Are Pitchers Searching Hitters’ Weaknesses, or Avoiding Their Strengths?

One benefit of residing in an age the place the wealth of human data is at one’s fingertips is that no curiosity want go unhappy. I used to be simply sitting round questioning idly in regards to the relationship between how hitters get pitched and the way nicely they do towards sure varieties of pitches. So I ran a few Baseball Savant searches and performed round in Excel over lunch and ended up with one thing that might absolutely have made Henry Chadwick soil his trousers.

Which in all probability overstates the impression of those findings, akin to they’re. One in all my main takeaways is that Aaron Judge is a preposterously good hitter, which I really feel like all of us knew getting into. Nonetheless, it’s a enjoyable journey to go on, so let’s take it collectively.

Heading into Thursday’s video games, 281 totally different batters had seen 500 or extra pitches this season. I separated these pitches into three totally different classes: fastballs, off-speed, and breaking balls, and took every hitter’s wOBA towards every of these pitch sorts.

Now, if I have been working in a entrance workplace attempting to get an edge on an opponent, I’d get extra granular, as a result of pitch classification is a type of issues that doesn’t all the time lend itself to neat categorization. Not solely are sliders totally different from curveballs, however not all sliders are alike. And a few sliders, the truth is, are extra like cutters, which aren’t breaking balls in any respect. Then there’s sequencing, and most essential of all, location. (Pitching is like the true property market in two respects: First, location is of paramount significance. Second, cranky previous folks refuse to know how various things are actually than they have been within the Eighties.)

Anyway, we’re not overlaying any of that immediately. That is as high-level a survey as you would ask for: How does every hitter fare towards every class of pitch, and is the proportion of pitches he sees commensurate with these outcomes?

For every pitch group, I in contrast every hitter’s wOBA towards that group, in addition to the proportion of whole pitches seen from that group, towards league common. Hitters within the high left quadrant hit fastballs very nicely however don’t see a variety of them; hitters within the backside proper see numerous fastballs however don’t hit them very nicely:

And whereas this chart seems to be pretty random — fastballs are a basic pitch; you’re by no means going to keep away from throwing them utterly — you possibly can see a transparent slope on the match line. I highlighted 5 outliers in numerous colours for example among the outliers:

You possibly can see the entire gamut right here. Schuemann can’t hit the fastball, so he sees a ton of them, whereas Larnach kills fastballs and sees fewer of them than every other hitter within the league. Then there are Trout, Soto, and Kwan, who reside at various stops on the “Jeez, I suppose we’ve received to throw them one thing” railway.

And there are totally different approaches to totally different hitters. Soto has the most effective fastball wOBA within the league, so pitchers will attempt their luck with the rest. Within the decade-long seek for holes in his swing — a search as arduous and dear as an expedition to search out the Northwest Passage — elevated fastballs have been the closest anybody ever received to a constant weak spot. So Trout, regardless of being an above-average hitter towards fastballs, and faring higher towards them than he has towards off-speed stuff this 12 months, remains to be seeing one of many highest fastball charges within the league.

Which brings up one other enjoyable artifact of this search: The fellows who simply hit all the things. Out of 281 hitters within the pattern, solely six have a top-50 wOBA towards all three pitch teams:

That’s 4 of the consensus finest hitters in baseball, plus two of the most important first-half surprises this 12 months. Good for Fry and Profar.

Let’s see how our fastball outliers received pitched by way of off-speed stuff:

When you’re having a tough time seeing Trout and Kwan’s dots on this graph, I don’t blame you. Each hitters drifted again towards common right here, and are seeing an acceptable proportion of off-speed pitches:

However now it needs to be even clearer why Schuemann sees so many fastballs and Larnach sees so few. Larnach is likely one of the 25 finest fastball hitters within the league and one of many 15 worst off-speed hitters, so he sees actually the bottom proportion of fastballs and actually the very best proportion of off-speed stuff. Schuemann is the reverse.

Of the highest 10 hitters in off-speed OPS, six — Rob Refsnyder, Travis d’Arnaud, Rafael Devers, Brenton Doyle, Ezequiel Tovar, and Willy Adames — are 2 hundredth or decrease in off-speed pitch proportion. As soon as pitchers determine the place you’re robust, they’ll attempt to take that energy away. What about breaking balls?

Lastly, a pitch group the place Soto is merely above-average:

And eventually, our reply to the query of why Kwan and Trout preserve seeing so many fastballs: As a result of they’re simply pretty much as good towards breaking pitches as they’re towards warmth.

Schuemann and Larnach are two of 12 hitters within the league who’ve wOBAs within the high 75 in two pitch teams however are backside 75 within the third. Of these 12 hitters, solely Pete Alonso (who has a wOBA of .214 on breaking balls, 241st out of the 281 hitters within the pattern) is seeing a below-average serving of his weakest pitch.

So are pitchers typically attacking hitters the place they’re weakest? Probably not:

The highest right-hand nook of this graph is fairly closely populated as a result of a variety of hitters stink at hitting two totally different teams of pitches. Javier Báez, as an example, is 276th in wOBA on fastballs, 233rd on off-speed pitches, and 273rd on breaking pitches. So whereas he’s technically backside 10 within the league in seeing his weakest pitch group (comparatively to the league), pitchers can principally throw him something they need. He’s like the alternative of Choose.

Let’s flip that desk on its head, although. What number of hitters are getting an abnormally small serving to of their strongest pitch group?

The highest-left nook of this graph (excessive wOBA, low Pitch%) is rather more closely populated, even with the caveat that there are some guys, like Choose, whose strengths are so huge they’re unimaginable to pitch round. This season, 24 totally different hitters are within the high 10 in wOBA for not less than one pitch group; 16 of these hitters are 2 hundredth or decrease in Pitch% for that group. One other six are a hundredth or decrease.

The one two exceptions are Brent Rooker (seventh in wOBA, twenty eighth in Pitch% on breaking balls) and Kyle Tucker (tenth in wOBA on fastballs, sixtieth in Pitch%). And Tucker is not any decrease than forty first in wOBA on any of the three pitch sorts — he’s nearly within the Choose Zone. Rooker, not less than, is 202nd within the league in wOBA on off-speed pitches.

Throw Brent Rooker extra change-ups and splitters, I suppose, is the ethical of this story.