Grading the Home Runs Against Hunter Strickland
Harold Reynolds on Wednesday, a few pitches into Hunter Strickland’s appearance:
I think they figured out the problems with Strickland. He struggled against the Nationals and actually a little bit against the Cardinals, but, my goodness, against the right-handed hitters, we saw last night and these first two pitches, very impressive.
Harold Reynolds, a few minutes later:
[different words]
We don’t have enough information to say that Hunter Strickland is homer-prone. We do have enough information to say that Strickland has been homer-prone. With the Giants in the season, he faced 25 batters, and none of them went deep. With the Giants in the playoffs, he’s faced 23 batters, and five of them have gone deep. Or four of them have, Bryce Harper doing it twice. Before this month began, you didn’t know who Hunter Strickland was. Now you’ve got all kinds of opinions, few of them nice. It’s going to take a while for Strickland to repair this reputation. A while, or, one high-leverage World Series inning, if it’s clean. Fans have short long memories.
It’s not just crazy that Strickland’s allowed five dingers. It’s also crazy how he’s allowed said dingers. All of them have been hit off his fastball, and his fastball is fast. The slowest that’s been hit out was 96.5 miles per hour; the fastest was 97.5. Using the Interactive Spray Chart Tool, here’s how fast right-handed fastballs were hit in the air this season:
You see righties going up the middle, and pushing the ball the other way. Lefties, similar story. This is what you’d expect — hitters generally aim to take a fastball up the middle, and they work off of that. The faster the pitch, the less time to get out in front of it. For lefties against fast fastballs, they pulled 10% of balls in play (homers included) to right field in the air, and about a third of those were hit 300+ feet. For righties against fast fastballs, they pulled 6% of balls in play to left field in the air, and about a quarter of those were hit 300+ feet. Lefties have trouble turning on right-handed heat. Righties have even more trouble. Now, the Strickland postseason dinger log:
- Bryce Harper, LHB, homer to right
- Asdrubal Cabrera, LHB, homer to right
- Bryce Harper, LHB, homer to right
- Matt Adams, LHB, homer to right
- Omar Infante, RHB, homer to left
Five fast fastballs, five homers, all yanked. This doesn’t happen unless hitters are just sitting on that fastball. Otherwise, they won’t be able to react in time. Here’s a different guy clearly sitting fastball:
That time, the swing didn’t work, but even that serves as an indication of how guys have hit against Strickland this month. They’ve hunted for his fastball. They’ve thought about literally nothing else. When Strickland’s other stuff hasn’t been there, he’s gotten into a whole heap of trouble. Five dingers’ worth, basically, plus a two-bagger. We’ll probably look at that in a different post.
Another sign guys have swung from the heels? Of 15 balls hit fair against Strickland in the month, just three have been on the ground. It seems worthwhile to review the five home runs. In doing so, I’ll arbitrarily grade them on their difficulty, and discuss the context. How did what’s happened happen? Luck, plus non-luck. Onward!
Homer No. 1
- Date: 10/3
- Batter: Bryce Harper
- Speed in: 97mph
- Speed out: 114mph (source)
Strickland, making his first postseason appearance and first appearance against the Nationals. An inning earlier, summoned from the bullpen with the bases loaded and two out, he struck out Ian Desmond on four fastballs. That made it pretty clear what he liked as a weapon, and the first two pitches to Harper were fastballs, in, one for a ball and one for a strike. Strickland then tried to get ahead with a breaking ball, but it missed pretty badly, so Harper had no reason to respect it. The count ran 2-and-1, and then Strickland threw a fastball literally over the very center of the plate. Harper was looking for that very pitch, and you might’ve heard before that he’s pretty quick and strong.
Difficulty: Difficult! Do you know how hard it is to hit a 97 mile-per-hour fastball? It’s so hard! They’re almost never home runs.
Homer No. 2
- Date: 10/3
- Batter: Asdrubal Cabrera
- Speed in: 97mph
- Speed out: 100mph
After Harper, Strickland used up nine pitches to freeze Wilson Ramos. All of the two-strike pitches were fastballs. Cabrera took a first-pitch breaking ball inside, then he got a good swing at a fastball a little up and a little away. He fouled it off, and Strickland returned with an elevated changeup that Cabrera was out in front of. At that point Cabrera was behind 1-and-2, but no lefty had seen a good breaking ball, and because the changeup was up, that could be dangerous to go right back to. Buster Posey wanted a fastball above the belt. Strickland didn’t miss his target by that much. But while the pitch was over the outer third, look how close Cabrera stands to the plate — it was over the heart, to him, and right around where he likes to hit right-handed fastballs for dingers. Cabrera figured Strickland would try to put him away with high heat. It just wasn’t quite high enough.
