Interpretations welcome
This morning I was chewing on a question about how other teams are approaching games with the Mariners, researching on Fangraphs and I found this:
The M’s see almost as many fastballs as any team (they’re 6th, at 62.7%, the Cubs the low at 56.5%). And they see fewer changeups than any other team (their 7.6% is last… the Braves are first at 12%). Now, is that because teams think they’re so weak hitting (generally) that you just want to pound the strike zone and let them make outs?
And does this in part help explain some of Branyan’s success? So far this season, if you fed the team a diet of fastballs, only Branyan and Ichiro! wouldn’t starve for hits. I didn’t think it was likely, but when you look at what hitters have been seeing it’s hard to make sense of it. Of the regulars, here’s the fastball order, and what they do with it
Griffey, 71%, bad
Ichiro, 66%, good
Branyan, 64%, crazy good
Chavez, 63%, really bad
Gutierrez, 62%, bad
Lopez, 60%, horrible
Beltre, 59%, bad
Betancourt, 58%, bad
Johjima, 58%, bad
Balentien 55%, really bad
The minimalist pitching plan for the M’s would be “fastballs to everyone except Branyan, Ichiro” and you’d do pretty well with that right now. And I know that Ichiro and Branyan are going to see at least 55% fastballs. I don’t get it.
The only explanation I’ve come up with is that teams are regularly pursuing poor options to get those two out because they’re buying into commentator-reality where a man on means you have to throw fastballs continuously. Gutierrez at the bottom’s meant Ichiro hitting with a runner on reasonably often, and Branyan gets Ichiro. Still, this requires teams to actively decide that they’re going to pick a strategy with less likelihood of success for no good reason, and I can’t bring myself around to lean on that.
So I welcome thoughts.
The Mariners are like the girls in my co-ed softball game last night…just throw it over the plate and see if they can hit it…we got our asses handed to us last night…it’s been working for the Mariners lately too…
Ichiro might get more fastballs in his first at-bat because pitchers want to establish it early in the game.
It looks like the data is a tad noisy. The unidentified pitches range from 4 to 7 percent by team.
Also, could the effect be the oter way around? Maybe we have played teams and pitchers that prefer to throw fastballs. With the unbalanced schedule, that can’t be discounted. If we played against Felix, our FB% would be way up there. In fact, the M’s lead all of baseball in FB% thrown.
I’m just throwing this out there, the hitters that get the higher % of fastballs seem to be the ones that have the highest P/PA. It might be that the pitchers are throwing more first pitch fastballs to the high P/PA players, sans Ichiro, thinking that they won’t swing at the first pitch. Also, these hitters are more likely to get to the 2-2 count and see more fastballs.
Then again, it could be the handedness, LHB might see more fastballs from RHP.
I don’t know how many pitchers walk out there with a Moyer-esque game plan of what pitch they want to throw to every individual batter in every situation.
Could it just be as simple as bako suggests–the strategy is ‘throw them fastballs, they can’t hit ’em’?
Neither Beltre nor Griffey is replacement level with fastballs so far. And if that fault applies to the middle of the order, maybe opponents expand it to the team in general. And why not? It seems to be working.
What jumps out is the increase in fastballs Griffey is seeing, even over recent years. Since he’s such an ‘all about the team’ leader, wouldn’t he be just as happy sticking around as a third base coach? Fans could still see him on the field…but one of the half dozen better options in Tacoma could be up here with an actual chance of making contact with a fastball.
Well, you have to consider what other options you’ve got facing those guys.
Looking at the data, Branyan crushes fastballs and sliders (+2.91 and +1.82 runs above average per 100 respectively), and also hits curves well (+1.01). Cutters and changeups are the only things he struggles with (and the changeups number probably comes from facing lots of RH pitchers, wish they broke out the pitch type values by splits…).
If you look at Ichiro!, he absolutely mashes (well, Ichiro!’s version of mashing anyway) curveballs, and hits changeups well. Sliders are his bane.
