Less Fastballs, Texas

by
October 23, 2008

As David just announced, he’s unveiled some new team pages with all kinds of fantastic data. It’s just a treasure trove of sortable data, leading to the following kinds of revelations – the Texas Rangers, as a pitching staff, threw fastballs 68.9% of the time. This is, by far, the most in the league – the next highest rate is the Mets at 65.8%. The average ML team threw fastballs 60.6% of the time, so the Rangers were just over two standard deviations from the mean.

Can someone in Texas teach these guys to throw a breaking ball or a change-up once in a while? I understand that pitching coaches like to establish the fastball, but at some point, you might want to look around, say “hey, this isn’t working” and try to get them to throw something soft once in a while.

This is essentially basic game theory – it doesn’t matter how good you think your pitching staff’s fastballs are, because if the other team knows that they’re going to see a steady diet of hard stuff, they’re going to just wait for it and swing from the heels when they read fastball coming out of the pitcher’s hand. Even if you throw 95, an expected fastball is going to get turned around a lot more often than not.

Keeping hitters off balance is a huge part of pitching. The Rangers were the most predictable team in baseball in terms of pitch selection, and while it’s not fair to claim that it was the main reason why they gave up more runs than anyone else in baseball, it almost certainly didn’t help.

Note to Jon Daniels – how about finding a pitching coach who believes in balls that bend?

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Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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David Foy
17 years ago

Not only did they throw an exorbitant amount of fastballs but they also coupled that with throwing a middling amount of change ups, at a 8.2 % rate. I’m not a pitching coach or anything but that seems like a very bad way of using your pitching staff. If you are going to rely so heavily on fastballs it would seem logical to teach your pitchers to use some change ups.

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