Difficulty: Difficult! Hitting a fastball in a pressure-packed situation? I’m so impressed. Baseball players are amazing.
Homer No. 3
- Date: 10/7
- Batter: Bryce Harper
- Speed in: 97mph
- Speed out: 100mph
This homer had one of the very greatest elevation angles off the bat of the year, at 42 degrees. Called upon, Strickland quickly retired Desmond, with two fastballs and one bad breaking ball. Then it was Harper’s turn, and Strickland tried to steal a strike with a first-pitch changeup. It was bad and missed up and away. He came back to miss in with a fastball, then he threw a centered low fastball that Harper fouled away. Then, another good idea: a 2-and-1 changeup, but like the first one, it missed up and away, being bad. Good idea, poor execution that left Strickland in a 3-and-1 count against an ultra-dangerous lefty. Harper had no reason to believe in the changeup, and he wasn’t feeling a breaking ball, so this was a classic dead-red situation. Strickland came close to his target with a fastball, but the pitch leaked just a little in, and Harper was so ready for it he very nearly pulled it foul. He didn’t, though, because, homer.
Difficulty: Difficult! I wouldn’t even want to stand there while a guy was throwing something 97 miles per hour a few feet away from my body. No sir. I like to live.
Homer No. 4
- Date: 10/12
- Batter: Matt Adams
- Speed in: 97mph
- Speed out: 105mph
This is fun, and here’s why. Strickland retired the first guy he faced, a righty. Up came Adams, and Strickland bought a strike with a first-pitch breaking ball. Then he missed with a breaking ball, then he bought another strike with a 1-and-1 breaking ball. So, with three breaking balls, Strickland had gotten himself ahead, and this was an uncharacteristic approach for him. Adams, clearly, hadn’t been looking for secondary stuff, so all Strickland had to do was locate a few of them to get into a good spot. But then what do you do when you’re up 1-and-2 having thrown three unexpected pitches in a row? Strickland and Posey thought they had Adams set up. They thought they had him looking for something slower. Posey set the same target he’d set for Cabrera. But Adams, obviously, wasn’t fooled; Adams, obviously, assumed Strickland would go to his bread-and-butter in a strikeout count. And putaway fastballs are usually elevated fastballs. Adams was a step ahead. He saw right through the Giants’ plan for him.
Difficulty: Difficult! It’s one thing to expect a pitch and expect a spot. It’s quite another to recognize them and execute in the blink of an eye. If you told me exactly what was coming, and what was coming was a 97 mile-per-hour fastball over the plate, I’d be like, great! I will back away, then, for safety.
Homer No. 5
- Date: 10/22
- Batter: Omar Infante
- Speed in: 98mph
- Speed out: 106mph
In Game 1, in a low-leverage situation, Strickland was great against the Royals, working a 1-2-3 with two strikeouts. In Game 2, by this point he’d already gotten in trouble by yielding a hit to Salvador Perez. That at-bat featured one wasted breaking ball, and the first pitch to Infante was a fastball that missed outside. Infante would’ve figured a couple things. One, Strickland might not trust the breaking ball at the moment. Two, it’s a fastball count anyhow. So Infante would’ve had a notion. Now, here’s a key point: Posey set up away, at the knees. That would’ve been a good pitch, probably. But this time Strickland badly missed, up and to the other side of the plate. If Infante has a power zone, that’s it: up and in against right-handed fastballs. At least, that’s where it’s been historically, and that’s where it was against Strickland. Infante got one of the only pitches he’s able to drive over the fence. It’s exactly what he wanted to see.
Difficulty: Difficult! Baseball bats can be surprisingly heavy. They’re easy to swing, but they’re not so easy to swing fast, unless you’re really strong. And did you know that they’re round, and the baseball is also round and little? Collisions like this are miracles.
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It’s interesting that, four out of five times, Strickland was right around his target. Only the pitch to Infante badly missed. The issue hasn’t been his fastball command; it’s been command of the other stuff. Without it, hitters have looked for the fastball, and when the fastball has been there, it doesn’t matter if it’s 97 if hitters have a hunch. It is to a large extent bad luck that five swings have already generated home runs. Home runs aren’t common, and Strickland’s fastball doesn’t actually supply that much power to the bat-ball collision. It’s not bad luck, though, that Strickland has struggled. Not entirely, and not even in large part. A predictable straight fastball isn’t a weapon. Not when you don’t have an alternate weapon.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
The different batters’ reactions are fascinating. Bryce Harper #1 knows he has just committed assault and battery on a baseball. Bryce Harper #2 also knows this, but he (and most of us watching) thought the ball would drift foul.
