Curiosity Might Kill the Home-Run Spike
The Brewers’ Jared Hughes is the type of pitcher who’s endangered.
When Hughes was one of the more effective relievers in baseball for the Pirates from 2013 to -15, he relied on one pitch — a sinker — that he threw time after time in the lower part of the strike zone. Over the last year-plus, however, two important trends in the game have conspired against Hughes. For starters, the strike zone shrunk for the first time in the PITCHf/x era last season, according to Jon Rogele’s research. Worse, it shrunk in one particular area, down, where Hughes likes to pitch. Jeff Sullivan found that the zone continued to contract in spring training. The other trend is that more and more hitters have gone in search of fly balls, adjusting their swing planes to become more effective at lifting pitches down in the zone.
FanGraphs resident Alex Stumpf explored some of the challenges facing Hughes, and pitchers like him, last week. Hughes, entering his second year of arbitration, was released by the Pirates this spring. Last season, he posted a career-worst 4.68 FIP and a career-worst ground-ball rate of 57.9%. (His career rate is 60.9%.) He has a 4.79 ERA, 4.51 FIP, and 58.9% ground-ball rate to date this season.
In part because he’s endangered, Hughes has also become curious. He’s become interested in finding ways to attack hitters, to evolve, to identify advancements that might allow him to remain successful. Perhaps a cure for the home-run surge is for pitchers to react, like Hughes, with curiosity, to explore the resources available.
As noted on Friday, launch angles on pitches in the lower third and below the zone have improved from 4.6 degrees in 2015 to 5.3 degrees this season. Batters are doing more slugging damage there. In 2015, 0.18% of pitches in the lower third or below the zone went for home runs. Last season, it inched up to 0.22%. This season, the rate stands at 0.24%, according to Statcast data.
It appeared at one point as though the most popular counterpunch to the uppercut swing would be an increase of elevated four-seam fastballs. But we’re not seeing more teams follow the Tampa Bay model. In fact, according to Baseball Savant data, we’ve seen fewer four-seam fastballs thrown in the upper third of the zone and higher this year: an 8.8% rate this season compared to 9.9% in 2016 and 9.8% in 2015. Pitches down and below the zone have inched up from 35.7% in 2015 to 39.3% this season, according to Statcast’s detailed search. Jeff Sullivan wrote about the missing elevated fastballs last week.
Wrote Sullivan:
You’d think that teams would be demonstrating more of a willingness to explore the upper part of the strike zone. After all, the bulk of the recent home-run increase has come lower within the box. …But on the team level, you expect to find more signal. You expect to find even more still when you examine the league overall. Overall, the high fastballs haven’t surged, not yet. Perhaps they still will. Perhaps the hitters need to do a better job of forcing it.
Perhaps it’s curiosity — or a lack of it — that has been an element in the surge of home runs per fly ball (HR/FB). Perhaps too many pitchers haven’t been sufficiently curious to understand why batters are more often homering and, consequently, too slow to develop effective counterpunches. Moreover, there’s also the fact that few pitchers have ever been taught to “pitch up” in the zone. Perhaps battling that conventional wisdom will take some time, and that lag has allowed hitters to gain an advantage.
But conversations that Hughes and others have had in the Brewers’ bullpen are evidence that the home-run surge is grabbing pitchers’ attention in a serious way.
Hughes has always been one of the kindest people in the game. He was a favorite of the media when I was on the Pirates beat with the Tribune-Review. That hasn’t changed. I don’t know if he’s the nicest person in the world, but he’s likely in the upper one percentile. What’s changed over time, however, is that Hughes is more and more interested in the data.
In the visiting clubhouse of PNC Park earlier this month, Hughes asked me what web sites I use for research. I told him FanGraphs, of course. But I also walked him through the Statcast search tools at Baseball Savant on his phone in the Brewers clubhouse. He said it was exactly what he was looking for. Hughes is more and more interested in finding answers to his questions.
Hughes watches most games from the left-center, where the home bullpen at Miller Park is located. And it’s there that the conversation has changed to something far different than what you think might be being said after having read Ball Four.
“There is more talk in the bullpen than ever before,” said Hughes of Statcast and other data tools. “I’m probably spurring a lot of it on, but there is more talk about that stuff. We’ll just be watching guys hit and someone will offer up, ‘Hey, did you know this guy has one of the highest launch angles?’ And then we all kind of share information of why we think that is.”
Hughes uses the in-house video and data tools the Brewers make available to their players. But he’s also interested in all the information he can find on his phone or tablet outside the clubhouse. Interestingly, Hughes said the advanced meetings the Brewers hold — and this is an analytically friendly organization — don’t go as deep into details as he would like or specific enough to an extreme ground-ball pitcher like Hughes.
“Overall, in the official-scouting-report meeting, sure there’s a little bit of stuff like that, but it’s not there yet,” Hughes said. “But guys are looking into it.”
Hughes has begun investing more of his own time in finding hitter weaknesses.
“So if you look at some hitters who have really good launch angles, they don’t hit many ground balls or hit less than 50% ground balls, then it’s like ‘OK, where down in the zone does that hitter really have an ability to hit it into the air?’” Hughes said. “You avoid that spot. You go to the spot where the ground ball is.
“Say a catcher calls a two-seamer, arm side. Well, I want to know exactly where that pitch needs to be arm side to get it on the ground, where that batter has a better chance to hit it on the ground… It’s evolved over the last two years were I started looking more into it. It’s helped me a lot.”
