The Mets, Fastballs, and Pitching to a Scouting Report

The narrative, coming into the World Series, was impossible to ignore. Boiled down to its most simple form, it went like this: the Mets are here, playing in the World Series, because they throw really good fastballs. The Royals are here, playing in the World Series, because they’re really good at hitting fastballs. There’s much more to it than that, of course, but that was the most talked-about story, the Mets’ fastballs vs. the Royals’ ability to hit them, and so something had to give. The Mets would either overpower the Royals like few other teams have been able to, or the Royals would become the first team to strike back against New York’s heat.

With the Royals now leading the series 2-0, you can guess what happened. You’d guess the latter, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong — you don’t outscore your opponent 12-5 and take a 2-0 lead in the World Series without hitting some heaters — but the correct answer might actually be “neither.”

Allow me to explain. The Mets, see, haven’t exactly thrown their fastball. In Game One, Matt Harvey threw a career-low rate of heaters to the Royals, throwing just 30 fastballs while going to his breaking and offspeed stuff 50 times. Granted, he also may have had his career-worst stuff, and the couple ticks he’d suddenly lost in velocity are a reasonable explanation for why he’d be more reliant on his non-fastball offerings.

Then also, there’s this:

Terry Collins said Matt Harvey throwing career-low fastball % was partly respect for Royals fastball hitting, partly lack of pitch sharpness

— Adam Rubin (@AdamRubinESPN) October 28, 2015

A line of thinking exists that if you change what it is that’s made you successful in light of your opponent’s strengths, then you’ve already lost. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with the “playing not to lose, rather than playing to win” mantra. As a Mets fan, it’s probably not the thing you want to hear. On the surface, it makes it seem like the Mets had decided beforehand that their strength wasn’t as strong as the Royals strength, and so they changed courses before they had a chance to find out. Of course, there’s some give-and-take here, and it would have been silly for Harvey to not have considered a potential Plan B if he didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate. He didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate, and so he opted for Plan B. And in the end, he really didn’t pitch that poorly.

Yesterday, John Harper published an an article in the New York Daily News featuring some opinions from former Mets pitcher Bob Ojeda. Ojeda pitched for the champion Mets in the 1986 World Series. Ojeda does not like the way the Mets are pitching in the 2015 World Series.

From Harper’s piece:

His complaint is that he believes Harvey and deGrom allowed the Royals’ reputation as excellent fastball hitters to dictate the way they’ve pitched, trying to trick them with their offspeed stuff rather than dominate them with their best pitch, the fastball.

“I’m watching two outstanding Mets pitchers pitch to a scouting report rather than be who they are,” Ojeda said by phone on Thursday. “It’s been pretty frustrating to watch.

“I love scouting reports but I am not going to go away from who I am because of them. Especially those guys, with the fastballs they have, they should make the Royals prove they can hit it before they go to Plan B.

In the case of Jacob deGrom, it doesn’t appear, on the surface, that he actually pitched the Royals much differently than usual. For the season, deGrom threw fastballs at a rate of 61%. Against the Royals in Game Two, deGrom threw fastballs at a rate of 56%. A little lower, but that’s the sort of change you’d expect to see against an elite hitting team. Except, Ojeda brings up an interesting point worth exploring.

Again, from Harper’s article:

“Instead they’re starting out with Plan B, showing them everything they’ve got the first time around the lineup. And they get to the second and third time around the lineup and the K.C. hitters have seen everything. I think it’s a bad plan.”

Ojeda submits that, even though deGrom’s overall usage didn’t much change, it was the distribution of his pitch mix that put him at a disadvantage in the later innings. This is a common line of thinking. You often hear about the importance of a pitcher “establishing his fastball early,” and there are plenty of examples of pitchers who don’t break out their curveball, for example, until the fourth or fifth inning. Think of it almost as a third-time-through-the-order-penalty insurance. The more times a hitter faces a pitcher in a game, the more the advantage leans towards the hitter, but a pitcher can leverage against that in the later at-bats by throwing him pitches he hasn’t yet seen.

deGrom, for the season, has done this:

It’s a fairly typical line of a pitcher looking to establish the fastball early. About two-thirds fastballs the first time through the order, mixing in more and more offspeed stuff as the game gets deeper. In Game Two, though Ojeda may have a point. In Game Two, deGrom threw just 56% fastballs the first time through the order, relying far more heavily on his breaking pitches (32%) than usual. The thinking, then, is that deGrom had shown the Royals his breaking stuff more, early, than he’s used to. Going off that, the thinking is that the Royals would then be better equipped to hit deGrom’s breaking stuff later in the game, having timed it up early.

The fifth inning was the big inning in Game Two. The Royals put up a four-spot and broke the game open, ending deGrom’s night. In that inning, six Royals batter reached base safely. What follows are the pitches that ended each of those successful at-bats:

• Slider
• Fastball
• Slider
• Slider
• Changeup
• Curveball

deGrom got his three outs that inning on a two-seam fastball, a four-seam fastball and a four-seam fastball.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and there’s no saying, definitively, that anything different would’ve happened had deGrom not strayed from course and shown the Royals so much of his breaking stuff early in the game. It’s entirely possible that deGrom’s game plan was a sound one, trying to catch the Royals cheating on fastballs in the early innings, and it just didn’t work out.

But the story, coming into the World Series, was the battle between fastball-pitching strength and fastball-hitting strength. Certainly, the story now is that the Royals’ fastball-hitting ways have proved superior. Perhaps the bigger story, though, is that the Royals’ fastball-hitting strength has manifested itself in a different way. An unexpected way. Maybe it’s not so much that the Royals’ strength has overpowered the Mets’ strength. Maybe it’s that the Royals’ strength has caused the Mets to play without their strength at all.