The really interesting one is Asdrubal Cabrera. Is he slamming his helmet in frustration? It can’t be often a player reacts with anger, not knowing he has just hit a home run.
also, having watched, in all five, Strickland reacts all angry-like
Strickland does the “glove over mouth” move in 4 out of 5 of these GIFs.
Weird to think he censors himself before stopping censoring himself.
I call that the Shredder
Strickland should have been doing the glove over mouth in the altercation with Perez. Undercurrents of racism are enough to curtail or destroy a career.
I know I would not want a potential racist on my club regardless of how hard he throws.
@Strickland sucks: The good news is that Strickland wasn’t being racist, it was a simple misunderstanding. Strick was screaming at himself, like he does in every one of these gifs when he gave up a HR, and Perez mistakenly but understandably thought Strick was screaming at him and it escalated a tad from there. Strick wasn’t yelling at Perez because of his race or some other dumb reason like that, just a misunderstanding.
Correction: having watched the video, Cabrera is making an unusually elevated fist-pump which only looks like he’s reaching for his helmet.
He’s flipping his bat
That is an insult to my talents…
Angried up? Or amped up? In real time, I thought he was releasing (‘Did my job! Did as asked! Evil ball is running away! I’M ALIVE!’)
I really enjoyed the “difficulty” part of this analysis.
Difficulty of producing material as engaging as Jeff’s? Difficult! It’s one thing to understand this analysis when it’s offered in a visually appealing, well-written format. It’s something else altogether to actually write it up.
In all seriousness, one of the things I most enjoy about his work is that it relates the data and visuals, which can seem a little abstracted from actual baseball, back to the sense of childlike wonder at watching professional athletes do awesome shit.
I really didn’t…sorry, the rest of the article was great… the difficulty part just got repetitive and banal the third time around.
How far did you get into Seinfeld?
I thought the whole thing about faster-pitched balls providing more energy was a myth? Seems to me more likely that a fireballer is liable to get a guy to sit on the pitch they hope to get and give it their best cut to catch up with it. When you barrel up a ball with that kind of swing it’s going to go a long way- but selling out on contact probably means that fewer of these swings turn into good contact at all.
Strickland’s definitely been unlucky. Harper’s homer at AT&T was foul by the time it landed and probably would have been an out if it had been hit on a similar flight path but to CF instead. A fraction of a second sooner and the same ball is just a loud strike.
The ball clearly does supply some energy to the collision, but just look at bunts to see how much that’s worth. Meanwhile, the bat is at least 6 times heavier, and moving as fast or faster than the ball.
When I saw the Adams at-bat live, in my head he said “Fuck this pitch” when he swung at that fastball. He just turned on it so fast after seeing only off-speed stuff. It was fun.
Oh is that the same Reynolds that said the only reason a ball in the hole was close at first was due to Eric Hosmer, though he failed to elaborate what it was that Hosmer did? On a play where Hunter Pence fell on the ground getting out of the box. The fact that he sexually assaulted a woman at ESPN aside, what in God’s name does this guy bring to the table?
Reynolds is a little too arrogant for my taste. He comes off as the great athelete in high school who is really a punk but everyone lets him get away with it.
Folks who read FGs, JABO, BP etc are not Reynold’s audience. Doesn’t matter if he says majority drivel, the rest mostly wrong and 1-2% possibly right or not provably wrong; or if he and Buck play Idiot Pong game after game; or if Verducci inexplicably takes a small pile money most of us don’t see in year to refrain from contracting a missile hit to take out those two. We have to reserve the possibility that Reynold’s audience appeal is more comparable to that of retail populist politicians than to sabermetrics nerds nattering over tenths or hundredths of a percent of advantage in certain high leverage contexts.
In most of these, it seems like he sticks WAY too close to the center of the plate horizontally. Especially for a fastball without much movement, deception, or alternatives, even if it is fast, you have to be able to place it somewhere closer to a corner in the majors. I mean, it’s 97 miles per hour: guys will have trouble telling if it’s going to hit or miss the corner. He may be hitting his spots, but I think Posey and he are setting up spots that are too hittable.
I think those two pitches on 1-2 counts (#2 and #4) were the pitch was supposed to be up, weren’t up anywhere near enough. You have a pitch or two to waste, so you shouldn’t be aiming at the exact top of the letters, but rather more like the shoulders. And if you look closely enough, those two pitches were at least a couple inches lower than Posey sets up, so he did miss his spot down a little. If the targets were set up around the shoulders, were the catcher gets in that half standing position, maybe he gets those balls a little higher and makes it easier to generate a swing and miss.
Then, more about missed spots; On #1, he misses towards the middle of the plate pretty badly. The ball is still down, but it floats well into the middle of the zone. I’d have a hard time saying he was really around his target on that one.