So, if you’re a Fastball/Slider/Curveball guy facing Branyan, you’re doomed. You’ve got nothing to throw him that he isn’t crushing this year. If you do have a changeup, well, he’s a reasonably patient hitter (Yuni/Beltre/Lopez, are you taking notes?) and will let it go by if he can.
And unless you have a good slider, Ichiro! is going to be a tough out, but then that’s nothing new.
With Yuni/Beltre/Lopez, maybe the pitchers just throw fastballs out of the strikezone and let them swing at it. No need to get too tricky against them.
Might be interesting if we could look at the percent of the pitches that were in the strikezone by type of pitch and batter.
Digging through a little deeper, it looks like Fastball + Slider accounts for 70-75% of the pitches thrown in a typical game. They’re the two most common pitch types, and (reason suggests) the ones pitchers are able to most reliably throw.
In years past, Branyan struggled badly with sliders, while this year he is hitting them quite well. Perhaps that’s the key to his offensive explosion?
Purely speculatively, maybe Branyan sees more fastballs because his patience (especially relative to the rest of the team) means he sees more pitches in “fastball counts”. i.e. He’s more likely to be ahead in the count.
I thought I’d just look for something to back that up and found for all players with 50+ AB:
Name FB% FStr% OSwg%
Cedeno 75% 57.5% 29.9%
Griffey 71% 46.6% 19.2%
Ichiro 66% 46.4% 32.4%
Branyan 64% 56.1% 27.0%
Chavez 63% 62.4% 26.5%
Johnson 63% 58.7% 27.6%
Gutierrez 62% 61.5% 22.1%
Lopez 60% 61.8% 33.7%
Sweeney 59% 52.6% 29.5%
Beltre 59% 57.5% 38.4%
Betancourt 58% 59.0% 37.2%
Johjima 58% 56.5% 27.3%
Balentien 55% 61.3% 27.0%
ÏFB%,FStr is -0.44 (-0.73 limited to the ten players you listed) and ÏFB%,O-Swg% is -0.32 (-0.50)
So, taking ball 1 is a big factor in getting more fastballs and not swinging outside the zone is significant in getting more as well.
No big surprise really.
(apologies for the formatting :/)
Yeah, with hacktastic batters there’s no reason to get too clever — fastballs out of the zone work fine. How does the swing% on fangraphs show the M’s to compare to other teams? Perhaps there’s a correlation between teams that don’t swing out of the zone and teams that see fewer fastballs?
And the change-up is often the out-pitch against opposite-handed pitchers. With a RH-heavy lineup, the M’s will be seeing fewer changeups than teams with a more balanced attack.
Yeah, that’s the other factor that jumped out at me. You really have to do a With You and Without You comparison, looking at what each pitchers threw to all other teams he’s faced vs what he threw against the M’s.
I looked at this and swinging outside of the zone seems a fairly small correlant but Swing% and Z-Swing% somewhat larger.
Contact, especially outside the zone seems to be the strongest indicator on the team stats, surprisingly.
This is all fine, but none of it addresses the basic question. Let’s say Ichiro/Branyan are essentially unpitchable for purposes of this. I still don’t understand why the M’s who cannot hit fastballs aren’t getting more of them than those two, and particularly why the guys who toooottally suck against them see so few.
The fastball’s generally a pitcher’s bread and butter, the easiest to throw for strikes consistently and mechanically pretty easy on the arm (especially compared to, say, a curve). If you’re facing a Mariner hitter who can’t do anything with them, why wouldn’t you throw a way higher proportion to those guys?
Maybe they hope Branyan will swing and miss, he’s been doing it a fair amount, but he’s usually squared up on some pitches and hit the hell out ’em. The post on here a few days said he has nowhere to go but down, and I’d think that’d mean more strikeouts. Remember before we were all (really) high on Branyan, multiple sources told (warned) us that he’d strike out a TON. So far he’s been pretty lucky. I know my logic is a little bit flawed, because guys like Russ feed on fastballs, but maybe teams are trying to get him into a mindset where he expects a fastball so they can catch him off balance. If that’s the case, it’s obviously not working… yet.
