How Hitters Are Fighting Back Against Rising Strikeouts
Over the last decade, hitters have been fighting a losing battle against incredibly talented pitchers who throw at higher velocities with even more effective offspeed and breaking pitches. Faced with the increase in talent and velocity on the pitching side, position players have done their best to adapt. The emphasis on launch angle, so as to hit balls harder and farther to get an extra base hit, is a fight against hitters’ inability to take the ball the other way or string together rallies, which are increasingly blunted by the strikeouts. Hitting an 89 mph fastball on the outer edge of the plate to the opposite field is a strategy that might work well. Unfortunately, those 89 mph fastballs aren’t as prevalent as 89 mph sliders that dart away from the outside corner and the fastballs that are routinely in the mid-90s. Hitters are continuously adapting to changes in pitching in order to be successful, and this season, they are getting better by not swinging.
Hitters tend to get some blame for their role in there being fewer balls in play, what with the proliferation of strikeouts and homers and three true outcome players who seek walks and power and have a willingness to swing and miss, but much of what hitters do is simply react to what pitchers do. The increase in strikeouts over the years isn’t due to hitters actively choosing to strike out, but to pitchers who have gotten much better at striking hitters out. When I looked at the issue last season, the rise in strikeouts was due to primarily two factors: the increase in the number of pitches at 95 mph or greater, and the increase in the use of non-fastballs to get hitters out. It’s hard to catch up to velocity, and it’s really hard to lay off breaking and offspeed pitches. This season, pitchers are still throwing hard, and as Ben Clemens demonstrated, they are throwing even fewer fastballs.
To go along with the increased use of non-fastballs is an accompanying decrease in pitches in the strike zone. The graph below shows the number of fastballs and non-fastballs in the strike zone over the past few years.
Given that the number of fastballs has decreased, it should come as no surprise that the number of pitches in the strike zone has decreased as well. It hasn’t mattered for pitchers that they have moved more pitches out of the strike zone, as hitters increased the number of pitches they swung at. That number stabilized over the last half decade at around 30%, but for the first time in a while, hitters seem to have meaningfully decreased their number of swings on pitches outside the strike zone.
When hitters chase fewer pitches, we see more walks, which is what has happened in this season’s early going, with the league posting a 9.2% walk rate after staying at 8.5% the last two years. Strikeouts are up a bit, too, but the league’s .176 ISO is about 15 points higher than last season and 20 points higher than in April of last year. Some of that increased power could be due to the weather being better this season. Some of it could be more changes to the baseball, which is decreasing drag and helping balls out of the park. Some of the changes are likely due to hitters getting better and adapting to the way pitchers are throwing to them.
Players are pulling the ball and getting the ball in the air more than they have in the past, which is leading to better results. The graph below shows groundball percentage and pull percentage.
We haven’t seen numbers like this in more than a decade, and the result so far this season is more homers and a higher ISO than we’ve ever seen. As to how hitters are going about this transformation, they are no longer increasing their chase rate on offspeed and breaking pitches out of the zone despite seeing more pitches there. As a result, hitters are swinging at fewer bad pitches they can’t handle and swinging at a greater relative percentage of pitches they can handle, particularly fastballs in the strike zone. Despite not swinging at some of those breaking and offspeed offerings outside the zone, hitters haven’t done any better against those pitches when they make contact. They aren’t doing any better when they make contact on breaking and offspeed offerings in the zone, either. Where hitters are making gains is on the fastball, particularly fastballs in the zone. The table below splits pitches into four types and two time periods: fastballs and non-fastballs in and out of the zone, and 2016-2018 compared to this season.
| wOBA on Contact 2019 | wOBA on Contact 2016-2018 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non FB OOZ | .277 | .275 | .002 |
| Non FB Zone | .380 | .382 | -.002 |
| FB OOZ | .316 | .308 | .008 |
| FB Zone | .420 | .397 | .023 |
| TOTAL | .379 | .370 | .009 |
Maybe some of the changes are due to the ball, but hitters aren’t seeing the same gains when they make contact on breaking and offspeed pitches as they do when they hit fastballs in the zone, which happen to be some of the best pitches to hit. Further, we can see that this appears to be a change in skill when we compare hitter performances when they don’t make contact. Below is the same table as above except it shows only performance on walks and strikeouts. It shows what is happening on these pitches in and out of the zone when a player is taking or whiffing.
