Mason Miller Is Unbelievable

My puny mortal brain is having trouble making sense of the numbers coming out of San Diego right now. It’s an uncanny valley thing. Mason Miller’s statistics just don’t quite seem like they’re numbers that you can put up in the majors. Oh, they’re all in the right columns. They’re not impossible or anything. It’s just that no one else has numbers that look quite like this, and even more so than that, if you think about what they all mean together, it doesn’t seem like the performance they describe can possibly be real.

Let’s start with the most striking statistic: 19 strikeouts in 24 batters faced. That 79.2% strikeout rate is obviously technically feasible, but I keep saying it in my head and it keeps not making sense. I look at strikeout rates a lot, particularly early in the season. But even for very good pitchers, they tend to top out around 40%, maybe 50% if they’re performing especially well. I can fit those numbers into my head. That means that about half the batters they face are going to strike out – easy enough. Face four batters in an inning? Two punchouts.

But 79% doesn’t work so easily. In a four-batter inning, that’s three strikeouts! But you don’t get a lot of four-batter innings if you’re striking out three batters an inning. Another way of thinking about that: Batters reach base safely about 40% of the time when they don’t strike out. But if they’re striking out 80% of the time, they’re already making outs in 80% of their plate appearances right off the top, and then add another 12% from in-play outs (60% times 20%). That’s an out rate of 92%! I can’t wrap my head around 92% outs. That’s the ratio of outs in your average two-hit complete game. But your average two-hit complete game includes a ton of batted-ball luck. Miller’s dominance doesn’t involve a lot of batted-ball luck – or a lot of batted balls.

That leads me to my next point of cognitive dissonance: all the swinging strikes. Right now, Miller is running a 39.6% swinging-strike rate on his slider. That means that batters swing at – and miss – 39.6% of the sliders he throws them. But they only swing half the time! That means they’re coming up empty 79.2% of the time when they offer at that pitch. Likewise, his four-seam fastball carries a 24.4% swinging-strike rate, off of a 43.5% whiff rate. These numbers are all ludicrous if you stop to think about them.

We’re squarely still in small-sample season, but Miller stands out even there. His slider is missing more bats than anyone else’s in baseball, of course. The gap between his slider’s swinging-strike numbers and second place (Erik Miller) is the same as the gap between second and 11th place. That 80% whiff rate looks just as silly. Mason Miller has recorded as many swinging strikes on his slider as Jesús Luzardo, a slider-dominant elite starter. But Luzardo has thrown more than twice as many sliders! They’re tied for the sixth-most slider whiffs in the majors so far this year – and Miller has gotten there in only 7 1/3 innings.

You can still wrap your head around all of this? Let’s keep going, then. Average everything together, and Miller has garnered a swinging strike on one third of the pitches he’s thrown this year. His 33.3% rate is in first place across the majors by a ton. For his career before this year, Miller was already one of the best, strikeout-heaviest relievers in baseball. He ran an 18.8% swinging-strike rate and struck out 40% of opposing batters. His recent form is simply absurd.

Here’s the kicker: Miller is eighth in called-strike rate so far this year. He’s gotten 22 called strikes, a 23.7% rate, to add to all the whiffs. Add those two up, and 57% of Miller’s pitches have resulted in a strike – and that’s not including foul balls, either. Second place is Jake Bird at 40%. That 17% gap is comical. That’s the distance between Bird and Christian Roa in 381st place (min. 50 pitches).

How do you get so many called strikes – which require not swinging – and also so many swinging strikes? It’s because batters can’t pick up on Miller’s pitches fast enough and so are just guessing. Look at his swing rate by zone, as well as the league average in each zone this year:

It’s too early in the season for meaningful leaderboards in these statistics – Miller has only thrown 21 pitches over the heart of the plate – but his performance is without precedent. Batters are swinging at his pitches no matter the location, whether the ball is right down the pipe or looks like this:

There’s no precedent for so many bad swings, or for so many bad takes. Both of those numbers are better than any full season on record. How could they not be? That table of swing decisions against Miller shows you what random chance looks like. Batters are just guessing out there. And even if they guess right, he’s allowing a mere 52.9% zone contact rate. That’s lower than the league average for out-of-zone contact rate (61.8%). Ponder that a few times.

This can’t possibly continue. Miller is making such short work of opposing hitters, so comprehensively scrambling their brains, that he’s actually throwing fewer pitches per batter and per inning than he ever has before. That’s not supposed to happen with strikeout pitchers. Last year, he averaged 4.2 pitches per batter. This year, he’s averaging 3.9 pitches per batter and 3.8 pitches per batter on guys he strikes out. Reminder: You need three pitches minimum for a strikeout.

Baseball doesn’t work this way. We have thousands upon thousands of observations to say that no pitcher can break the game like Miller is currently doing for long. But, um, he’s doing it right now. You should go watch it while you can. Miller has been roughly a coin flip to strike out the side when he enters. He’s making batters look like they’re hitting with blindfolds on. He throws the best fastball and one of the best sliders in baseball, and he’s locating the slider perfectly this year. I flip to every save situation in San Diego now, and I think you should, too. It’s the most dominant performance in the league this year – and it’s here for a limited time only, because, like I said, no one stays this hot forever.