Please:
1. Go to the front page
2. Read Dave’s post on Branyan
3. Repeat step 2 until you understad it.
Thanks.
If you look at just simply BA, everyone from Beltre on down (I use this as the benchmark for extremely unacceptable ’09 BA), I’d say the way those guys are hitting indicates they way they’ve been pitched is working. WIth the exception of Wlad and Rob Johnson (pathetic considering his career avg. is .198) they’re all hitting below their career averages.
Yeah, that does make sense. One thing that the raw pitch % don’t tell us is how many of those FBs are in the zone vs O-Zone. Maybe Lopez has such a lousy wFB/C because the first couple of pitches are curbeballs for strikes followed by O-Zone FBs for him to chase until he strikes out, pops up, or rolls over to the SS.
On the other hand, look at Beltre. He’s never gotten very many FBs. He’s averaged 58.2% FBs for his career (this year he’s at 59.0%). He probably has a rep as a fastball hitter (in his monster 04 season he had a +2.89 wFB/C*). And prior to this year (-0.68 wFB/C) he’s generally deserved it.
Or Betancourt. Last year he was -5.63 wCB/C, and surpirse, this year he’s seeing more curveballs.
One final thought – fastballs are the pitch a pitcher is least likely to make a mistake with. Opposing pitchers might look at Branyan standing up there and think “a mistake will go 480 feet, better try to paint with a fastball”. Same guy looks at Rob Johnson thinking “mistake scmistake, hang a curveball and he’ll pop it up”.
* for those who haven’t gone an looked at the fangraphs data, wFB/C is runs above average per 100 FBs.
If M’s hitters really don’t care to walk much, throw breaking balls out of the strike zone. It is possible that the Beltres, Lopezes, etc. would lay off fastballs out of the zone, but everyone knows that they constantly chase sliders down and away. Get ahead in the count with breaking balls and then use a fastball up and in. That’s one possibility for why the bad fastball hitters see fewer fastballs.
I haven’t looked at the math here, but I have to imagine there’s a threshold at which frequency of fastballs becomes time-able to the point that there’s no benefit continuing to throw it as even guys who do poorly with the fastballs they receive are able to sit dead red. These are major league players, their whole lives they’ve faced fastball pitchers, the quality and variety of offspeed stuff they see in the bigs is orders of magnitude better than what they faced coming up through high school, college, the minors, etc.
In short, a fastball doesn’t really become a fastball unless it’s contrasted by another pitch, and in, say, a six pitch at bat, even throwing one off-speed pitch would still account for 17% of pitches thrown. Make it two and you’re at 33% off-speed, 66% fastballs, which.
Whilst the point is not unreasonable, it doesn’t reflect Derek’s question.
All the players range from 55% to 75% fastballs seen, but unless I’m misundertanding, Derek’s asking why would you see players being pitched more carefully (less fastballs) than Ichiro/Branyan within that range
i.e. Guys who can’t hit should just be seeing a steady stream of fastballs (say, up to that 75% mark) since that will tend to give the opposing pitcher the best chance.
But isn’t the conventional wisdom that everybody can hit fastballs? In that case, people might think a FB is the only thing Betancourt could hit, so dont’ throw him one.
Of course the stats say otherwise, but it wouldn’t be the first time conventioal wisdom did not square with measured results.
I’ve been doing more digging. The left-handed batters and swith-hitters on the Angels, Rangers, and Athletics generally have a greater percentage of fastballs.
There are too many variables to draw a singular conclusion.
*which, is barely more than they’re seeing now.
(Man, that’s embarrassing to come back after the weekend and see I hit “submit” too soon).
In this case I would argue that it has less to do with a player’s ability to hit a fastball, and more to do with his ability to hit a fastball mixed in with other pitches.
Griffey, for example, has slowed down, so if you keep pumping him fastballs he’s going to have a harder time catching up to it than, say, Betancourt. Similarly, I have no doubt that Wlad can hit a fastball, but his poorness with them might not manifest unless he’s seeing off-speed stuff. That was my original point.