2013’s First Pitches in Review

Some time ago, Brandon McCarthy asked a question about first pitches of seasons. McCarthy is neat and fun and smart and good and he recently dropped a FanGraphs reference in an article, so we pay attention to McCarthy, and to his question we issued a response. McCarthy was asking about offspeed frequency with the first pitch of a season. Turns out offspeed pitches are almost never thrown to begin a year, or at least that’s been the case during the PITCHf/x era. Things might’ve been the opposite before and we’d have no way of knowing because all that information is inaccessible if not unavailable and/or non-existent. It stands to reason that the fastball has always been the popular pick to kick things off.

McCarthy’s question got me interested in McCarthy’s question, but it also got me personally interested in first pitches of seasons in general. What gets thrown, where does it get thrown, and what do hitters do? As of Tuesday, every team in baseball has now played at least one game of the 2013 regular season. So every season is underway, so we can assemble a complete record of 2013’s first pitches. Are you also curious about these things? Are you not at all curious, but can you not pull yourself away from this article? Below, please find a thorough table, followed by more stuff commenting directly or indirectly on the table.

The first pitches of 2013, by team, in the tops and bottoms of first innings:

TEAM	PITCHER	BATTER	PITCH	SPEED	RESULT	INNING
Angels	Weaver	Choo	Fastball	86	Ball	Bottom
Astros	Norris	Kinsler	Fastball	92	Called Strike	Top
Athletics	Anderson	Gutierrez	Fastball	93	Called Strike	Top
Blue Jays	Dickey	Bourn	Knuckleball	75	Ball	Top
Braves	Hudson	Revere	Fastball	91	Ball	Top
Brewers	Gallardo	Fowler	Fastball	89	Ball	Top
Cardinals	Wainwright	Parra	Fastball	93	Ball	Bottom
Cubs	Samardzija	Marte	Fastball	95	Ball	Bottom
Diamondbacks	Kennedy	Jay	Fastball	91	Foul	Top
Dodgers	Kershaw	Pagan	Fastball	93	Called Strike	Top
Giants	Cain	Crawford	Fastball	91	Called Strike	Bottom
Indians	Masterson	Reyes	Fastball	93	Ball	Bottom
Mariners	Hernandez	Crisp	Fastball	91	Ball	Bottom
Marlins	Nolasco	Span	Fastball	89	Called Strike	Bottom
Mets	Niese	Denorfia	Fastball	89	GB 1B	Top
Nationals	Strasburg	Pierre	Fastball	94	Called Strike	Top
Orioles	Hammel	Jennings	Fastball	93	Ball	Bottom
Padres	Volquez	Cowgill	Fastball	93	Ball	Bottom
Phillies	Hamels	Simmons	Fastball	92	Ball	Bottom
Pirates	Burnett	DeJesus	Fastball	93	Ball	Top
Rangers	Harrison	Altuve	Fastball	91	GB 1B	Bottom
Rays	Price	Markakis	Fastball	94	Called Strike	Top
Red Sox	Lester	Gardner	Fastball	91	Ball	Bottom
Reds	Cueto	Trout	Fastball	92	Called Strike	Top
Rockies	Chacin	Aoki	Fastball	90	Ball	Bottom
Royals	Shields	De Aza	Fastball	93	Called Strike	Bottom
Tigers	Verlander	Hicks	Fastball	88	Called Strike	Bottom
Twins	Worley	Jackson	Fastball	88	Called Strike	Top
White Sox	Sale	Gordon	Fastball	94	Ball	Top
Yankees	Sabathia	Ellsbury	Fastball	88	Called Strike	Top

The table is sortable, for your convenience. Our first observation: nearly every single pitcher started off with a fastball, with the lone exception being R.A. Dickey, who almost never throws a fastball. Dickey’s third pitch was a fastball after consecutive knucklers. Our second observation might be, I don’t know, Justin Verlander throwing a fastball at 88 miles per hour. This is what they might call a get-me-over fastball, and Verlander wasn’t his usual self all day, perhaps owing to the cold, or perhaps owing to something else, or perhaps both or neither.

