Let’s Now Be Critical of a Single Pitch Selection

The only pitch that should literally never be thrown is a pitch aimed at a hitter’s head.

Anything else, totally fine. You don’t read MGL over the years without learning some things about game theory. Game theory explains that, optimally, you need to be unpredictable. You should bunt just often enough so that your opponent doesn’t know if you’re going to bunt. You should pitch out just often enough so that your opponent doesn’t know if you’re going to pitch out. And you should mix your pitches just enough so that your opponent doesn’t know what pitch will be on the way. It’s simple, if oversimplified: don’t tip your hand. It does your side a disservice.

Game theory is fascinating, and at the same time analytically limiting. When you get to talking about pitch sequences, any pitch, in isolation, is justifiable. Any pitch should/could be thrown more than zero percent of the time. Let’s say there’s a hypothetical that calls for, I don’t know, 60% fastballs in, 39% changeups away, and 1% hanging sliders. That describes no real situation, but anyway. If you see the pitcher throw a fastball, okay, yeah, that should happen sometimes. If he throws a changeup away, same deal. And if he throws a slider down the middle? It seems like a mistake, but every so often it does make sense to do that on purpose, in theory, because otherwise the hitter could just rule the pitch totally out. When a pitch gets totally ruled out, it slightly tips the balance. Part of being unpredictable is the willingness to sometimes do things that don’t seem so good. Surprising mistakes can be surprising successes.

Because of game theory, it’s almost impossible to reasonably criticize any given pitch or pitch sequence. A pitch comes with an n of 1, and stripped from context, you don’t know how many times that pitch would’ve been thrown in the same situation. Taking one pitch and only one pitch, you almost always have to conclude that, maybe it was fine. There’s no such thing as a pitch that absolutely should never be thrown, aside from the one noted at the beginning. This is frustrating, but sometimes sensibility frustrates. So the world can be.

And yet. I think this is against my better judgment, but there’s a pitch I want to criticize. It happened in Wednesday’s Game 2, and it was thrown by Hunter Strickland to Salvador Perez. I can’t declare absolutely that the pitch was a terrible idea, because of all the reasons, but this is about as close as I can get to believing that a pitch shouldn’t have been called. Perez, against Strickland, broke the game open. He did so against a pitch I think he knew damn well was coming.

Setting: bottom of the sixth, 3-2 Royals, two on, one out. Strickland comes in from the bullpen, to face Salvador Perez. Perez homered in Game 1, but for the most part, for a while he’s been a mess. The game here is still within reach. Strickland is known to have a high-90s fastball, and a couple other pitches he doesn’t throw much. He never throws changeups to righties anyway. From the start, Perez knows he’s going to see fastballs or sliders.

Pitch 1: fastball, away, over the plate. It’s fine. Perez swings.

Strickland’s going to start most plate appearances with fastballs, but sometimes he won’t do that, and most hitters don’t like to be too aggressive on the first pitch, especially if they haven’t seen a guy before. So after the foul, Strickland’s ahead 0-and-1. Makes a breaking ball more likely. That means there’s also value in throwing a heater. Strickland places another, tucked in the low-away corner.

Beautiful pitch! It got Harold Reynolds to say pretty nice things. It put Perez in an 0-and-2 hole, and Perez has gotten pretty used to that by now. There were options. Fastball, or breaking ball. A breaking ball would probably be low and away. A fastball could perhaps be up, but in Strickland’s appearance in Game 1, all his two-strike fastballs to righties were intended to be around the outer edge, at the level of the knees. That’s how he retired Lorenzo Cain, and that’s how he tried to retire Josh Willingham before dropping in a pretty slider.

And this is where things turned. The call, unsurprisingly, was for a breaking ball low and away. The Giants know that Perez is ultra-aggressive. The idea was sound, but the pitch was too bad — too bad for Perez to chase, and too bad for Buster Posey to block. The runners moved up, meaning one was suddenly within 90 feet. A runner 90 feet away can score on another bad breaking ball in the dirt.

The count was still 1-and-2, heavily in Strickland’s favor. But this is where Perez’s brain would’ve kicked in. From the beginning, he would’ve eliminated the changeup. Now, he would’ve figured he could eliminate the breaking ball. Strickland wouldn’t want to risk it again, and Posey also wouldn’t want to call for a pitch Strickland wasn’t controlling. And Strickland likes his fastball, even as a putaway pitch, so Perez had plenty of reasons to think he was going to get some heat. And where does the heat go? Perez had seen it away, between the knee and the thigh. It’s what Cain saw the night before. It’s mostly what Willingham saw the night before. It didn’t seem at all likely that Strickland would try to throw a fastball up in the zone. The one time he did that to Willingham with two strikes, it was a location mistake.

Perez had every reason to expect a fastball away, somewhere around knee height. The Giants should’ve recognized that. The count was still very much in their favor — they couldn’t let Perez have an edge in the guessing game, not with his back up against the wall. Yeah, it would be hard to call again for a pitch that Strickland had just bounced, but what would be the odds of another bouncer? What would be the odds that Posey wouldn’t be able to block it? And there was another choice, too: a fastball located somewhere else. Perez is used to getting pitched down and away, in particular with two strikes. He kind of hunches over in his stance, as if to better reach those pitches away from him. So that would’ve been another choice: fastball up. Maybe Perez gets it in the air deep enough to score a run, or maybe he swings and misses or swings and pops up. There should’ve been three options. It seemed like everyone agreed there was one.

Strickland did not miss by very much. The ball did drift a little over the plate, but it was still on the edge, and besides, Perez is capable of hitting pitches outside. Look at the way he attacked: he was leaning over, looking for a pitch in that spot. For his career, Perez has hit better than .300 against such pitches, and those were presumably in less predictable situations.

The hitter shouldn’t be able to know what’s coming. He especially shouldn’t be able to know in a 1-and-2 count. I’m not saying Perez knew with absolute, 100% certainty, but he would’ve had a real good idea. And the Giants should’ve known that. Based on what Posey called for, Strickland didn’t miss in a surprising area. He barely even missed at all, relative to the norm. Strickland mostly executed the pitch, but the pitch wasn’t a good pitch to execute under the circumstances.

From Jeff Passan’s column:

“After he threw that breaking ball to Salvy, he didn’t want to throw another one in the dirt,” Royals third baseman Mike Moustakas said. “I’m pretty sure Salvy was hunting dead red and got a pitch, and he smoked it out to center field.”

This is kind of basic stuff. Hitters anticipate pitches all the time. But guess hitters should be exploited in pitcher-friendly counts, whereas in this case I feel like Perez and Posey were on the same wavelength. I don’t know that for sure, I haven’t talked to Posey or Strickland, but I feel like the odds of such a fastball in that case were very high. Too high, given that Perez would be hunting for the same thing.

Back to game theory. Because of game theory, we can’t say anything about this absolutely. It was a sample size of 1. It’s always a sample size of 1. But let’s say this were repeated 100 times. How many of those times would Strickland throw that kind of fastball? How many of those times would he throw a different fastball, or another slider? My guesses are too often and not enough. Sometimes hitters are just going to be far too comfortable. That’s when game theory says you throw them a curveball. Figuratively, or literally.