley being carted off the field with a concussion. While it doesn’t meet our criteria, Stanton’s bizarre broken bat demonstrates just how dangerous things are for the people squatting or standing behind home plate. Although I had never seen it happen until a couple weeks ago, for as long as people have been playing baseball, the brave souls who do their work back there have been taking foul tips to the throat.

As I had only ever seen this particular play happen once, and had only even heard of it happening once before that, I was shocked by its ubiquity. I resolved to tame this unruly mass of stories and assemble a complete history, but I quickly had to scale back my ambitions. There were two reasons for this. The first was that as I read more and more of these accounts, my own throat started to ache. It took me a full day to realize that I wasn’t just experiencing sympathy pain. I had Covid, and I was laid up for more than a week. I didn’t have enough energy to write, but I did have enough to sit around with a laptop, combing through newspaper archives.

That brings us to the second reason: There were way too many stories. Although the vast majority of foul tips to the throat go unrecorded entirely, the official record still contains enough instances that I wouldn’t be able to make my way through them all without dedicating at least a few weeks to the task, and a complete history would be far too long to publish. Without coming close to exhausting the supply, I found well over a hundred. I also found a trove of great old black-and-white photographs dating back to the 1950s, and I’ve shared a handful of them on Twitter just for fun. I also assembled a supercut of the videos I was able to find. You’ll note that I intentionally cut away from each play pretty quickly, before the person who got hit has a chance to react. There’s a reason for this: These plays can be very dangerous, and some of the videos are difficult to watch.

Because I can’t publish a complete history of bouncing balls to the throat, this will necessarily be an anecdotal history. As such, you’ll be reading the most entertaining stories I found, but first I need to acknowledge some truly tragic ones. In 1961, 12-year-old Brumit Estes of Cocoa, Florida, died from a ruptured artery in his throat when a pitch took a strange bounce off home plate during a Little League game. A dutiful catcher, he pounced on the loose ball and threw it back to the pitcher, then collapsed suddenly. He was dead before first responders could arrive. On July 11, 1967, a foul tip damaged the windpipe of 13-year-old catcher Rickey Looper of Cleburne, Texas. Looper was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, but he died early the next morning.

The most recent instance happened just a few weeks ago in Worcester, Massachusetts. Umpire Korey Pontbriand took a foul ball to the throat in the second inning of a Little League game. Pontbriand didn’t experience much pain initially and kept umpiring, but he switched from home plate to field umpire when he lost the ability to talk. A few innings later, Dr. Jennifer LaFemina, an oncologist and the mother of the game’s starting pitcher, pulled Pontbriand off the field because he was stumbling. As LaFemina prepared to transfer him to the hospital, he went into cardiac arrest. “I fell directly backwards and lost complete consciousness,” Pontbriand told reporters. “I had no pulse, and I wasn’t breathing at all.” LaFemina and her assistant immediately began CPR, getting Pontbriand breathing again by the time first responders arrived. Pontbriand was intubated for two days and spent 11 days in the hospital. If you like, you can help him with his medical expenses. Pontbriand had only recently recovered from taking a foul ball to the same spot last year, and he’s already hoping to get back to umpiring soon.

To understand how this play happens so frequently, we need to start at the beginning. The earliest foul tip to the throat that I was able to find probably happened in 1866. Not at all coincidentally, that was also the year Doug Allison, catching for the Masonic Club of Manayunk in Philadelphia, decided that instead of standing the usual 20 to 25 feet behind home plate, he would move right behind the batter. In a time before protective equipment of any kind, catching was already considered extremely dangerous. Allison’s move increased the danger, but because it made it easier for him to control the running game, catchers everywhere quickly followed suit. Allison’s future teammate, Hall of Famer George Wright, possessed the throat that would make history. He was a catcher for the New York Gothams when, as he later told a reporter, “One day a foul tip struck me in the throat and it hurt me so much that I never afterward was able to muster up sufficient courage to catch.” When Wright joined Allison on the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first ever professional baseball team, he did so as a shortstop. Because he switched positions in 1866, that’s the latest possible date that the fateful foul could have taken place.

