This weekend, Jack Flaherty will face the Astros in place of Kenta Maeda. The Tigers traded away both of their starting pitchers and moved Maeda to face the Marlins in the next series. Nobody cries for the Astros hitters, but this little quirk of the schedule means they’ll have to face a pitcher with much better stuff. No matter how balanced the schedule is now, five-plus rotations and three-game series (plus injury timing!) mean there’s a bit of chaos involved in exactly selecting which pitchers each team is forced to face each other during a given match. season.
The other word for chaos is luck.
We tend to think of luck as a characteristic of the bouncing ball. If the ball had hit that blade of grass or rock at a slightly different angle, or if it had come off the bat a millimeter to the left or right, it would have been a hit. “Nine times out of 10, it’s a hit,” you might say to yourself about a ball crashing straight into a fielder’s glove. But the calendar also offers us the opportunity to see luck from another angle.
These 10 teams faced the pitchers who threw the nastiest pitches in baseball (defined by Tips+):
Obviously, each of these teams didn’t have bad results at the plate early on, but it’s still interesting to see that the four teams that faced the nastiest pitching are all subpar offenses that under -are also performing on their preseason projections. The Phillies and Brewers buck this trend, as do some teams behind them, but then those teams are much closer to average. On the other hand, the Royals saw the third easiest starting pitchers and overperformed their showings at the plate, the surprising A’s saw the fifth lowest Stuff+, and the best offense in baseball, the Dodgers, saw the the fourth simplest calendar judged this way.
There are of course divisive effects here. The Rays, Blue Jays, and Orioles are likely to see the best Stuff+ in baseball (with the Yankees and Red Sox second only to the Rangers), so it’s all part of being in a good division and having to face good pitchers. But the spread going forward is lower than what spread teams have seen so far in this regard. The Rays should see 101.3 Stuff+, and the easiest schedule belongs to the Reds and their 98.6 Stuff+. Things could get even worse for the White Sox, who saw the lightest Stuff+ in baseball at 94.0 and are heading into the 11th-toughest schedule with a 100.2 for the remainder of the season.
If you want to add locations and just ask which teams saw the best pitches, period, not just by Stuff+, the list is largely the same. But the Rockies, Padres and Giants join the top 10 and eliminate top-scoring teams like the Brewers and Yankees, who apparently saw a group of bad pitchers with little command. Use locations And stuff, the Padres and Phillies are the only top 10 offenses to have performed this well despite pitching at top 10 quality:
TEAM | TIPS+ | LOCATION+ | Pitch+ | RACES MARKED BY GAME RANK |
---|---|---|---|---|
104.5 |
101.9 |
102.6 |
20 |
|
103.8 |
99.5 |
101.5 |
17th |
|
104.4 |
101 |
101.4 |
24 |
|
102.1 |
100.4 |
101.3 |
6th |
|
96.6 |
101.6 |
101.3 |
25 |
|
99.5 |
101.4 |
101 |
4th |
|
99.8 |
101.1 |
101 |
23 |
|
106.3 |
99.6 |
100.8 |
19th |
|
98.9 |
100.5 |
100.8 |
21 |
|
100.9 |
99.7 |
100.6 |
13th |
The takeaway is that it’s pretty easy to believe the projections that say there are better days ahead for the offenses in Toronto, San Francisco and Tampa, since they’ve seen throws very good quality so far.
But at the team level, chaos is everywhere, because teams are a collection of players, each with their own ups, downs, and pitchers they face. It is more difficult to diagnose a team-wide illness during an attack than to analyze isolated players.
So, which players faced the nastiest stuff (minimum 400 shots seen)?
Some of the players who are struggling the most despite good (or excellent) track records are on this list. But as a group, they’re about league average, and maybe that’s because some of them have experienced below-average command. It’s also worth pointing out that while Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Aaron Judge have been above average technically with the bats, they haven’t been as good as usual. Let’s set the record straight, then see if we can’t compare the players to their preseason projections.
Player | Launch+ | OPS | Project. OPS | Difference |
---|---|---|---|---|
106.4 |
0.598 |
0.667 |
-0.069 |
|
106.2 |
0.602 |
0.799 |
-0.197 |
|
105.8 |
0.781 |
0.720 |
0.061 |
|
105.4 |
0.582 |
0.748 |
-0.166 |
|
105.3 |
0.519 |
0.775 |
-0.256 |
|
105.1 |
0.529 |
0.743 |
-0.214 |
|
105.0 |
0.699 |
0.710 |
-0.011 |
|
104.9 |
0.759 |
0.697 |
0.062 |
|
104.7 |
0.567 |
0.748 |
-0.181 |
|
104.6 |
0.637 |
0.713 |
-0.076 |
|
104.5 |
0.673 |
0.720 |
-0.047 |
|
104.5 |
0.671 |
0.711 |
-0.040 |
|
104.1 |
0.697 |
0.676 |
0.021 |
|
104.1 |
0.530 |
0.756 |
-0.226 |
|
104.0 |
0.675 |
0.749 |
-0.074 |
Uh, wow. We have 15 hitters here and three of them are doing better than their preseason projections (courtesy The BAT). And some of baseball’s biggest struggling hitters are all gathered here.
We know from research that higher Stuff+ leads to lower batting averages on balls in play and lower strike counts among hitters, and that good pitches lead to more strikeouts and fewer strikeouts. walks. So if you look at these hitters, you’ll see lower hard hit rates and lower barrel rates, as well as poor strikeout and walk rates. But that could be a function of who these hitters saw as pitchers as much as what they do themselves.
There is a fine line between excuses and explanations. The best hitters must perform well against the best pitchers. But seasons tend to even out over time, and these hitters will likely see more average pitching in the future. This should help them bounce back as much as any other adjustment. Just wait for the schedule to stabilize.
(Aaron Judge photo: Vincent Carchietta / USA Today)