Take John Smoltz Seriously, Not Literally

In the top of the fourth inning of Saturday’s Braves-Cardinals tilt, Atlanta struck for four runs, breaking a scoreless tie and setting the team up in an enviable position. Leading off the bottom of the inning, St. Louis’ Tyler O’Neill walked on four straight pitches against Charlie Morton. That walk cost the Braves; two batters later, Andrew Knizner popped a two-run homer that brought the Cardinals within two runs.

On the broadcast, John Smoltz was livid even before the home run. “The last thing you want to do is walk the leadoff hitter after the team gave you four runs…. You don’t care if he hits a 3–1 pitch for a homer. Just don’t walk him.” He said that even before O’Neill walked, and emphasized the point throughout the inning.

Aaron Goldsmith, handling play-by-play, asked Smoltz to elaborate. “You’re not being facetious, you actually mean that? You’d rather have a run on the board than a runner at first base?” Smoltz stuck to his guns, said he preferred the homer to the walk, and that was that.

Here’s a bit of an upset: I understood what Smoltz was talking about. In fact, I think that if you give him a little leeway, he might have a point. Sure, it’s fun to point at a statement like that and laugh. It’s absurd on its face. The worst-case outcome of a walk is a run scoring. The only outcome of a solo home run is a run scoring. There’s just no way a rational observer could come to any other conclusion.

That said: I don’t think that’s what Smoltz meant. Consider this: no major league pitcher has ever thrown a pitch that they knew with certainty would turn into a home run when it left their hand. That’s just not how baseball works. Position players lob plenty of objectively terrible pitchers that don’t leave the yard every time they handle mop-up duty. The meatiest meatball Morton could throw is far from a certain home run. If we think a little more about process, and a little less about outcomes, this silly debate takes on new light.

Think of this statement: “The last thing you want to do is take an approach that makes it likely you’ll walk the leadoff hitter after the team gave you four runs. You don’t care if your strike-throwing approach makes him more likely to hit a homer. Just don’t pitch in a way that makes it likely you’ll walk him.”

That’s pretty close to what Smoltz said, at least if you adjust for the fact that human beings are awful at discussing probabilistic outcomes. Pitchers don’t have exclusive control over whether the batter at the plate hits a home run. They don’t have exclusive control over whether the batter walks, either.

If we think about what a pitcher controls in a given plate appearance rather than the eventual result of that appearance, we can give Smoltz’s statement the earnest scrutiny it deserves, because what a Hall of Fame pitcher thinks about the proper way to attack an opposing team is worth evaluating. I’m going to evaluate the win expectancy of pitching to contact as compared to pitching “regularly” to lead off an inning, and we’ll see whether the concept — if not the literal words — makes sense.

What does pitching to avoid a walk mean? I’ve looked into the math of 3–0 counts before, and I can tell you that pitchers throw the ball in the strike zone roughly 61% of the time in them. I can also tell you that when pitchers still batted, they saw strikes on 68% of 3–0 pitches. That appears to be the high end of pitchers’ ability to throw strikes, but let’s go even farther and call it 75%. After all, if you reach 3–0 with a pitcher in the batter’s box, you might not be at your strike-throwing best at the moment.

Okay, so there’s your walk-avoiding strategy: jam the strike zone full of pitches like your opponent isn’t even standing there. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Smoltz was advocating for switching to that mode the second Morton got behind in the count 1–0. If Morton got ahead in the count, sure, fine, go for a strikeout. But behind in the count? All fastballs, all pipe shots, all the time; you could theoretically still walk somebody pitching this way, but it would be phenomenally unlikely.

If you don’t feel like reading the nitty gritty of the math, don’t worry: while it’s worth showing, it’s not of outsize importance in this case. If you’d like to skip it, you can just search this article for the word “rigamarole” and avoid it all entirely. That said, you could always stick around for it if you’d like, because I sure enjoyed figuring it out.

In fact, we can do the math on this fairly easily. Assuming independent and identically distributed pitches, the odds of missing the zone (a 25% shot) three times in a row are a piddling 1.5%. That’s not the only way you can walk someone, but it’s one of the most likely ways. Let’s make a few assumptions to handle the other cases.