| wOBA on BB/K in 2019 | wOBA on BB/K 2016-2018 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Non FB OOZ | .176 | .157 | .019 |
| Non FB Zone | .016 | .170 | -.001 |
| FB OOZ | .409 | .405 | .004 |
| FB Zone | .045 | .048 | -.003 |
| TOTAL | .189 | .185 | .004 |
Hitters are still bad on breaking pitches out of the zone, but they are a lot less bad than they used to be with little to no change elsewhere. It’s possible hitters are doing a better job identifying those breaking pitches out of the zone. They might simply be waiting for a fastball to hit in the strike zone and swinging hard — the whiff rate on fastballs in the strike zone has continued to go up, including this season. Hitters are swinging and missing on more pitches than they ever have before and that has meant strikeouts continue to rise, but they’ve stopped the bleeding when it comes to chasing offspeed pitches outside the zone as they see more and more of those pitches. The result has been more walks and more power, which has counteracted some of the gains pitchers have been making over the last few years.
None of these developments will put more balls in play unless pitchers start pitching in the zone more. The talent level on the pitching side has forced hitters to take an all-or-nothing approach and think harder about fishing for a walk. No rule banning the shift or requiring a three-batter minimum is going to put a significant number more balls in play. The talent on the pitching side would need to be thinned by a fair amount to decrease the strikeouts that have forced hitters into more extreme approaches. When it comes to pitching versus hitting, batters are beginning to adjust to try and level the playing field. It’s meant more offense, but not more action.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
And this better zone discipline may explain the increase in quality contact, or is it vice versa (see data here: https://tinyurl.com/y3vadv7z). Either way, when we consider what strikeouts are replacing, I am not sure it’s accurate to say they result in less action, unless action is taken to mean anything that happens when the ball is propelled off the bat.
Seems to me the main problem is that pitchers are not coming into the zone because the cost is too high when they do, and as Craig has demonstrated here, the cost has increased even more just this year. The increasing cost of throwing strikes has been leading to fewer strikes being thrown.
If we want to see fewer takes, fewer swings and misses, and more balls in play, then pitchers need to be incentivized to pitch more into the strike zone .
How can we accomplish that? By reducing the cost of pitching into the zone. How do we reduce the cost of pitching into the zone? By deadening the ball.
Deaden the ball even 3%, in which a ball hit 100 MPH becomes a ball hit 97 MPH under identical conditions, then fewer fly balls will go out for homers, and pitchers will in turn feel comfortable about serving up the ball to down-the-order hitters and saying, “Here you go, hit it and get yourself out.” There’s no way guys like Orlando Arcia or Jose Peraza should be threats to hit 20 home runs in a year. Maybe if they came to understand that they can luck into home runs only on their very best days once or twice a year, they’ll forget about trying to jack bombs at all and start spraying the ball around the field more. Pitchers would be a lot more comfortable with that idea and start throwing more strikes to allow their fielders the chance to get these guys out, which the game needs if we want to escape the TTO hell that we’ve descended into.
The Dodgers-Astros world series seemed like a real turning point to me. Those incredible games with homer after homer in the clutch were equally amazing and excruciating (as a Dodgers fan). Obviously that wasn’t the start of the juiced balls, but I think that series really epitomized what the league wants to see. Lots of action and tension via home runs. Juiced balls+increased emphasis on the value of home runs and extra base hits=the current environment
Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t think any of us are qualified to say. I like home runs a lot, and I like it when pitchers strike a lot of guys out. The TTO doesn’t really bother me all that much, but I can see why it would bother others.
It’s clear what the league wants to see if you have ever watched the daily highlight show Quick Pitch on the league-owned-and-operated MLB Network. I don’t know the exact number, but well over 50% of all plays featured on the show are either home runs or strikeouts. You yourself are OK with that. If Baseball has conducted focus groups that concluded that most fans are like you, then not only are we never going to see Baseball try to reverse course, but we may even see an acceleration of TTO ball. Even in a fake market economy, consumers ought to get what they want at least once in a while, just to feed the illusion that they’re the driving force behind all the decisions about the product.