A few years later, Allison became the first player to wear a glove. That innovation would take a while to catch on, but once catchers were so much closer to the action, the catcher’s mask followed quickly. According to Chuck Rosciam, author of “The Evolution of Catcher’s Equipment,” Fred Thayer was thought to have created the first mask by adapting a fencing mask for Harvard catcher Alexander Tyng. By the 1880s, masks were used widely, but more than a century before the debut of the Wu-Tang Clan, the neck was still woefully unprotected.

If the foul tip to the throat has a patron saint, there’s only one possible choice: Voiceless Tim O’Rourke. O’Rourke was catching in Lima, Ohio, in the 1880s, when a foul tip hit his Adam’s apple and “crushed back the cartilage into Tim’s throat,” leaving him unable to speak in much more than a whisper. When he made it to the major leagues, O’Rourke was primarily a third baseman and shortstop. By 1894, he was widely known as “The Voiceless Wonder.” After his playing days, O’Rourke would go on to work as a scout, and his son, Tim Jr., would sign with the A’s in 1929 (as a catcher, of course). O’Rourke’s other claim to fame is that he’s the owner of the two most wildly divergent headshots in the Baseball Reference database.

Mammalian necks long ago traded security for flexibility. We humans can turn and bend our heads in just about any direction, but that exquisite range of motion comes at a price (especially if you’re married to Lot or Orpheus). Without rigid bones to protect them, the extremely fragile contents of our necks are extremely exposed. The neck is home to four compartments. The vertebral compartment houses your vertebrae and spinal cord, and because it’s located toward the back of the neck, they’re less at risk from foul balls traveling straight upward. The visceral compartment, which houses the trachea (or windpipe), larynx, and pharynx, is right in the line of fire, protected by the thyroid cartilage of the larynx, also known as the Adam’s apple. The two vascular compartments on either side of the neck hold the vagus nerve, the carotid artery, and the jugular vein. The vagus nerve is an important part of your parasympathetic nervous system, and damaging it can have severe consequences. Damaging your carotid artery is also not ideal, since getting blood to your brain (and, more generally, keeping it inside your vascular system where it belongs) is a tried-and-true method for not dying. That’s a lot of precious cargo that doesn’t respond well to baseballs.

For this reason, catchers are taught to tuck their chins into their chest when blocking a ball in the dirt, explained Esteban Rivera, our resident catching expert. However, tucking the chin isn’t always possible. Esteban took a ball directly in the Adam’s apple while playing travel ball as a high schooler. “I went to block a ball in the dirt,” he told me, “but it nicked the edge of the plate and had a weird side bounce and caught me on a diagonal. I felt like [I was] choking and immediately started gasping for air.” For one thing, on a foul tip or an odd bounce, the ball doesn’t look like it’s on a trajectory to bounce straight upward until it’s too late to react. Even on pitches where a high bounce does seem like a possibility, for a competitive ballplayer, the instinct to block the ball can supersede the instinct for self-preservation. As for umpires, they’re usually leaning as far forward as possible in order to get a better view of the pitch, leaving their necks exposed.

Rosciam found that Spalding started manufacturing a mask with “ patented neck protection” as early as 1888, but the use of throat protectors wouldn’t become commonplace for nearly a century. Look up a picture of Yogi Berra or Johnny Bench in action, and you won’t see a throat protector. In 1971, Dr. Creighton J. Hale, a research physiologist who was also vice president and research director of Little League Baseball, patented a chest and throat protector that was immediately made mandatory for all Little Leaguers.

At the big league level, throat protectors needed a push before they were adopted. It came on September 6, 1976, when Dodgers catcher Steve Yeager suffered a freak accident in a game against the Padres. Teammate Bill Russell grounded out to third base, breaking his bat. A large shard flew directly toward Yeager in the on-deck circle, impaling him in the throat. Yeager was rushed to the hospital, where Padres team physician Dr. Paul Bauer performed emergency surgery to remove all of the shards of wood from his neck. Miraculously, the bat missed an artery by millimeters, and Yeager was back on the field less than three weeks later. Yeager worked with Dodgers trainer Bill Buhler to create a throat guard that hung from the bottom of the catcher’s mask, and the device became standard throughout the game.

