Meatball Punchout Bonanza

Yesterday, I dove into the wonderful world of Nick Pivetta’s middle-middle magic. It’s pretty crazy to think about. Pitches down the middle shouldn’t lead to a huge batch of called strikeouts, and yet opposing hitters can’t help themselves when Pivetta is on the mound. This two-strike dominance is fueling Pivetta’s best season as a professional. Obviously it is – all those free strikeouts can’t be bad.

When I see such an unexpected and excellent tactic, my mind naturally goes to the exact opposite of it. If Pivetta is getting ahead by doing this, surely some hitter must be getting victimized by having it done to them. If there are standouts in acquiring called strikeouts, surely there are players particularly susceptible to them. So let’s look at the list of the hitters with the most called strikeouts on middle-middle pitches, hereafter “meatball punchouts” with a hat tip to editor Matt Martell:

Wait, what? These are mostly good hitters! The anti-Pivetta being Gavin Lux is one thing – Lux is having a solid but not spectacular season. But Shohei Ohtani? Elly De La Cruz? The hitters who are worst at the thing Pivetta is best at are mostly great. Let’s look at it a different way:

Yeah, OK, whatever Ke’Bryan Hayes is doing isn’t working. Look at the rest of them, though! A nine-man lineup of the top nine on this list would be the best offense in baseball, with an average 123 wRC+. Hell, a 10-man lineup with Hayes included would still be the best lineup in baseball, with a 118 wRC+. By contrast, here are Pivetta and company along with some performance metrics:

Sure, there are a few clunkers, but that group has admirable run prevention numbers overall. Even if you had to run a 10-man rotation and use all of them, their average ERA works out to one of the top five staffs in baseball.

Squeeze this into your head: The batters who take pitches down the middle for strike three most often would, in aggregate, be the best offense in baseball. The pitchers who get those meatball punchouts most often would be one of the best rotations in baseball. This marker – lots of called strikeouts on smashable pitches – somehow works in opposite directions depending on which side of the ball you’re examining.

What gives? To explain that to you, I’ll first point to an old study of mine. The pitchers who draw the most swings and misses down the middle of the plate are amazing, just as you’d expect. The hitters who swing and miss most frequently on pitches over the heart of the plate? They’re also amazing! It’s the same weird phenomenon that I found here, only for swings instead of takes.

The reason that both of these counterintuitive effects exist comes down to contact quality. Since the start of the 2021 season, Aaron Judge is the best hitter when he puts a middle-middle pitch into play, with a .673 wOBA. Miguel Rojas is the worst hitter on those same batted balls, with a .308 wOBA. That’s an enormous spread, obviously. Think about who Rojas is and who Judge is, though, and you’ll have no problem understanding why.

Over the same time frame, Carlos Rodón has been the best pitcher in the majors at limiting damage on middle-middle contact, allowing a .356 wOBA. Patrick Corbin has been the worst, allowing a .456 wOBA. The gap between these two pitchers is only a third as wide as the gap between the two extreme ends of the hitting spectrum. In other words, hitters have a lot more to say about contact quality than pitchers do.

The identity of the batter at the plate matters far more to a pitcher than his own skill when it comes to limiting loud contact. You know this to be true implicitly; your best pitcher against Judge feels scarier than your worst pitcher against Amed Rosario, the last guy on the Yankee bench. Understanding this unravels the whole riddle.

Take a look at the 10 hitters we started this article with again. They’re a powerful group (again, except for Hayes). They take a lot of called strikeouts because they’re pursuing a strategy that lets them do what they do best – send the ball into orbit – most often. Expanding the zone as a power hitter is your worst nightmare. The more bad pitches you swing at, the more bad pitches you put in play, and the more pitchers can avoid the zone without walking you. Chases sap power and OBP at once, in other words. Taking strike three right down the middle is very bad too, of course, but if you trade one called strike three for four tough takes (or whatever ratio), you’re coming out way ahead. If taking the occasional easy pitch allows you to take many more tough pitches, the trade-off is acceptable.

Taking a called strike three isn’t hurting these guys as much as you’d think. Pivetta and company excel in two-strike counts, and overall, our group of 10 hitters does too. Sure, Oneil Cruz has been downright atrocious in two-strike counts, but even taking his woes into account, these hitters combine for above-average production with two strikes, meatball punchouts and all:

Think of it this way: Ohtani has seen 141 middle-middle pitches in two-strike counts. Sure, he’s taken 19 strikeouts. He’s also socked 11 homers, two doubles, and four triples on those pitches. Those middle-middle strikeouts aren’t hurting him that much; his results on contact are so dang good that his overall production on two-strike meatballs is high even as he gives up a few freebies. Meanwhile, he’s seen 378 pitches outside the zone with two strikes, and he’s swung at 133 of them. He’d love to cut down on those swings. He sees more bad pitches than good ones and performs well on the good ones even as he takes a few for strikeouts. Why would he change this equilibrium, exactly?

That’s the delight of this counterintuitive finding. Power hitters can afford to be patient, even in two-strike counts, because they’re capable of producing runs with a single swing of the bat; convert 10 meatballs into one homer, and life is good even if one of them turns into a strikeout. Pitchers, meanwhile, don’t exert a ton of control over how far the ball is going to go; the best thing they can do is get a strike, whether called or swinging.

Now, would the approach of our most-meatball-punchoutable hitters work for everyone? Definitely not. Take that approach when you can’t punish pitchers for their in-zone insolence, and you’re just costing yourself strikeouts for no gain. Fail to lay off pitches in the dirt anyway, and you’re not getting anything for your patience; might as well hack away at the easy ones if you’re going to hack away at the hard ones.

There’s a selection effect here, of course – hitters who take a ton of called strikeouts and also don’t hit for power generally don’t stick in the major leagues. You have to bat a lot to lead the league in called strikeouts down the middle, and the worse you are, the less likely you are to bat a lot. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this potential shortcoming of the study.

Even taking that into account, though, this weird dichotomy between the Pivettas and Ohtanis of the world helps explain why strikeouts have continued to climb throughout baseball’s history. For pitchers, a relative lack of control over contact quality encourages strikeout-seeking behavior. For hitters, strikeouts are a reasonable sacrifice in pursuit of damage. Some of the best hitters in baseball strike out a lot because they’re trying to sock homers. As long as batters keep hitting for enough power to offset the strikeouts, they’re going to stick to what they’re doing. Thus, we get the current state of the world, where meatball punchouts are an indication of good pitching – and of good hitting.