Given that our strategy is essentially to throw the ball right down the middle, I took the major league average swing rate on pitches over the heart of the plate in each count, as well as the rate at which they turned into balls in play. That looks like so:

I ran through the math, and by my (admittedly rough) numbers, this works out to a 5.5% walk rate after starting behind in the count 1–0. The overall rate across the league is 15.6% after 1–0 counts with the bases empty. In other words, our hypothetical pitcher is following through on Smoltz’s plan, limiting walks above all else.

What does the no-walk plan cost when it comes to hard contact? We can make an approximation there as well. To limit walks, you need to throw the ball right down the middle. Hitters, naturally, do more damage when they connect on meatballs like that, particularly when they’re fastballs. Want the numbers? Batters are hitting .350 with a .622 slugging percentage when they unload on middle-middle fastballs while ahead in the count, which is a close approximation for the situation at hand. They’re hitting homers on 6.3% of their batted balls, as compared to 4.1% of batted balls overall.

Here’s an outcome matrix for the control case in this study. In other words, it’s what the league as a whole does in 1–0 situations with the bases empty in aggregate. One quick note: I’ve folded HBPs into walks to make the line items cleaner:

With that in tow, we can make an easy comparison to the Smoltz plan: forcing the hitter to put the ball in play by throwing fastballs down the middle. That .350 batting average and .622 slugging percentage is impressive, and when you split it out into the individual outcomes, you can see that singles, doubles, and home runs all become more likely when batters are teeing off on pitches to hit:

That 10% strikeout number is approximated from the zone and swing data above, and there’s definitely room for it to be higher or lower. We’re squarely into the realm of theory at this point anyway. But you can plug each of those possible outcomes into our WPA Inquirer, add them up, and get at least a generic result.

The result in question: if Morton had pitched completely normally after reaching a 1–0 count (which he did), the Braves stood to win the game 85.86% of the time. If Morton instead went full meatball, the Braves stood to win the game 85.85% of the time.

That’s such a small difference that I’m comfortable saying it’s immaterial. You could imagine other versions of the “Smoltz plan,” though, that work better. If Morton had switched from a regular approach to only pipe-shot fastballs in a 2–0 count, he might see better results. There, batters walk 28.5% of the time with the bases empty across all situations. By accepting loud contact in exchange for walks, Morton could have slashed that expected walk rate to roughly 18%. The new grid looks like this:

Now, switching to the maximally aggressive strike-throwing option actually improves Atlanta’s odds of winning the game, from 85.3% to 85.4%. Again, that’s close enough that I’d call the two equivalent, particularly given the amount of approximating I’ve done, but you can see where Smoltz was coming from.

After all that rigamarole, the numbers hardly seem to matter. Should you go all out to throw strikes? Should you pitch normally, ignoring the score? Neither affects the outcome of the game overly much. But it’s clear that there are some situations — up a lot of runs, with not many outs left in the game, and in hitters’ counts — where “pitching to contact” makes sense.

In fact, what Smoltz said is just a slightly different packaging of wisdom that I think we’d all agree with. Home runs can happen to any pitcher, with any batter at the plate. Heck, David Fletcher has two of them this year. It’s not hard to imagine there are situations where making a batter more likely to hit a home run — by challenging him, basically — is just the cost of doing business. If you really want to avoid baserunners, sometimes you’re going to give up a few extra homers. It doesn’t mean you want to give up the home runs — rather that the extra outs you’re getting by avoiding walks are worth the cost.

So, should you actually prefer to give up a home run to a walk? I mean, no. Of course you shouldn’t. I guarantee you that if someone went up to Smoltz when he was on the mound and told him that the batter he was facing was going to be awarded either a home run or a walk without Smoltz throwing a single pitch, he’d pick the walk. That’s not rocket science. But he might be more upset with himself after surrendering a walk, because that’s largely in his control, than after giving up a home run that he knew was always a possibility. Changing your pitching style to limit the odds of letting a runner reach base without the chance of making an out, when you’re pitching with a lead? I’m not saying the math supports it, but there’s a discussion to be had there, so long as you take Smoltz seriously rather than literally.