Kevin Pillar Reached a New Height

Any story of the Toronto Blue Jays’ 5-2 Wild Card victory over the Baltimore Orioles at the Rogers Centre on Tuesday night will start and end with Orioles’ manager Buck Showalter’s refusal to allow ERA leader, Cy Young candidate, and flawless closer, Zach Britton, into the game. Britton watched from afar as Ubaldo Jimenez threw the final five pitches of the their team’s season, and considering how baffling Showalter’s decision-making was, it’s only right the stories should start and end there.

But a start and an end leave room in the middle, and the ending we got couldn’t have happened without everything that led up to it. Showalter’s decision was key to the final outcome of the game, as was Jimenez’s failure to execute. But we never get there without Jose Bautista’s first-inning home run, or the five innings of scoreless relief by Toronto’s bullpen, or Edwin Encarnacion hopping all over that fat Jimenez fastball in the 11th and raising his hands in triumph. And while those were the most obvious keys to success for Toronto last night, Bautista and Encarnacion have crushed hittable pitches hundreds of times in their career prior, and bullpens have thrown countless scoreless innings. What Kevin Pillar did in the fifth inning is something he’s never done. What Pillar did in the fifth was something most have never done.

At the time, it was the highest-leverage moment of the game for Toronto. It was the fifth inning, there was one out, Michael Saunders had just hit a ground-rule double, and the Blue Jays were down, 2-1, with Pillar up to bat. It wasn’t edge-of-your-seat, white-knuckle intensity, but it was big. Every pitch in the playoffs feels big. Every pitch in the playoffs with the go-ahead runner in scoring position can get the juices flowing. Starting pitcher Chris Tillman got ahead of Pillar with two strikes, and went up and away with the fastball in an attempt to get Pillar to expand his zone.

You could say the plan worked:

You could say it didn’t:

Pillar damn near jumped out of his shoes, and so did every Blue Jays fan in the Rogers Centre. Toronto evened up the score at 2-2 that inning, where it remained until Encarnacion’s bomb in the 11th.

Pillar had every right to be looking for a pitch up. Tillman’s one of baseball’s most extreme high-ball pitchers, and, with an offspeed pitch to get Pillar to two strikes on the prior offering, an elevated fastball only made sense. Pillar himself is keen on going after the high pitch, and while he makes more contact in the upper-half of the zone than the lower, those high swings typically haven’t worked in Pillar’s favor. Maybe it’s because he swings at pitches like this.

This pitch wasn’t just a high pitch; it was the highest pitch Tillman threw all night. It was 4.61 feet off the ground, according to PITCHf/x, and it was also the highest pitch Pillar — noted high-ball swinger — has ever put into play:

You’ll take note of the annotations I’ve provided next to some of the most similarly anomalous dots; these swings aren’t supposed to work out. This one did. It’s simply the latest in an endless stream of reminders that, while a pure process is what players aim to achieve, a pure process doesn’t always lead to pure results, and results are ultimately the driver of success or failure, no matter how cruel that may seem to the pitcher or team who drew the short end of the stick by inducing poor process from the opponent only to be met with an undesirable result in a sudden-death Wild Card play-in game.

Pillar’s swing and the result that followed were too nutty to go without further investigation, so investigate further I did. Using the PITCHf/x queries at BaseballSavant, I came up with a leaderboard of baseball’s highest hits this season, before catching onto an important trend. Consider, first, some of baseball’s common high-hits leaders: Matt Wieters, Mark Trumbo, Hunter Pence, Evan Gattis. Now consider those same players’ heights, respectively: 6-foot-5, 6-foot-4, 6-foot-4, 6-foot-4. Big dudes. Pillar is listed at 6-foot-0 — several inches below the median height of an MLB hitter. If Wieters were to have hacked at the same pitch that led to Pillar’s double, it wouldn’t have looked nearly so out of place. The reason Jose Altuve once jumped during his swing had less to do with the location of the pitch and more to do with Altuve’s stature.

So, I grabbed myself a spreadsheet of all the hits in the PITCHf/x era, dating back to 2008, and I grabbed myself another spreadsheet of every player’s height, and I adjusted pitch height for player height by diving the former by the latter. Using this methodology, a returned value of “1.0” would indicate a pitch that was exactly at the height of a player’s head. No one’s ever gone quite that far, but if you look again at that screenshot of Pillar from above, you’ll know that they’ve gotten close.

The important thing to understand about what’s to follow is that there have been 382,450 hits recorded in the PITCHf/x era. Well over a quarter million. After clearing out some confirmed data glitches and bunt attempts, this is where Pillar ranks:

Pillar has the 10th-highest height-adjusted pitch that went for a hit out of 382,450 hits in the PITCHf/x era. Tenth, and without video I wasn’t able to confirm five of the entries above his as being non-bunt attempts or glitches, and frankly I have my doubts regarding the legitimacy of Wilson’s second-place entry. So, Pillar’s pitch, after being adjusted for player height, was either the 10th-highest pitch to have gone for a hit in nearly a decade, or better.

The highest confirmed height-adjusted pitch that went for a hit came off Marwin Gonzalez’s bat last year, and it came against a knuckleball, which is kind of like cheating in it’s own way:

The highest confirmed non-knuckleball height-adjusted pitch for a hit was this one, hit by Brett Lawrie last year:

Pillar got a decisive, two-strike hit on a pitch about as close to one’s head as we’ve ever seen. Let those numbers sink in again. 382,450. Tenth. That’s the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile.

Is this probably a part of the reason why Kevin Pillar has a 4% walk rate and a career batting line 15% below league average? Most likely. Was it a bad swing? Sure was. Was the result the sort of thing that makes it worth questioning why we even care about this stupid sport? Probably. Was it also the most extraordinary thing about an 11-inning Wild Card game in which a world-class manager made one of the most baffling, head-scratching non-moves in recent history? For my money, it was.

Thanks to Eno Sarris and Jeff Zimmerman for research assistance.