One of the great virtues of baseball is its abundance of individual, miniature virtues, which are appreciated to varying extents by some, and perhaps go unnoticed by others. Maybe one of the small things you enjoy looking for is what a player does with his batting gloves upon reaching first base. Is he a back-pocket kinda guy? Give them to the first base coach? Hold ’em in one hand while he runs the bases? Keep them on the entire time? Or how about a pitcher’s tendencies between pitches? When does he go to the rosin bag, and how often? Does he walk around the mound, or kick dirt? Take off the hat, run the fingers through the hair? Lick the hand? You could just be enthralled by a very particular type of pitch — say, a backdoor two-seam fastball, or a splitter in the dirt. Maybe you’re captivated by the different ways in which players react when they feel slighted by questionable calls.
We enjoy baseball, in a larger sense, because of the competition, and the displays of human achievement. The storylines, and the lessons to be learned. Our childhood, and a sense of both geographical and familial pride. On a more primitive level, we probably just find pleasure in watching dingers and heaters. But it’s the little intricacies that we only notice after countless hours playing and watching the sport that we adopt as our own and grow attached to that give us a deeper appreciation for the game that we love.
One of my favorite small pleasures in baseball is a well-executed check swing. Baseball is such a reactionary game, where the margins are in the milliseconds, and the check swing is a beautiful tug of war between a human’s physical reactionary ability and cognitive reactionary ability. The moment a pitcher releases that breaking ball destined for the dirt, the hitter’s first reaction is to hunt, and his limbs are set in motion. Yet, instantaneously, like an evolving caveman playing with fire, the brain kicks in and says “Nuh uh uh, remember what happened last time?” and sends that signal to the limbs to stop what they’re doing just in time to lay off the pitch that would’ve been strike three, had the brain waited a split-second longer to intervene.
But the brain doesn’t always get that signal out in time. Whether by fault of the batter or by virtue of the pitcher, you as a batter are sometimes halfway through your swing when you have the dreadful realization that, “Crap, I shouldn’t be swinging right now.” Some batters have a greater ability to halt their ill-advised swings than others, and on the other hand, some pitchers have a greater ability to prevent check swings. Some pitchers can throw junk ball after junk ball that hitters just can’t lay off. Using BaseballSavant’s PITCHf/x search, I was able to identify these pitches, those which batters had the hardest time laying off last year. Let’s dive in.
Read the rest of this entry »
