Less Fastballs, Texas
As David just announced, he’s unveiled some new team pages with all kinds of fantastic data. It’s just a treasure trove of sortable data, leading to the following kinds of revelations – the Texas Rangers, as a pitching staff, threw fastballs 68.9% of the time. This is, by far, the most in the league – the next highest rate is the Mets at 65.8%. The average ML team threw fastballs 60.6% of the time, so the Rangers were just over two standard deviations from the mean.
Can someone in Texas teach these guys to throw a breaking ball or a change-up once in a while? I understand that pitching coaches like to establish the fastball, but at some point, you might want to look around, say “hey, this isn’t working” and try to get them to throw something soft once in a while.
This is essentially basic game theory – it doesn’t matter how good you think your pitching staff’s fastballs are, because if the other team knows that they’re going to see a steady diet of hard stuff, they’re going to just wait for it and swing from the heels when they read fastball coming out of the pitcher’s hand. Even if you throw 95, an expected fastball is going to get turned around a lot more often than not.
Keeping hitters off balance is a huge part of pitching. The Rangers were the most predictable team in baseball in terms of pitch selection, and while it’s not fair to claim that it was the main reason why they gave up more runs than anyone else in baseball, it almost certainly didn’t help.
Note to Jon Daniels – how about finding a pitching coach who believes in balls that bend?
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Not only did they throw an exorbitant amount of fastballs but they also coupled that with throwing a middling amount of change ups, at a 8.2 % rate. I’m not a pitching coach or anything but that seems like a very bad way of using your pitching staff. If you are going to rely so heavily on fastballs it would seem logical to teach your pitchers to use some change ups.
It should be “Fewer Fastballs, Texas”.
I have no doubt the Ryan Express will really help with the diversification away from speed….
Since TX had innumerable injuries, rookies forced to stand in, and changed pitching and bullpen coaches I’m not sure you can draw any systemic conclusions here.
No, the article should really be titled, “Tinier Totals of Turbo Tosses, Texas”
How does philosophy of yours compare to Ubaldo Jimenez in Colorado? You have him throwing 70% fastballs. Yet he allowed a .348 SLG(with only 11 homers) in 200 IP. Coors is a notorious hitters park(just like Texas). So what is your explanation for Ubaldo’s success with literally the sme strategy that you are critisizing the Texas staff for? Perhaps its not the pitch selection in Texas. Its just shitty pitchers in general getting rocked.
Also interesting is that the Blue Jays staff had the lowest percent of fastballs thrown but had the highest average velocity on the fastball.