MLB SWING AND MISS LEADERS FULL

If you’re looking for one number to hang on a pitch, it might be up to your preference between whiff percentage and swinging strike rate. This is a one-man argument for keeping both stats around. And his ball rate has remained mostly unchanged for his career. But while batters usually swing at sliders close to 50% of the time, they swung at Sale’s slider only 36% of the time last year (40% career according to BrooksBaseball). Once batters swing at his pitch, it’s plus-plus, elite, as good as it looks when you’re watching it live.

Where Zimmermann and Cain might only be one-year blips, Sale’s been showing this effect his whole career. Maybe the league is adjusting to him a bit.ģ7.9% whiffs/swing, 17th of 59. Unlike Cain’s change-up, however, the ball percentage on his curve only differed by a couple percentage points over his career number. Like with Cain’s change-up, though, this effect goes away if you zoom out and look at his whole career. The result is a swinging strike rate that’s right about where curves sit (11% is average), but he got there in strange fashion.

MLB SWING AND MISS LEADERS FULL

Zimmermann gets about seven percent more whiffs than your average curveball once he gets batters to swing, but batters only swung 28% of the time at the pitch last year, a full 10% worse than league average. Perhaps the big bend at the top is easy to spot, and the pitch goes for balls more than most other pitches, but either way it’s a pitch batters love to take. The curveball is an interesting pitch because it gets offered at less than any other pitch in baseball. These starters threw the pitch in question regularly last season, and got whiffs once the batter swung, but didn’t get batters to swing as often as other pitchers. Then I looked for those that were ranked highly in whiffs per swing but poorly by swinging strike rate. In order to find these pitchers, I set high benchmarks for the use of each pitch and then ranked the qualifying starters by whiffs per swing and swinging strike rate respectively. Let’s first have some fun and look at the outliers who are good at one of the interwoven skills and not at the other. And so it’s not surprising that we have two different metrics for that moment - whiffs per swing (whiff% in some places) and whiffs per pitch or swinging strike rate (swsTR% here). These are, in effect, two different skills, even if the best pitchers are awesome at both. In order to get a swinging strike, you need to get the batter to swing and you need to get them to miss. It’s a simple thing to say, but there’s an important interplay between the swing and the miss when it comes to pitching.

Mlb swing and miss leaders