How to Combat Fly Ball Hitters: Part One
You don’t need to throw as hard as Doctor K in order to live at the top of the zone and succeed anymore
The cat and mouse relationship between batters and pitchers is why our game will always be great; baseball is a game of constant adjustments. Nearly forty years after the greatest hitter of all-time began preaching it, it appears hitters have finally begun challenging one-hundred years of hitting philosophy and are angling their swing to put the ball in the air. While young little leaguers are taught to emulate the beautiful swing of Tony Gwynn, players such as J.D. Martinez are realizing that approach is not optimal for every hitter. With a new wealth of power throughout the game, it is time for pitchers to respond to this fly ball revolution and neutralize it.
One of the newest metrics offered to us by Statcast is Average Spin Rate (aSR). An explanation can be found here, and we will be concentrating on what they mean for fastballs. High aSR is a very good thing for a fastball and gives the pitch natural rising action. Due to the nature of its movement, I decided to sample the ten highest aSR fastballs from 2016.
If we are to find a way to combat an uppercut swing designed to create fly balls, the best way to counter is to throw a pitch that is difficult for batters to lift with authority. This would be beneficial to pitchers because it would neutralize this newfound power and generate more infield fly outs, the most effective outs in the game. I believe high-spin fastballs located at the top of the strike zone and beyond are the pitch to counter with.
To prove my theory, I took each pitcher from my sample size and calculated how much they were throwing their fastball at the top of the strike zone. I will use Matt Bush’s visual to exemplify the process:
By adding the percentages in columns two through four, but only from the top two rows (which is a 2x3 area), we will get the overall percentage that Matt Bush threw his fastball in what we deem to be the optimal location.
After getting that percentage, I wanted to compare it to opposing batters’ isolated slugging (ISO) against Matt Bush’s fastballs in that optimal location. Here is a visual for that process:
Using our same area, I divided the total numerator by the total denominator to get the overall ISO. It’s a simple enough process, done over for each of our ten pitchers. To put all of the data in perspective, I included each the fastball percentage for each pitcher (that is, how often they threw their fastball as opposed to any other pitch). I compiled the results in this table:
The results are encouraging. These pitchers have high aSR on their fastballs, and the opposing batters’ ISO on fastballs in our optimal location were well below the league average in 2016. There are some possible hidden gems in here, as Xavier Cedeno is hardly a brand name. Some of these pitchers, like Yu Darvish, seem to buck the trend, but he has the lowest sample size in our table. On the other hand, the poster boy for the theory seems to be the resurgent Justin Verlander. Here’s that fastball in action against noted fly ball advocate Brian Dozier.
Not bad, Verlander. Baseball is a game of adjustments. Luckily for J.D. Martinez, he won’t need to face his teammate Verlander in a game. As for other fly ball advocates going up against other pitchers with high aSR fastballs? They won’t be so lucky as long as those pitchers don’t get too comfortable, like Andrew Bailey did here:
It’s a cat and mouse game to watch in 2017.
