First off, not a sports fan, so forgive me if this is terribly ignorant.
In Major League Baseball how well does the pitcher control his pitches? IOW assuming a fresh pitcher, warmed up, best conditions etc. approximately what percentage of strikes and balls called were actually pitched that way? Not including special things like an intentional walk or a pitch-out, how often is a controlled pitch meant to be a ball? Are most (or all) balls merely ‘wide’ strikes that the hitter (correctly) didn’t swing at?
And conversely, how & when does a MLB hitter decide if he’s going to swing or not? Given the speed of MLB pitches is there really enough time to judge anything between the windup and the swing?
I realize lots of other things can/will be on the pitchers & hitters minds (the count, outs, score, inning, runners etc.) but how much of the decision comes down to their individual skills at that moment?
It varies widely. Sometimes wildness, combined with a blazing fastball, can intimidate a hitter.
On a fastball, the batter will have only .10sec or less from the pitcher’s hand to determine speed, pitch and location. The swing must start while the ball is still 15-20 ft. away.
Total transit time is around .4 sec.
Sometimes the best control pitchers will throw more “balls” than you might expect. That’s because they’re aiming at a spot on the edge of the strike zone and a 1 inch error can put the pitch out of the zone while a pitcher with less control will aim at an area so even a 3-4 inch error can still be a strike( or a pitch down the middle that goes over the fence 400 ft away).
An MLB pitcher will throw more strikes than balls, by a fair margin, unless he’s having a very bad day, and some of the balls are deliberately thrown outside of the strike zone. I would guess 75 percent of all pitches are either strikes or balls that were meant to be balls. I’m not sure of the precise number of deliberate balls, but it’s not that high, I’d guess one in fifteen pitches. It would actually go up the better a pitcher is doing.
As to how and when a hitter decides to swing, that’s a complicated thing. MLB hitters must make a lot of decisions prior to the pitch, since they cannot effectively swing at any possible pitch; instead they will, depending on the count, focus on particular pitches in particular locations. On a 2-0 count a hitter may elect to focus solely on hitting a fastball (a typical pitch in that count) in a good location and will not swing at anything unexpected; on a 1-2 count he will by necessity expand the area he is willing to take a cut at. Every situation requires different pre-pitch preparation.
Certainly there is time for SOME judgment between windup and swing or they’d never hit anything.
A lot depends upon the the umpire’s strike zone which changes from umpire to umpire. But a pitcher generally has fairly good control over his pitches, unless throwing a knuckle ball.
Yes, but one question surprisingly missing here is this: How much does the pitcher’s familiarity with an individual batter determine how he pitches to that batter? Or rather, the real question: How much can a pitcher put that familiarity to his advantage? I know this happens to some degree, but I wonder how much difference it really makes? I was a pitcher in Little League, but I couldn’t imagine being able to do that.
I used FanGraphs.com to figure out the proportion of strikes thrown in MLB in 2013. There were 710546 pitches thrown in total. 451512 of them were strikes, or about 63.5%. Some pitchers do better than this, and some do worse. Cliff Lee of the Phillies threw 70.8% strikes last year, while Jeff Locke of the Pirates threw 59.1% strikes (according to teamrankings.com).
I don’t think there are any stats on the number of intentional balls versus accidental balls. There’s usually no way to know the intent of the pitcher, much less record it. There are times when a pitcher deliberately throws a pitch just outside of the strike zone to tempt the batter to swing at a bad pitch. There are also times when a pitcher loses the strike zone, and can’t throw a strike to save his life.
Pitchers today are way better than the ones in the old days. This is why I dont think to highly of Babe Ruth’s records - he never went up against good pitchers and certainly no negro ones.
And in truth, they were actually feeding him easy pitches because the fans wanted to say BR home runs.
What? You couldn’t be more wrong. Ruth himself was a Hall of Fame quality pitcher. There is no way in Hell that opposing pitchers served him up softballs to pad his statistics. If I had the choice between pitching in the major leagues or going back home to work in a coal mine, I’d do my absolute best to strike out Ruth.
Pitchers could easily throw many more strikes than they do, but they would get hit.
