When Arrieta and Cole Are Most Predictable

It’s always an oversimplification to reduce a baseball game to the starting pitchers, but reduce we do anyway. In our defense, the starting pitchers are always the most important players in any given individual game, so it’s not like this comes out of nowhere. But you can see this taking place with tonight’s NL wild-card game. It’s a game between two excellent baseball teams, two teams who deserve to play in full playoff series, but to a lot of people, the whole story is Jake Arrieta. To others, it’s both Arrieta and Gerrit Cole. Everyone understands there will also be hitters, but the game might as well be a pitch-off.

Almost literally anything can happen, but my read of the consensus is that the Cubs have the edge and Cole will need to match Arrieta’s zeroes. With that in mind, this seems like a game likely to be decided by a very narrow margin. With that in mind, any sort of advantage could end up being a hugely significant advantage. You know what could constitute an advantage? Knowing what the other guy is going to throw. I can’t speak to every pitch, but both Arrieta and Cole do at least have their tells.

And they’re the same kinds of tells. Pitching, at its core, is about unpredictability, right? Some people would say it’s about messing with the hitters’ timing, but that’s just a different way of saying the same thing. Pitching is about throwing something other than what the hitter expects. A good pitcher tries to avoid any conspicuous patterns, because while not every pattern will get read and exploited, it’s best to avoid the danger in the first place. Pitchers want the next pitch to be a mystery. The less mysterious the next pitch is, the more the hitter might be able to benefit.

For the most part, Arrieta is good about avoiding patterns. He is, after all, one of the best pitchers in baseball, and hitters say it’s difficult to read his pitches out of the hand. He’s got everything going for him. Cole, too, is far from being a predictable pitcher, which is one of the things that allows him to be good. The Cubs and Pirates are very thoughtful about their pitching attacks. If there are glaring issues, they’ll quickly work to resolve them.

Still, there’s at least something, something applying to both tonight’s arms. This was made easily possible by Brooks Baseball, where I seem to find new features every week. What you’re going to see are first-pitch fastball rates, blending lefties and righties. The information is broken down by trips through the batting order. You see rates for the first time through, rates for the second time through, and rates for anything after that.

First-Pitch Fastball Rates, 2015
Split Arrieta Cole
1st time 82% 93%
2nd time 58% 61%
3rd+ time 57% 61%
SOURCE: Brooks Baseball

With both pitchers, you see a high first-pitch fastball rate the first time through, followed by a steep drop-off. We can isolate just the second half, to see if anything’s moved:

First-Pitch Fastball Rates, Second Half
Split Arrieta Cole
1st time 86% 90%
2nd time 66% 60%
3rd+ time 57% 60%
SOURCE: Brooks Baseball

It’s similar. Arrieta’s early rate moves up, and while Cole’s moves down a bit, it remains extremely high. The first time through the order, both Arrieta and Cole start almost everyone off with a heater. Though they both have two different fastballs, for Arrieta it’s mostly sinkers, and for Cole it’s mostly four-seamers. The general line of thinking is familiar to you — it’s evidence of both Arrieta and Cole trying to establish the fastball. That’s not an uncommon thing to hear, but these rates are unusually high.

Baseball Savant doesn’t split information in the same way, but if you try a proxy by looking at first-pitch fastballs in the first three innings, both Arrieta and Cole are near enough to the league leaders. It’s evidence of patterns, patterns that presumably have a purpose, but by this point they’re established and unlikely to change just for tonight. The pitchers will stick with their game plans. The hitters will be the ones reacting, and this could conceivably be one opening.

Here’s where Arrieta threw his early first-pitch fastballs:

arrieta-early-fastballs

It looks like there are maybe a couple hot zones, but if you split by handedness, Arrieta mostly stayed middle-away against righties, and also middle-away against lefties. Meanwhile, here’s where Cole threw his own early first-pitch fastballs:

cole-early-fastballs

Mostly the same half of the plate. With both pitchers, you have a good idea what they’re going to throw early, and you have a good idea of where the pitch is supposed to be located. It’s the smallest little hint, but it’s some sort of opportunity. The game could very well come down to one or two swings, and there’s no reason why those swings couldn’t come in the early going, before the pitchers settle in.

As proof that this can mean only so much, Clayton Kershaw just threw more than 90% first-pitch fastballs his first time through the order. Also, his first time through the order, Kershaw allowed a .450 OPS. Early in games, batters swung at Kershaw’s first pitch more than they did at any other pitcher’s, by a decent margin, and Kershaw just had one of the better seasons in recent history. But at least with Kershaw, you see that inclination for opposing hitters to offer at the first pitch. It’s something they’ve thought through. That inclination hasn’t existed for opponents of Arrieta or Cole. Batters have approached them with more patience, even though, at least early, they’ve come right after the zone.

Some hitters just don’t like to swing early. The first time through the order, the hitters are seeing the pitchers for the first time, and few hitters want to swing at the first pitch they see in a game. If it’s a comfort thing, so be it, but a lack of preparation ought not be any excuse. Odds are, tonight, early in the game, Gerrit Cole and Jake Arrieta are going to be starting hitters off with fastballs in fairly consistent locations. A hitter who’s ready to swing can do so with the knowledge he probably knows what’s coming, and that isn’t an edge that often exists. In a one-game-playoff format, you never know ahead of time which edge will be the critical one.





Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.

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joser
8 years ago

I’m as excited for this pitching match-up as any baseball fan, but knowing how perverse the universe in general (and baseball in particular) tends to be, I more than half expect it to end up something like 8-7 and ultimately decided by the bullpens.

Well-Beered Englishman
8 years ago
Reply to  joser

Having personally attended the (at the time) career-worst starts of King Felix and Justin Verlander, I’m wary of this hype too.