Make some assumptions about the season’s first pitches. You probably imagine a fastball, thrown at less than 100%, taken for a strike over the plate. Indeed, 27 of the 30 first pitches were taken, but a full 15 of them — half of them — were first-pitch balls. So this wasn’t a case of pitchers just grooving one in there, knowing that the batters wouldn’t swing. And of course, three of the batters swung, two of them in the top of the first. Two of them wound up with hits. There were a lot of first-pitch fastballs hanging out around the strike zone’s various edges.

I’m now going to include for you some .gifs of some first pitches of note. These are .gifs, so you’ll want to complain, but they’re also relatively small .gifs, so either don’t complain or don’t complain as much. Off we go, all together.

The 2013 season’s very first pitch

It’s Bud Norris, throwing a first-pitch fastball to Ian Kinsler at which Kinsler never had any idea of swinging. Kinsler was taking the whole way, as most people probably would in his situation. Who wants to make the season’s first out on the season’s first pitch? We’re all naturally risk-averse. Imagine the glory of hitting the season’s first dinger on the season’s first pitch. Anyway, it was actually quite a good pitch — a heater with strong velocity in the low-outer quadrant. Kinsler wasn’t going to do much with that in any case. Norris didn’t groove it in there.

The 2013 season’s most grooved first pitch

In terms of proximity to the center of the strike zone, James Shields threw the most grooved first pitch to Alejandro De Aza. On the other hand, look at the movement on that heater. James Shields is good! Wow!

The 2013 season’s slowest first pitch (non-Dickey department)

Here we have Jered Weaver throwing Shin-Soo Choo a first-pitch ball at 86.0 miles per hour. In the game, Weaver’s velocity was down about two miles per hour from his 2012 full-season averages, and it was down about three miles per hour from his 2012 April averages. Weaver’s made some adjustments to his delivery, but while CC Sabathia has gotten a lot of the attention, Weaver’s another guy who deserves to have his velocities monitored, because he’s critically important to his team and dropping velocity is never a positive indicator. Not for a pitcher’s pitches, anyway.

The swings

Facing Matt Harrison, Jose Altuve singled on the first pitch to the Astros as an American League team. That’s noteworthy, but it also came in the bottom of the first, so it wasn’t truly the first pitch of the year. Chris Denorfia singled against Jon Niese in the top of the first on the first pitch, so that’s a little more extraordinary. Denorfia’s first-pitch single would’ve been taken as a good omen for the Padres, who subsequently lost by nine. Finally, Jon Jay went after a fastball from Ian Kennedy and fouled it off into the seats. It was a very good fastball from Kennedy, located in the low-outer quadrant, and it was a curious pitch for Jay to chase right at the get-go. Jay probably had the idea that he was going to swing at anything that was close, just for effect. I say this as if I know Jon Jay as a person.

The 2013 season’s wildest first pitches

Up top, we see Jason Hammel come close to shaving Desmond Jennings‘ face with a baseball. Hammel didn’t actually come that close to drilling Jennings in the body, given how close some other pitches come, but this fastball was 93 miles per hour, so even kind of close feels really really close if you’re in the batter’s box. As much as people think that pitchers just go out there and groove the first pitches, consider the extra adrenaline when you’re kicking off a season. Pitchers are going to be a little more amped up, which could intuitively lead to greater wildness. If pitchers were that good at throwing strikes when they wanted to we wouldn’t see so many four-pitch walks, or any walks to Brendan Ryan.

Down below, R.A. Dickey misses against Michael Bourn. And J.P. Arencibia misses against R.A. Dickey. It isn’t a very good .gif, given the camerawork, but it was at this point that I figured out MLB.tv has a login limit that kicks you out if you log in too many times in too narrow a window. I was loading up new windows for almost every single first game, and this was the last one I wanted to look at. I couldn’t access the archived footage, so I had to depend on the existence of an official MLB.com first-pitch video highlight. Which, thankfully, there was. Now I don’t know when I’ll be able to log into MLB.tv again, and for all I know this could be a 24-hour or a 48-hour block, but the important thing is this post got finished. And now my next post probably won’t have any .gifs in it. Yay, or, oh no!