Its spread was no doubt helped along in 1979. That year, I found no fewer than five separate incidents at the big league level, including a Steve Carlton curveball that bounced up into the throat of Tim McCarver. According to his memoir, McCarver spent two days in the hospital in Cincinnati due to a blood clot on his vocal cords, then had a steel throat protector welded onto the bottom of his mask. More recently, throat protection has been incorporated directly into the facemask. If you watch a game today and look at the catcher or the umpire, you’ll see that the metal cage extends a few inches below the jaw. Presumably for the sake of comfort, catchers rely on this rather than the hanging throat protector, while umpires often use both.

However, no throat protector is perfect. First of all, in the name of flexibility, plastic throat protectors usually dangle from the mask, leaving a space between the throat guard and the chest protector. They can stop or deflect balls that are fouled straight backward, but a ball on an upward trajectory can take advantage of that opening. Sometimes, the ball can even hit the chest protector and then roll upward into the throat. Here’s a play that happened in 2016. John Hirschbeck is wearing a dangling throat protector, but the ball travels right up behind it.

Here’s a side view from 2013. Rather than a dangling plastic throat protector, Carlos Ruiz uses a mask with an elongated cage, but even with the angle of this pitch – which is flatter than that of a foul tip – it’s unlikely that any kind of protector would have stopped it.

Another issue is that throat protectors aren’t wide enough to protect the entire neck. I imagine that this is a tradeoff made in the name of comfort and mobility, but they’re thin enough that they leave the sides of the neck exposed. Many of the plays I saw on video were balls that glanced off the side of the throat protector or missed it entirely.

Lastly, the force of the ball can detach the throat protector from the mask or even break it outright. In a 1990 article in the Bend, Oregon, Bulletin, Mike Wilson described a foul ball that hit his throat protector flush while umpiring. “The impact tore the protector from the mask and shoved it against my throat, pushing my Adam’s apple what felt like several inches backward,” he wrote. Pat Borders would go on to win World Series with the Blue Jays, but in 1987, he was a minor leaguer who had switched to catching as a last resort. “I just felt I was going to get released that year if I was still a third baseman, “ he told Tracy Ringolsby. “In the first inning of my first game there was a foul tip that broke my throat protector and got me in the Adam’s apple… A couple innings later I tore my (right) thumb nail off trying to make a throw. At that point I wondered, ‘What am I doing back here?’” Borders later took another foul ball to the throat, during spring training in 1990.

Protective equipment has by no means been perfected. It’s still evolving. Before the 2005 season, at an annual retreat for MLB umpires, a Wilson representative gave Ed Hickox a new mask with a throat guard that was angled forward, telling him that it would better disperse the force of a ball. When a ball hit the guard a few months later, rather than deflecting the ball, it temporarily trapped it and directed all of the force into Hickox’s jaw. He suffered a concussion and damaged a joint between the bones of his inner ear, resulting in some permanent hearing loss. Shockingly, it turned out that Wilson hadn’t tested this new design to make sure that it actually was safer, and Hickox successfully sued for damages. You likely remember the trend toward hockey-style masks that swept the league at the beginning of this century. More recently the Defender mask, which was invented by former minor league umpire Jason Klein, has spread through the league. The mask features Kevlar padding and two sets of metal cages separated by springs that dilute the force of the ball. Catcher Tyler Flowers is enough of a believer that he has invested in the company.

In recent years, the advent of one-knee-down catching has made it possible for balls to bounce off the leg of the catcher and up into the umpire’s throat. In fact, that brings us back where we started, with Austin Hedges. I’m not sure why he seemed so shocked when Wolf said he’d been hit in the neck. Hedges was involved in a similar play just last September, when a Jonathan Hernández fastball ricocheted off Ramón Laureano’s bat, then the dirt, and then Hedges’ shinguard, sending it straight up behind the mask and the dangling throat protector of umpire Roberto Ortiz.

On the call for the Guardians, Matt Underwood got right to the heart of the matter: “Runners go, 3-2 pitch, and ow!” When a ball boy brought out a bottle of water for Ortiz, third base umpire Rob Drake intercepted it and unscrewed the cap for Ortiz. I recognized the gesture. It’s what you do when a loved one is going through something difficult and you’re completely powerless to help. You latch onto any nice gesture that comes to mind in order to fight off your insignificance in the face of actual problems. I can’t heal your bruised larynx, but I can make it roughly one percent easier for you to drink this water.