Absolutely deaden the ball. But if we’re taking away a hitter’s edge (home run rebound), we should give hitters something to offset the loss. That’s why I think we should lower the seams on the baseball, and make it harder to throw impossible-to-hit cutters and sliders. That late movement/spin rate on the best pitches is the biggest cause of the increase in Ks, so we should bring the game back into balance by making it harder for pitchers (especially relief specialists) to come in and throw frisbees.
I’m a proponent of reducing spin on the ball and I presented a poster at last year’s SABR convention on getting more balls in play that included the idea of reducing spin (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RerMH_q9a-sDLZBYAJF2mFz7vnA5HDcv_xK0p0-zqyU). I thought that would entail lowering seams, a hypothesis of mine for the past few years, but the more I looked into it, the more I learned that lowering the seams might not have that effect. There may be other things that can be done, e.g., redistributing the weight within the ball from the core to the edges. Perhaps deadening the ball might by itself reducing spin by increasing drag while in flight from the mound to the plate. Even the idea of making the ball heavier was discussed, something that might also work on reducing velocity of the pitch. Bottom line, though: something should be done. The $64 Question is, would Baseball, who is raking in the dough on homers and strikeouts, even agree that something should be done?
Very interesting. Did you look at the seams in terms of aerodynamics, grip, or both?
As a pitcher (admittedly, not a great one 🙂 ), I felt that baseballs that had too smooth of a surface were difficult to grip. This didn’t impact my fastball much, but made releasing my curveball, slider, and circle change consistently far more difficult. This is why pitchers tend to scuff up the baseball – to increase the coefficient of friction between the hand and the ball.
I think it would be interesting to have the same pitchers throw breaking pitches with baseballs with different coefficients of friction on the seams, to determine whether this impacts spin rates, etc.
I thought that the juiced ball articles explained how lowering the seams of the baseball actually reduce wind resistance and would have the effect of increasing the distance balls are hit, all other factors being equal. If that is the case something else would have to offset the change. However, based on what has happened since the second-half of 2015, you can tell that MLB is and the commish is doing his best to turn it in to a beer league softball home run derby. Most hitters don’t even have to hit it on the barrel to hit HR’s anymore, they just have to put the bat on the ball at the right angle. With the fine tuning going on now every year, they are informed enough to know how and what to change on the baseball to bring it back to a reasonable balance. Of course, that won’t stop owners from moving in their fences to make sure every power hitter gets his 30-40 HR’s. How many have moved in their fences now since Camden Yards opened? 15? Some have done it multiple times. More outfield grass would equal more balls in play.
While the Atlantic League experiment will not be able to deliver definitive answers, moving the rubber back to 62’6″ should give an idea of just how much of a difference the increased distance will effect the effectiveness of velocity. I think it will be transformative and the strike out rate will drop precipitously in the second half of the Atlantic League season. If that is the case, then a combination of a less lively ball and more contact could achieve a better balance with more hits, more baserunners, more pitches in the zone and fewer strike outs.
Great post. It isn’t the ball, it’s the pitching.
If you want more balls in play, change the top and bottom of the strike zone. Or just enjoy the natural evolution of the game. Nobody really wanted Three True Outcomes Ball, but the logic driving it is inevitable, just like shifts. There isn’t any sense in continuing to place fielders where the hitters aren’t hitting the ball. Likewise, why throw fastball hitters fastballs in the zone? If they’ll chase a slider away, let them.
Personally I suspect the eventual next step is that old school contact hitters like Jeff McNeil or Jose Martinez are going to start getting promoted. Singles are the new market inefficiency!
Pitching is changing in response to the ball. Change the ball, and it will change the pitching.
Correct, a dead ball turns flyballs into outs and incentivizes contact oriented approaches.
Wow, this is an impressive piece of work: A clear thesis, with a clear presentation of data that’s both relevant and persuasive.
A real eye-opener for me, since I’d never seen the stat “wOBA on BB/K” by zone & pitch type.
My one quibble is, unfortunately, the opening line: “Over the last decade, hitters have been fighting a losing battle….” In the past decade, I see no consistent trend in the most meaningful batting line, which is runs per game.
— From 2009 to 2014, R/G trended down consistently, from 4.61 to 4.07…
— but then came a 3-year rise to 4.65 in 2017, the highest mark in that span.