I agree with this. To me his biggest mistake yesterday was throwing that 1-2 fastball in the strike zone that Perez hit for the double. I know he’d just uncorked a wild pitch on the breaking ball to move the runners up but why throw Perez anything in the strike zone when you’re ahead of him in a 2 strike count? He’s going to be swinging anway.
Strickland made a revealing comment when he was asked about the location of the first 2 home run balls to Harper and Strickland. He was basically asked if they were mistakes and his response was “I’m not trying to hit a gnat out there” (ie. I don’t need to have pinpoint location with the velocity I’ve got). Hopefully he’s learning now that you can’t expect to get hitters at this level out on stuff alone.
Meant to say Harper and Cabrera btw (after NLDS game 1).
I’m still trying to figure out why Strickland in even on the WS roster and why Bochey insists on using him?
Probably due to some combination of Strickland’s regular season and a lack of better options. As for the second part, I don’t get why he is being used right now. I would only put him out there if the game gets way out of hand.
Based on 7 regular season innings? Really? The only innings that he had ever pitched at the major league level? His minor league innings certainly weren’t terribly awe-inspiring.
Lack of better options I could see, but there seems to be strong sentiment amongst Giants fans that George Kontos should have been on the roster rather than Strickland.
Hindsight is 20/20. I, like many Giants fans, was excited and intrigued by Strickland heading into the postseason. While many wish now that Kontos had been there in his place, I don’t think many were calling for that specifically. Where the issue was for most fans, that I saw at least, was Lincecum being on the playoff rosters over Kontos.
His minor league innings weren’t inspiring with a 48:4 K:BB in 35.2 IP at Double-A — that’s 12.11K/9 and 1.01 BB/9. Coupled with the stuff (which is objectively quite good)that should be inspiring to most. Tough crowd…
Plus much of that pitching staff is gassed or hurting.
Bochy’s got very few and precious pitches in specific situations left to call on. There were major meltdowns over the last 2 months of the regular season out of Gutierrez, Lincecum, and Machi, and more minor ones or struggles at least out of Hudson, Vogelsong and Lopez. There are some BIG HOLES in the Giants’ bullpen progression. We never see them when Bumgarner’s up, or if the Giants succeed in scoring their way past the graveyard, or if Bochy gets a combo out of a starter plus Petit. But they can’t go to Petit every game (plus I think Bochy’s holding onto the idea of a Petit start at some point). That means Bochy has to risk squeezing too much out of the starter’s tube to get to the closers, expose the shaky and stinky elements of his bullpen. Last night we got both.
I still think there’s a bigger reason Strickland won’t see the mound again this WS: There are a lot of Central American hispanics on the Giants, particularly from Venezuela, and they’re not just spectacular they’re close. And they all know and like Salvador Perez; several grew up around near him, or he them; Panda is CLOSE to Salvi Perez, and Panda is the Giants most senior active player after tiny Tim.
There’s mature leadership on the Giants that will not limit itself to avoiding this issue (like Panik has had do today, as a rookie, AWKWARDLY, as he knows this is trouble), or hints at implications (like Kuiper snuggled right up close to both last night and today). Bochy, HoFer-in-waiting or not, is going to have to defer to the team’s leaders on this. I just don’t see how Strickland gets past the court of Justices Panda, Posey and Pence.
Yeah, the bush-league aspect of his reaction, combined with the possible racism (hasn’t been confirmed yet, right?), definitely is unusual for this Giants team, and I don’t expect it to be tolerated.
You also want to make sure I never ever get used. Even though I have done quite well coming in as a reliever in an admittedly small sample.
*Puke*
If he wasn’t TJ’d he would have been up much sooner. Crazy K/BB ratio plus huge heat. But its tough to get thrown into the middle of the postseason. I would say Bochy likes the different look he gives over the rest of the pen – Giants were dead last in velocity scores this year.
I really like your grading scale. Have you ever thought about a career in teaching? The Carolinas are lovely this time of year!
Location, location, location. Get too much of the plate or put a ball where a hitter likes it and hitters can hit hit it if they know its coming, even 95+ FB.
Guy doesn’t have much of a resume. Is the Giants pen that thin?
It’s the Major Leagues. Hitters routinely smoke great pitches as well.
so steamer still has Strickland as the best reliever on the giants…
true or false
For some reason, the ball is slightly easier to pick up when the pitcher breaks his hands like that. That could help explain why his stuff has played down. It would also be interesting to see video of his delivery on a secondary pitch to see if it is different, which is maybe something the opposition has picked up on.
Simple explanation : no movement on a fastball with good velocity in a bad location in MLB usually equals a pitch crushed. The Eastern League is a little more forgiving.