Up in the broadcast booth, there was dead air to fill. “He may want a beer,” opined color commentator Rick Manning. Underwood did his best to roll with the suggestion. “Well, it is almost three o’clock on a Sunday,” he said. From field level, sideline reporter Andre Knott saw his opportunity to chime in: “Did somebody say beer?”

The lighthearted tone of the broadcast continued a tradition that stretches back to the beginnings of the sport. I found plenty of pun-filled headlines and stories about catchers swallowing or almost swallowing their tobacco.

Even a story about Michael Showalter, who in 1919 really did pass out because a foul tip caused his gum to get stuck in his windpipe, was told with a humorous slant. According to the Carlisle Evening Herald, Showalter wasn’t just chewing gum, he was “lustily masticating a large wad.” After Patrick “Irish” Padden got hit during a 1937 game in the Canadian-American League, the Ottawa Citizen relayed the tale with exquisite sensitivity: “Umpire Paddon [sic] behind the plate got hit in the Adam’s apple with the ball and, after making an attempt to stay in the game, just slithered to the ground and was carried out. The very next ball crowned a spectator who also lost interest in the proceedings.”

During an 1892 game in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the Miner’s Journal turned a foul tip to the throat into a fun tale about a promising alternative medical treatment:

Catcher Young was hit on his Adam’s apple by a foul and nearly swooned in the sixth. Young fell motionless upon the ground, and was being bathed with water when Pitcher Ruckel ran up to the grand stand and asked a gentleman “for some of that.” A flask of whiskey came from the pocket of the person addressed, and after Young had taken a swallow of the fluid, he immediately got upon his feet. A large lump formed upon his neck, but he pluckily took his position.

When Frank Chance sent a foul tip right into the throat of catcher Larry McLean in June 1908, the Chicago Tribune reported, “It sounded like hitting a green watermelon with a mallet… Sympathetic members of both teams surrounded the dying man. Some of them stood him on his legs and feet, but others were more considerate.” [Editor’s Note: McClean was not actually dead.]

On May 11, 1957, Roberto Clemente fouled a pitch into the throat of Phillies catcher Stan Lopata (who would manage to go 2-for-4 with a three-run homer that day). The next day, a picture of umpire Jocko Conlon bending over to check on Lopata was syndicated all over the country with the header, “UMPS ARE HUMAN.” Conlan’s humanity was no doubt enhanced by the fact that he could empathize with Lopata. He’d taken a ball to the throat five years earlier.

This is a fluky play, and some players and umpires have been particularly unlucky. Last month, DJ LeMahieu became the only player I could find to get hit in the throat by a foul ball while batting rather than catching or umpiring. Slow motion replays showed a shock wave rippling out across his skin from the point of impact.

In 1953, umpire Len Roberts took two foul balls to the neck, one in the Texas League and one in the National League. The two blows left him prone to losing his voice. Umpire Manny Gonzalez took fouls to the throat in 2013 and ’17. So far as I can tell, Yankees legend Thurman Munson also took foul tips to the throat in back-to-back seasons. The first came on October 5, 1977, in the first game of the ALCS between the Yankees and the Royals. Munson stayed in the game and went on to put up an .890 OPS in the World Series. The second came on June 10, 1978. According to the Toledo Blade, Munson also got hit in the Adam’s apple by an errant throw from Reggie Jackson the next season.

”I was catching Bob Gibson at St. Louis in 1961 and took a foul tip right in the Adam’s apple, “ Gene Oliver told the Quad City Times in 1983. “You know how hard Gibson threw, and when the ball comes off the bat like that it comes at you twice as fast. I just walked around the field for awhile then got back behind the plate. On the very next pitch, I caught another foul tip in the Adam’s apple. Two on two straight pitches. I couldn’t swallow; I felt like my vocal cords were paralyzed. I walked straight off the field into the dugout and into the dressing room.”

During the 1968 season, Pirates catcher Jerry May was hit in the throat by foul tips on four separate occasions. That didn’t stop Charley Feeney of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from telling the story with a bit more panache and a bit less compassion:

“May caught with all sorts of aches, bruises and cracked fingers last season…

He was hit in the throat half-dozen times [sic] in the space of two weeks in July. Once he collapsed as he was about to give the pitcher a signal for a curve ball.