And after last year’s modest dip, we’re back at 4.63 this year, which is particularly notable since March/April tends to see less scoring than warmer months.
The past 5 to 10 years have seen an upward trend in both BA and ISO on *batted balls.*
My research shows both of those marks have a strong correlation with runs per game over the past 50 years, much stronger than K%.
The tension between contact rates and batted-ball results is, to me, the major statistical narrative of the last half-century.
one interesting tweak to this analysis I’d like to see is how p(“hit”|first pitch strike) has changed over time, and maybe conditional probabilities of getting a “good” pitch the rest of the at bat. Even in high school we knew that if you gave up a first pitch strike, you were screwed the rest of the at bat. My suspicion is that if pitchers are getting first pitch strikes, you won’t even sniff a good pitch the rest of the at bat.
Given players are crushing fastballs, it could be that 1. pitchers know this and the only fastball people are seeing is the first pitch, leading to a system where pitchers are throwing more first pitch fastballs and batters are swinging more at the first pitch. If 1 is true, we could see an inflated first pitch hit probability and a dwindling hit probability for each subsequent pitch over the last few years.
In addition, if you’re down a strike, you kind of have to be bad on breaking pitches “OOZ” because you have to protect the plate, traditionally. It does seem intuitive and perhaps uninteresting, but seeing the proportion of “bad balls” dependent on first strikes (and then breaking that down by swinging first strikes and called first strikes) might be interesting.
If I read your first paragraph correctly, you’re talking about the difference in results between:
(a) outcome decided ON first pitch; and
(b) outcome decided AFTER an 0-1 count.
I’ll use OPS instead of batting average, as the stat more correlated with scoring.
And I’ll use OPS in the given situation as a % of overall OPS, to minimize the impact of yearly fluctuations in overall offense.
And I’ll use the past 20 years, since we have to have some limit.
So …
(a) Results ON the first pitch have trended steadily UPWARD, from a low of 113.4% in 2000 to a high last year of 126.8%. This year’s rate is quite similar, and 6 of the past 7 years saw an increase.
(b) Results AFTER an 0-1 count lack a clear trendline for the 20-year period. There’s been overall downward movement since the high in 2005, but last year’s figure was the same as the prior 5 years’ average (84.1%).
This year’s 83.0% would be the the lowest of the period, and 2nd-lowest since the start of pitch data in 1988 — but one month is too soon to draw conclusions.
I think I’m tracking, but just to make sure….
A). players are seeing an increasing share of their OPS generated from the first pitch?
and
B) There’s really no evidence either way that players are worse off than they used to be from being down in the count (just assuming the SE’s on that 84.1% are pretty big)
thanks for putting that up
Your (A) isn’t quite what I’m saying. I’m saying, the OPS on first pitches has been rising relative to the overall OPS. But that doesn’t go directly toward “share of their OPS,” which would also have to encompass the share of PAs that are actually decided on the first pitch.
In point of fact, the share of first-pitch PAs has trended DOWN since the dawn of pitch data. (Which jibes with the uptrend in average # of pitches per PA.) The high of 14.7% came in the data’s first year, 1988. It was 13.0% in 2000, 11.1% in 2010, and 10.9% last year (and this year to date).
So for first-pitch PAs, we have rising results, but falling shares.
For PAs that start 0-1, we have no longterm results trend, but a steadily rising share, reaching a high of almost 50% last year.
I don’t even want to try teasing out a “share of their overall OPS” from this data. 🙂
Spot on, Craig. Instead of lowering the mound or moving it back, how about we address the *real* issue, and lower the seams on the baseball, to make throwing 89 MPH sliders harder? I think guys can gear up and hit a 98 MPH fastball, but no one is hitting the best big league sliders and cut fastballs – they’re too good! So let’s adjust the baseball – make them a bit softer (to reduce this ridiculous home run rate) and a bit more aerodynamic (to reduce the number of unhittable breaking pitches).
These two changes to the baseball (softer, smoother) should increase balls in play and make the game more fun for people who like *action*, not “Three True Outcomes” baseball.
Pffft…the simple solution is to start a Willians Astudilo breeding program. Baseball loving couple with fertility issues looking for a donar, just contact him, in 25 years you will never see a strike out again.