Caught Between a Walk and a Hard Hit, Guardians Starters Came Out on Top

When a pitcher throws the third ball of a plate appearance, it can start to feel like his back’s against the wall quickly. First base starts to seem awfully close without any more pitches to spare and a walk lingering. The batter knows this, too, and he’s digging in looking for a juicy pitch, thinking about doing more damage than just a walk if he sees it. It’s a stressful position for any pitcher: aim for the edge of the plate, and you risk a miss and a free pass; catch a little more of the plate, you risk getting clobbered by the barrel of an increasingly comfortable and aggressive hitter.

In 2022, the Guardians didn’t get the memo. In plate appearances that reached three balls, opposing hitters posted a .197/.500/.311 batting line, good for a best-in-baseball wOBA of .397. There’s a big difference between production levels on 3–0, 3–1, and 3–2, but Cleveland handled each about as well as anybody else; its .336 wOBA on 3–2 counts and .512 mark on 3–1 were each second in baseball, and its .630 clip on 3–0 ranked fourth. The club’s starters were even better, limiting opponents to a .165/.464/.289 line and a .371 wOBA. With all unintentional walks coming on three-ball counts, these are still ultimately pretty productive lines — ask (almost) any major leaguer if he’d sign up for a .371 wOBA next year — but by comparison with staffs across the league, Cleveland’s was able to limit damage in these tight spots better than any of its peers.

Baseball Reference carries a nifty splits statistic they call sOPS+, which compares a player’s OPS (or in pitchers’ cases, opponent OPS) under the conditions of a certain split to his peers, with 100 representing league average. It’s a helpful way to contextualize splits — that Trea Turner had a .601 two-strike OPS in 2022 is less intuitive than his 137 sOPS+ with two strikes, which tells us he was 37% more productive with two strikes than the league average. By sOPS+, Guardians pitchers were again the strongest in the league with their backs against the wall. In three-ball counts, they had an sOPS+ of 75, the seventh-lowest in 300 team seasons over the last decade.

By this metric, Guardians starters were especially impressive when they had no room to spare. Among 129 pitchers who found themselves in three-ball counts at least 85 times in 2022, the top three pitchers by sOPS+ were Shane Bieber (26), Cal Quantrill (27), and Triston McKenzie (39). Just two other pitchers on that list — Zack Greinke and Luis Severino — came in below 50. And the rest of the rotation had good success, too: Aaron Civale ranked 27th with a 65 sOPS+, and Zach Plesac tied for 30th with a 68 mark. In other words, every member of the Guardians regular rotation was at least 30% better than average in three-ball counts, and three of the five were better than 60% more productive. This was an uniform improvement from 2021, when none of the five finished with an sOPS+ below 100.

So what allowed Carl Willis’ starting staff to have so much success? It wasn’t that they hit the strike zone more often than others; Cleveland starters’ 60.2% in-zone rate with three balls was just about in line with the league average of 59.9%, coming in near the middle of the pack on both 3–1 and 3–2 counts and below average on 3–0 counts. Nor were they painting the edge of the zone with any more frequency than the average staff; in fact, their 41.6% shadow rate with three balls was dead last in baseball. As a group, they threw more pitches in the chase zone — 19.2% — than any other team.

What they did do extremely well as a unit was induce swings. Opposing hitters offered at 65.2% of their pitches in these situations, including 85.9% over the heart of the plate, 67.4% over the shadow, and 30.5% in the chase zone. When they got hitters to swing, Cleveland’s starters had a profound advantage: the -62.1 run value of those pitches was the lowest in the league, as were opposing hitters’ .179 average, .313 slugging, and .211 wOBA. This includes 3–0 pitches, which hitters swung at just 11.9% of the time; on 3–1 and 3–2 counts, Guardians starters earned swings 72.6% of the time.

All five of the primary starters got in on the swing party. On 3–1 and 3–2 counts, McKenzie ranked second out of 141 pitchers with as many as 100 such pitches with swings on 79.0% of his deliveries, and Plesac ranked fifth at 76.6%. Not too far behind were Civale at 23rd, Bieber at 33rd, and Quantrill at 57th.

How they went about getting those swings differed pitcher by pitcher, but for most, it involved dramatically increasing usage of their most tempting pitches. McKenzie leaned heavily on one of the most swung-at four-seamers in baseball, opting for it 81.2% of the time on 3–1 and 3–2, and got swings on 78.2% of those. Plesac’s changeup and slider were among the most enticing pitches in baseball last year, inducing swings on 59.1% and 58.1% of respective uses; he ramped up their usage from a combined 46.7% overall to 61.3% in 3–1 and 3–2 counts (and 75.8% against righties). Civale doubled down on his cutter, already his highest-usage pitch but also his most frequently targeted, going right after lefties in the strike zone and cutting down and away from righties. Quantrill also went to his go-to pitch — his sinker — 15 percentage points more often in 3–1 and 3–2 counts, and got swings on 72.4% of them. Only Bieber, whose 49.7% overall swing rate was a career high and 16th among qualifiers, stuck with a relatively similar pitch mix on 3–1 and 3–2.

Despite the idea that hitters should get good pitches to hit in favorable counts, it is still every bit as advantageous to pitchers to get hitters to swing in hitter’s counts, if not moreso. Against starting pitchers in 2022, the league averaged a run value of -5.89 per 100 swings on 3–2 counts, -7.21 per 100 swings on 3–1 counts, and -3.71 per 100 swings on 3–0 counts. Pitchers were more likely to get good outcomes out of swings than to sneak called strikes past hitters. On pitches that weren’t swung at, hitters had the advantage, to the tune of a 14.64 run value per 100 swings on 3–2, 8.12 on 3–1, and 0.31 on 3–0.

To get outs, you’re better off getting swings, especially on good pitches. Guardians starters took this basic pitching philosophy and executed it better than anyone when they were in trouble. Their success was in large part a product of their ability to induce opponents to pull the trigger, but having the right tools in their individual arsenals let them achieve that goal.