Thought this was interesting:
Sarris: Does command age better than stuff?
By Eno Sarris 5h ago 11
A strike is a strike, no matter how you get it. That sounds like a truism you could hear from any grizzled baseball veteran. But the beauty — and struggle — of baseball is that are very few subjects that are black and white. The further you dig into something you believe to be true, the more you tend to find nuance.
It is true that, in terms of predicting a pitcher’s strikeout rate, called and swinging strikes are about equal. Which is to say, if you’re projecting a pitcher’s strikeout rate, adding called and swinging strike rates doesn’t make your projections any better.
That’s what Matt Swartz found in 2010, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Swinging strikes are slightly more sticky year to year, but if neither really makes our projections more effective, why should we differentiate much between the two?
I’ve preferred swinging strikes to called strikes for two reasons. For one, getting a swinging strike seems like a two-person interaction: You don’t need the umpire to call the pitch a strike in order to get the strike. It’s just such an iconic moment that really seems to define what we call “stuff” — you got the batter to try, and to fail.
The other reason had to do with measurement. We didn’t really have great measurements for command, and so I became a command agnostic. As a result, while trying to better define what characteristics made a pitch nastier, and how pitchers could get swinging strikes, I ignored the command and called strike side of the ledger.
Recently, though, advancements in command, such as Command+ from STATS and CMD from Baseball Prospectus, have brought me back to the other side. The later-career success of Bartolo Colon, and his level of excellence as judged by those stats, made me wonder if stuff was inherently young and command was the key to aging well.
So I asked Jeff Zimmerman to create two aging curves for me. One for called strikes and one for swinging strikes.
Put more colloquially, this means that pitchers retain their ability to get called strikes later into their career than swinging strikes. I showed this to one major league pitcher and his response was brief:
“That’s the most obvious thing ever.”
He might be right, but I see an interactivity between swinging and called strikes that makes this fascinating to me. Like, for example, the aspects of a pitch that elicit swings also affect how likely you are to get a called strike. If that seems confusing, stick with me.
The harder you throw, the more you elicit swings.
“With a 97 mph fastball, you have to get going earlier and you have to decide earlier whether to swing or not,” agreed Oakland All-Star Jed Lowrie.
Velocity Band Four-Seam Swing%
97+ 52.3%
94-97 48.9%
91-94 45.7%
91- 42.1%
Right away, you can see that you kind of have to get more called strikes as you age. Because velocity only goes down, you’ll get fewer swings, and you’ll have to adapt to that change. Cubs starter Jon Lester recently told me about the struggle to adapt to this fact as he’s aged.
“I don’t have 95 anymore. You have to swing more on higher velocity, because you have to get going earlier,” the lefty said before the All-Star break. “That’s where, two years ago, my curveball played more because I was sitting 93-95, and I pitch in a lot, so guys were already getting going earlier on pitches inside, and then that curveball didn’t get there and they swing over the top.”
The umpire is a part of this trend, too. You get more called strikes as you age because you throw slower — and high-velocity pitches are tougher for the umpire to see. Travis Sawchick recently picked up this thread from Jeff Sullivan over at FanGraphs. He studied the borderline parts of the strike zone and found a large velocity effect:
Fastballs 92 mph or less: 2,805 called strikes, 2,602 balls (51.8% called strikes)
Fastballs between 93-96 mph: 2,474 called strikes, 2,627 balls (48.5% called strikes)
Fastballs 97 mph or greater: 251 called strikes, 363 balls (40.8% called strikes)
So there are fewer called strikes with top end velocity because the batter swings more often and because the umpire calls those pitches strikes less often.
The last complication comes from the actual process of getting a called strike. Imagine a pitcher known for getting called strikes. He’s got to be around the zone a lot. Which means that hitters would know he’s around the zone a lot, and will be swinging. If they’re swinging, it means fewer called strikes (and if the ball is in the zone, likely some decent outcomes for the hitters).
So how do you get a called strike in that situation? I turned to the starter who’s currently the best at getting called strikes — Kyle Hendricks — and it turns out that weak contact might actually be the way to more called strikes.
“They might see that I’m around the zone a lot generally, but they also have to take what they see that day,” pointed out Hendricks about the role of the scouting report and how often batters swing at his pitches. “When they’re not swinging, it’s usually because I’m falling behind early, ball one, ball two. I want them to swing early because I want soft contact.”
This was something Lester echoed.
“I can throw this pitch in this area and I can get a foul ball, and that’s a strike,” he said of the battle for strike two if the batters aren’t swinging. “And now I’m on strike two. I’ve put them on the defense. We talk about that a lot, where can I go to get a foul ball.”
Once Hendricks gets some soft contact, the game really begins.
“When they’re aggressive, you start expanding the zone,” Hendricks said. “You have to see if they’re really offering at certain pitches or if it’s more of an auto take. If they’re just giving up on everything, you know you haven’t established anything they have to respect. They’re just waiting you out until they see something middle-of-the-zone and you have to come to them. If you’re noticing they’re jumpy, that’s usually when you’re hitting spots and addressing them in the zone, and when they’re jumpy you have expand off of it.”
Only then can Hendricks focus on called strikes, especially late in the count.
“I’ll notice guys taking my changeups if I’m only throwing them down, so I’ll pick my spots and then throw a first-pitch strike,” the righty said. “Then it’s in their mind that you’ll do that, and you can expand off of it.”
Here’s the king of called strikes, telling us that the order of business is something like strike one => weak contact in the zone => aggressive hitters => swings and misses outside the zone => takes on certain pitch types outside the zone => using those pitch types inside the zone for called strikes.
That’s not at all simple.
“How often do you realize it before they realize it,” is how Hendricks put it. “It’s the cat and mouse game.”
Still, even if Hendricks feels that he hasn’t had his glove-side command all year — something we noticed a while back — he’s number two on the Command+ leaderboard right now, and number one in called strikes. These things seem related.
The whole cat and mouse game that Hendricks described, even if it includes elements of weak contact and swinging strikes, and is perhaps augmented by his low fastball velocity, works because of his command. Maybe we’ll find later that, once we have a good sample of our new command stats, that they age better than the various stuff metrics we’ve been been developing, and then this aging curve will seem prescient.
And maybe it does make intuitive sense that a skill based on placing the ball would age better than a skill that relies more on velocity. That doesn’t mean we can say any of this with a ton of certainty, or separate stuff from command all that easily, though. Everything is intertwined.
"I've suffered a great many tragedies in my life....most of them never happened". Mark Twain
