The Weird Thing About Hitting Yordano Ventura

Some months ago, we moved our internal communications platform from Yammer to Slack. That part shouldn’t interest you, but I just had to explain where this screenshot of a direct message came from:

August is a good guy. So who am I to deny his request?

I remember I first started thinking about the relationship between velocity and batted-ball angle during Michael Pineda’s rookie season. I was probably trying to explain a low home-run rate or something, and that’s when it came to me — Pineda threw hard, and because of his size, it looked like he threw even harder. Wouldn’t it make sense that hard throwers would be more difficult to pull? And it tends to be those pulled fly balls that do the most damage. As a pitcher, you want air balls going the other way. They frequently suck.

When I thought about this stuff back then, it was mostly theoretical. Didn’t have many numbers. We’ve come a long way. There is a relationship between angle and velocity. It’s not perfect, but it’s real, with the pattern you’d expect.

Below, a plot, of pull rate and average fastball velocity for pitchers who have thrown at least 200 innings over the past three calendar years.

It’s like you’d expect. It’s not dramatic, but, the harder a guy throws, the more infrequently he’s pulled. Some of this, presumably, is just having less time to react to the pitched baseballs. Faster velocity means a hitter has less time to get his bat to the zone. And some of this, presumably, is due to an altered approach. Against faster pitchers, hitters are more likely to cut down on their swings, to “take what they’re given.” You know those two-strike approaches people are always talking about? Sometimes hitters take two-strike approaches in any-strike counts against flamethrowers. Thing about velocity is you know which guys have it.

Let’s now go back to the point August raised. We’ve demonstrated an inverse relationship between average fastball velocity and pull rate. Yordano Ventura, as you know, is a freak. He’s a starting pitcher capable of throwing a ball a hundred miles per hour. This year, among qualified starters, Ventura has thrown the fastest average fastball, and that’s not an unexpected place for him to be. He also still ranks with baseball’s second-highest pull rate, between Jered Weaver and Jeremy Guthrie. To make matters less encouraging still, Ventura owns baseball’s lowest rate of softly-hit batted balls. Next-lowest is Colby Lewis, and he’s separated by a couple percentage points.

This is the strange thing. Based on how we’d think about velocity, you’d expect hitters against Ventura to go the other way, and maybe make weaker contact. It hasn’t been so. It especially hasn’t been so in 2015, but for the record, refer back to that plot above, covering three years. The green point second from the right is Ventura, and you can see that it’s well above the best-fit line. It’s counter-intuitive.

We’ve got information going back to 2002. That is, velocity information, and some batted-ball information. Let’s pretend the season were to end today. In that case, there would be 240 pitcher-seasons with at least 50 innings and an average fastball of at least 95. Out of that group, this year’s Ventura would have the highest pull rate. Higher than the average by about 14 percentage points.

Now, you know not all batted balls are the same. Not even all pulled batted balls. More often than not, you want pulled grounders. It’s the air balls that get you in trouble. Let’s isolate those, using Baseball Savant. For these purposes we’ll just split the field in half, such that a batted ball is either pulled or it isn’t. Against righties, Ventura has allowed an above-average rate of pulled air balls. Against lefties, he’s allowed an above-average rate of pulled air balls. Overall, his pulled-air-ball rate ranks fifth-highest out of 137. So this isn’t just about grounders. Batters have turned Ventura’s pitches around.

And they’ve done damage! Lefties in particular. When batters have pulled the ball against Ventura, they’ve slugged .573. When they haven’t pulled the ball (but did still hit the ball), they’ve slugged .354. Home runs tend to get pulled. Doubles and triples tend to get pulled. Pulled balls are hit harder. You understand how this works.

What we have: Ventura has been pulled unusually often. He’s allowed solid contact unusually often. What that means is that hitters have been taking unusually comfortable swings. Ventura’s rates are worse than they were a year ago, in this regard. Is there an explanation for this?

The one you always have to keep in mind is randomness. To some extent, random baseball is influencing our observations. When you see a stat, you want to think of it as representing true talent, but it’s really true talent + randomness (basically). Going beyond that, it’s worth pointing out that Ventura’s lost some heat. Oh, his other pitches are more or less the same, but his fastball is down a little more than a tick. He’s also thrown fewer four-seamers and more sinkers, meaning he’s been down in the zone more, and perhaps that’s another contributor.

There are other potential factors that, for the moment, are difficult to test. Ventura might fall into predictable sequences. He’s pitched behind more often than a year ago, so maybe hitters are hunting a little more. Command could obviously be one thing — Ventura has grooved a higher rate of pitches than ever. And then there’s perceived velocity. One day, Statcast might help us with this. For now, we’re just guessing, but Ventura is relatively small, so maybe he doesn’t get average extension toward the plate at release. That would make his fastball look slower, which might be a partial explanation. Not that you could ever work any mathematics such that his perceived velocity matched Weaver’s.

We’ve all been able to easily recognize that Ventura is impressive. Physically speaking, he’s blessed, and the stuff that he throws gives him an extraordinary ceiling. I think we’ve also seen that Ventura isn’t close to his ceiling quite yet. He doesn’t miss bats like you’d think, and he doesn’t control contact like you’d think. For two months, hitters have been surprisingly comfortable against Yordano Ventura. Even when he’s, you know, been mad at them. You can never predict when it’s going to click, but at least we know it hasn’t clicked yet.