The “black-out” lasted 30 seconds. Medication restored Jerry May. He kept catching. He stopped hitting, but he kept catching.”

What does it feel like to be hit in the throat by a ball? “It’s not much fun,” said Erik Kratz during a 2005 interview. “You lose your voice, you can’t breathe, can’t swallow.” Said Jeff Newman in 1979,”I couldn’t breathe there for a second. I felt for my Adam’s apple and couldn’t find it.” Dioner Navarro got hit during a Rays-Marlins game in 2007. “All I remember was that it was hard for me to breathe,” he said later. “It was one of those situations where I needed to calm down, but I couldn’t… It was a scary moment.”

John Stearns took a foul to the throat while catching for the Mets in May 1980. Teammate Lee Mazzilli rushed to his side to check on Stearns. “I keep hearing bells, like a telephone ringing somewhere,” the catcher told him. “Don’t answer it,” said Mazzilli.

J.T. Realmuto got hit on the right side of his neck this April. “I got dizzy right away and then a headache behind my right eyeball,” he told reporters. “It was only on the right side.” The headache didn’t go away until Realmuto woke up the next morning, but he played and got two hits that day. “I went down and couldn’t breathe and almost swallowed my tongue,” Pirates catcher Hank Foiles told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1958. Cubs catcher Earl Averill, the son of the Hall of Fame outfielder, was knocked unconscious by a foul tip in 1960, and didn’t mince words afterward: “I thought I was a goner!”

In 1979, Derryl Cousins admitted to reporters that the fear affected him the next time he was behind the plate. He missed some calls, sparking arguments with batters. “Nobody was trying to show me up,” he said. “For the first three innings last night, I was flinching. Heck, I know I blew the [John] Mayberry call. The ball was only this far off the ground.” In 1988, youth umpire Brian McCleney confessed that he was most disturbed by the attention. “I opened my eyes and it seemed like the whole crowd was around me,” he told the Star-News. Although he had difficulty both breathing and talking, he said, “To me, the most embarrassing part was being taken off the field on a stretcher.”

Russell Martin got hit in both 2011 and ’12. “Any time you get hit in the neck,” he said, “you panic for a second.” However, maybe the most impressive thing I saw during all of my research was the matter-of-fact way Martin dealt with the second ball. He didn’t even spit out his gum after getting hit. He looked for all the world like any other guy from the Bronx waiting for the D train to come.

In all the stories I read, nearly every catcher or umpire who didn’t end up in the hospital (and some who did) stayed in the game. It’s a level of toughness inconceivable to most of us, and inadvisable for all of us. “It took the breath from me and kind of felt like I had a golf ball in my throat for a little bit,” Austin Romine said on July 30, 2017. “It was hard to get some air for a little while. It calmed down, and I just kept playing.”

Romine had taken a similar ball to the throat a year earlier, but this was the scariest of all the plays I saw. He went straight to the ground clutching his throat and stayed there. Later in the game, Romine get hit on the head by a backswing. After that, he was batting and took a Steve Cishek fastball straight to the hand. Only the final injury was enough to knock him out of the game. Despite the rough day, he summed up the attitude of so many of the people I read about over the last few weeks: “It’s part of the job and you’ve just got to roll with it.”

Previously on Dragon Ball Z, we discussed whether it’s better to run hot and cold like a reheated frozen burrito or show up at the plate with the comforting and consistent warmth of a hearty helping of mac and cheese. Specifically, when you’re a hitter trying to microwave some offense in the playoffs. The tl;dr of that article: When comparing streaky hitters to their more consistent colleagues, the streaky hitters came closer to replicating their regular season numbers in the postseason. Despite the fluky nature of playoff series and their bite-sized samples that leave no space for slumps, hitters prone to slumping still bring enough electricity when they do get hot to maintain a charge in their individual numbers.

But individuals don’t win the World Series, teams do. In the context of a team playing a sport where the superstars don’t necessarily factor into every plate appearance, individual performances don’t carry the same weight that they do in other sports. Not only do teams need contributions from multiple hitters in the lineup, but the sequence of those contributions matters too.

