I’m crippling badly Joe Sheehan’s newsletter again, but in his latest writing, he points out that things just keep getting better for pitchers. Thanks to technology and study, they discover new throw distances or optimize existing ones while throwing harder and harder. At the same time, they come up with ever more devilish breaking pitches. The new is a Slider that breaks much more horizontally and rotates more like a globe than a sphere. For example, last year, according to BaseballSavant, only 18 sliders with more than 15 inches of horizontal disruption were thrown across the league all season. So far this year, it’s been 35. And the average speed in fastballs has increased yet again.
And MLB decided to punish the hitters.
We know there was a mix of baseball makeup last year. The year started with the deflated football version, which went nowhere, but then, mid-season, they mixed in the livelier one without telling anyone. Hitters already have to deal with every pitcher who goes through a pitch lab to figure out how to add spin and break and discover new ways to fool them. Hitters have none of that.
And now, even as they fix things, they watch the ball die of exhaustion somewhere in the warning lane.
So far this season, if a batter hits at an exit speed over 100 MPH and a starting angle over 15 degrees – about as perfect as you want to hit a ball – they bat 1,797. That sounds like a lot, but not compared to the expected slugging percentage based purely on past seasons using these parameters, which is 2.270. That’s a difference of almost 500 slap points. Based on every ball batted in the Statcast era, all with a different baseball, hitters just can’t keep up with what they did before because something is stopping the ball from flying that far.
As Sheehan points out, on flyballs only, the expected slugging is .969, while the actual slugging is .721. And before anyone yells about how it’s April and how cold it is (never do that to a Chicagoan, WE KNOW), the expected bounce from balls hit at 100 MPH and a launch angle of 15 or higher this past April, was 2,147, lower than it is this season. Except that the actual slugging was pretty much the same at 2.058.
There are things in the works. A pitch clock is believed to be something that slows down and maybe even rotates. But that’s being tested and implemented to reduce playing times, not so much to aid offense, although that would be a happy side effect. Push back the hill appears to have lost steam after Atlantic League players complained of injuries, but it really should never have been introduced in the middle of the season when pitchers would have to adjust their release points on the fly. They would have had to have an entire offseason and spring training to adjust. The sticky attack and perhaps the implementation of Japanese baseball is another, although some would call it the Sticky Crackdown (title of your sextape). was bypassed somewhere last year and pitchers finding a new slider that breaks more than ever portend the same thing.
MLB decided home runs had become too numerous and did not improve the action. But turning well-hit balls into outs isn’t a good answer either.