The reason there are as many balls as there are is because the pitcher is typically trying to give the hitter the worst pitch possible that is still either a strike or close enough to it to get the hitter to swing.
In Ball Four, Jim Bouton remembers envying pitchers who had “pinpoint control.” Soon into his career, he realized “pinpoint” in pitching was actually within a foot or so.
Like in all sports modern nutrition, training, and development have created far better baseball players in 2014 than there were in 1927. But, but, that being said, of the major American sports baseball is probably “less” impacted by physical improvements than football and basketball. It’s definitely true that modern baseball draws from a huge base of potential players which is going to produce more top-end talent, as of course Babe wasn’t playing against black players or players drawn from Latin America and Japan. At the same time, the majors were only 16 teams in 1927 versus 30 today, so arguably there is some dilution of available talent. The DH rule also dilutes the talent pool a bit as well by creating another roster spot for the AL.
Anyway, I don’t think Ruth would be as good as he was in 1927 in 2014, but based on all we know about him it’s not unreasonable to suspect he’d still be a formidable hitter. There’s been lots of articles written about Ruth’s physical abilities, and he scored very well on tests measuring reaction speed and he had excellent vision and the ability to hit the baseball very far. Vision and reaction speed are something you can’t necessarily teach and that would’ve put Ruth on the path to being good even in 2014. While the ability to hit the baseball far correlates with strength, it’s really more about hitting the ball just right or all the big power hitters would look like powerlifters, and they don’t.
While the 20s were a time of journalistic exaggeration in sports reporting, a baseball forum I used to participate in put out an article once that detailed some of Ruth’s longest “hard confirmed” home runs. These are the ones where old newspaper articles give a decently precise location of where in the ballpark the ball actually landed. It discounted the many articles that just gave vague retellings or randomly called something a “500 foot” home run with no evidence, or the many instances where a ball would hit something and the reporter would state that “it was still rising and would have gone even further had it not hit…” (which actually shows an ignorance of physics.)
Anyway, while I can’t find it on the Internet now, basically Ruth had multiple confirmed 500’ home runs and set legitimate home run distance records in every ballpark he played in, including national league parks which he rarely frequented. By comparison, the last I heard, after they implemented computerized distance tracking of home run balls legitimate 500 foot plus home runs are still quite rare. I think maybe 7-8 were hit in all of the 1990s.
So it’s unlikely that Ruth is a fraud as a big league hitter. He also certainly wasn’t given “gimme” pitches by the opposing teams. He did benefit tremendously from the fact that in his home ballpark he didn’t need to hit the ball very far if he pulled it right (which he had a tendency to do) in order to jack it out of the park.
I do think one major reason that he hit all those tape-measure shots is the heavier bat he used. A heavier bat is more useful if distance is your only consideration (and, like he was, are able to still swing it authoritatively), but since reaction time and bat speed is also important, with today’s faster pitchers and all the trick pitches they throw I don’t think a heavy bat would be a viable weapon anymore.
To a certain extent timelining is a necessary part of analysis, but when doing so don’t just imagine you are plucking the player in question out of his own era and plopping him into a future one with no chance to mature within it and make adjustments. The Babe I am certain would still be a very formidable player, but he wouldn’t stand out from other star players nearly as much.
Right, I agree with that. I was just mostly refuting the idea that Ruth was a fraud whose stats were padded by gimme pitches and who never played against real competition. Ballplayers are better today, just like modern players are better in all sports. But, baseball I’d argue has been the least affected by modern “advances” of the three major American sports just because of the nature of the game. For many ballplayers probably the biggest things for their careers are all the modern sports medicine, in Babe’s day 35 was old and you rarely had good seasons after then. Now a lot more guys are productive up until 40-42. A lot of guys who got lucky and had a bad muscle tear in the 20s would have had their careers ended whereas in the modern era they’d miss the rest of the season and potentially come back good as new next season.
We don’t know much about the average speed of pitchers in the pre-radar days, but I believe that Walter Johnson was once measured using some technology available at the time and it came out to around 92 mph. He was known as the fastest of the fastest by every ball player and everyone who followed or just talked baseball back in that era. A 92 mph fastball would still get you looked at by a scout even today, but no one would be calling you the fastest they’d ever seen.