If more and more hitters are trying to elevate the ball — and Hughes believes they are — then there must be a hole opening in their swings. And Hughes is working on develop new strategies — which he declined to reveal — to attack those locations, though to begin this season Hughes is throwing even more of pitches in the lower third of the zone and below. (Hughes’ sinker has begun to get classified as a four-seamer, but he said the pitch is still a sinker, that it’s just being misidentified.)
Still, he insists he’s looking for a way up. That could be tricky with a below-average spin-rate, though.
“If your swing is geared to the lower pitch, there might be something else there you can’t get to. In my opinion, every swing, every approach, there is a way to get a hitter out,” Hughes said. “The thing is, if I can find a way to have a strength up, to find something to go to up there if I think I need it. [And] I think I do.”
Pitchers still dictate the action. And Hughes, now curious, now armed with information, believes he’s better able to figure out how to get hitters out, how to punch back. And if more and more pitchers follow Hughes, if more and more pitchers drill deeper, perhaps scoring and home runs will decline and more pitches will be up in the zone.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
When I got hitting lessons some 10-15 years back, I was always told never to lower the bat head, as I would whiff by swinging underneath pitches in the upper part of the zone. Now that players are doing this, I’m wondering if pitchers could elevate some of their pitches to induce more whiffs.
Isn’t .24% still over 400 pitches per home run? That seems to be still good from pitchers’ perspectives.
I think pitchers’, especially those that typically throw few 4-seam fastballs, natural reaction to more fly balls is to go lower to induce grounders even if it causes more walks.
Would it be against the rules to have a notecard in your back pocket as a pitcher? If it’s not, I would definitely make a list of weaknesses of hitters I might be facing that day
I’m not sure if it is now, but I remember watching SportsCenter probably 10-15 years ago as a kid and seeing–I want to say it was David Wells- pull a scouting report out of his back pocket when a rookie came up to pinch hit. He proceeded to strike him out, too, if memory serves me right.
I used to do that, but the note card squished the Milky Way bars and the chocolate got on the card so I couldn’t read it.
They don’t make back pockets big enough.
It’s not unusual to see a pitching coach come out (or just the catcher go to the mound) when there’s a pinch hitter or somebody else where the pitcher might need some new information. Obviously that’s not the entire or only reason for a mound visit, but (re)-acquainting the pitcher with a scouting report is often part of it.
I saw a player do this during this season. It was an outfielder and the Mets broadcasters pointed it out, but he was checking a notecard to see where to shift. I don’t remember which team it was though.
Could they not wear one of those wristbands like quarterbacks wear that had plays on them? I could swear I’ve seen catchers wear them.
What is interesting is that the launch angle on low pitches is still well below league average (actually half of the league average). So while in theory they are easier to lift with the new swing they are still harder to lift than higher pitches.
High pitches still lead to fly balls way more often than low pitches, this still happens
http://m.mlb.com/video/topic/8009980/v241591883/hou-cle-astros-strike-early-on-gattis-two-run-homer
What the high pitches probably do is induce more weak fly balls and pop ups while IF you lift the low pitch it often is trouble.
I don’t think that the high pitch will kill the HR spike but it might continue the trend of killing everything else.
If the high pitch can keep the HRs where they are (by maybe increasing FB rate a little but decreasing hard hit fly balls) while lowering babip and raising Ks it will be a success but pitching up won’t suddenly become the new GB pitch.
I think the strategy in pitching will be accepting the HR while trying to raise Ks, lower walks and lower babip.
This strategy is kind of working already. Runs are up but only to about 2009 levels or so it is still more than half a run lower than at the height of the steroid era.
I think it is almost like pitchers and hitters work toward the same goal: more Ks. Hitters accept Ks and maximize contact while pitchers avoid contact and accept some damage.
“pitchers avoid contact and accept some damage” — yes. This is the Max Scherzer approach that garnered him the NL Cy Young award. I watched him serve up tons of homers in 2016, but usually with no-one on base. You can give up two home runs in a game, and win 3-2.
Are pitchers that exhibit more “rise” in their four seamers more immune to this recent trend? I’m thinking of someone like Marco Estrada, who is a high FB% guy but has a lower than league avg HR/FB% the last few years.
The changeup is the pitch that does the job for him. Marco Estrada sends all the sabermetricians to their psychiatrists. Soft tossers are not supposed to strike out 12 in 7.2, like Sunday, and continue to be solid mid-rotation starters for several years.
Changeups with high spin rates thrown up in the zone. The new market inefficiency in baseball.
the problem with seeing high fastballs as a counter is that high fastballs can be easy to identify and the batter could adjust his swing accordingly to hit it hard.
I agree.it is just very hard to throw breaking balls and change ups up in the zone effectively. Occasionally you can sneak one in for a looking strike but generally it is dangerous to throw soft stuff up in the zone.
So basically if it is up the batter knows it is a FB most of the time which means the high pitch works less well with other pitches together.
Aaron Judge is a perfect example. He is crushing low-middle pitches especially offspeed middle in. Pitchers are still afraid to go up, especially up and in but with his swing path thats the only way to lower his exit velocity and increase his launch angle beyond the optimum. He hit a high pitch tonight that stayed in the air 8 seconds it was hit so high but only went 300 ft.
Also study what the Yankees pen is doing. 4.5 % HR/FB (league average for bullpens 11.9%)and not a single sinker baller among them in the best HR park in baseball. Key is lots of velocity, get ahead on counts and get hitters to chase out of the zone with good offspeed stuff.
Is Julio Teheran experiencing some of the same problems as Huhges this year? There are a lot of similar stat changes: decreased swinging strikes, decreased ground balls, increased home run rate.