In my last article, I used wOBA, which is derived from the run values associated with specific events (i.e. walks, doubles, home runs), to measure individual output. In turn, run values are historical averages of the number of runs scored following the given event. Those historical averages assume that what follows a given plate appearance is a league-average hitter doing whatever is most statistically likely. But that’s not how it works irl. The player on deck might be better or worse than league average, might have distinct tendencies toward hitting the ball on the ground or in the air, might be 0-fer their last eleventy-billion, or might be hotter than soup in the summertime. Read the rest of this entry »

Programming note: I’m taking a break from my Five Things column this week, as I’m traveling to Chicago for Saberseminar. Five Things will return next week with events from the last two weeks. In the meantime, please enjoy a ridiculous hypothetical.

This week, someone in my chat asked me an interesting hypothetical: How different would baseball be if the fences were the same distance from home plate all the way around? It would obviously be wildly different from how the sport currently works. Center field is the deepest part of the park by far, of course, and it’s hard to picture exactly what an equidistant fence would look like. You might think it’s a triangle, but that’s not right – it looks more or less like an arc, which is what an actual stadium looks like, only with a much sharper curvature.

That sounds so darn weird that I wanted to see what it would mean for offense. I don’t have any strong analytical reason for doing so. We aren’t plumbing the depths of smart baseball analysis here; we’re making up a dumb world and wondering what kinds of dumb things would happen in it.

First things first: There would be more home runs. I picked 370 feet as the distance because it feels reasonably close to the real world average of fence depths. I picked a 10-foot tall wall for similar reasons; if we’re getting weird in some ways, I’d prefer to standardize the others. There’s an easy math trick you can use here; baseballs tend to fall at roughly a 45 degree angle by the time they’re descending, their forward momentum getting slowly blunted by air resistance. That means that a ball that clears the wall by a millimeter would travel 10 more feet before hitting ground that was at field level – in an outfield bullpen, say. In other words, every ball that travels 380 or more feet in the air is going to be a home run now. Read the rest of this entry »

As the man who inspired Brad Pitt’s most memorable role once said, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.” Assuming Billy Beane wasn’t explaining an October Metamucil purchase to a grocery store cashier who simply asked how his day was going, what Beane likely meant was that the statistics used to construct his major league rosters don’t accrue large enough samples during postseason series to eventually even out in his favor. Over the course of 162 games, a team’s production settles into a reasonable representation of the squad’s true talent. But zoom in on any random seven-game stretch and the team on the field might look like a bunch of dudes in baseball player cosplay.

What applies to team outcomes applies just as well to player outcomes. A player with a perfectly respectable stat line in the regular season might morph into a pumpkin as the calendar shifts to fall, or on the flip side, an unlikely hero may emerge from the ashes of a cruel summer and put the whole team on his back.

With the law of averages in mind, I’d always assumed that the more consistent hitters would be better positioned to perform well in the playoffs. My thinking went like this: The natural variation in these hitters’ performances would never wander too far from their season-long average, making them the safer, more predictable options. Whereas streaky hitters — the ones with high highs, low lows, and steep transitions between the two — would be too reliant on “getting hot at the right time” to be the type of hitter a front office should depend on in the postseason.

Reader, I was incorrect. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I cracked the PitchingBot black box open a tiny bit and asked it to show me the worst pitches of the year. It was for fun, mostly; I think there are some interesting data in there, but the main thing I learned was that the worst pitches are non-competitive balls. That’s always a tough concept to grasp, because the ones that stick with us are the hanging sliders and no-ride fastballs right down the pipe, the kind of pitch that we see and go, “Oh I could hit a home run on that.” Like this one:

That’s the worst pitch in baseball this year by one specific metric: the likelihood that PitchingBot assigns it of turning into a home run. I’ll show you some more of them in a moment, but first I thought I’d lay out how I did this so you can get a sense of how the model is reaching its conclusions.

Cameron Grove, the creator of PitchingBot, wrote about this idea back before he started working for the Guardians, and he was kind enough to nudge me in the right direction when it came to looking at pitches not just for the “worst,” but the ones that are the most crushable.
Read the rest of this entry »