Hitters That Aren't Missing Their Pitches

Jon Anderson evaluates hitters who are making quality contact on their favorite pitches that could be fantasy baseball sleepers.

One thing that the analytical world of fantasy baseball doesn't talk much about is the quality of pitches seen by hitters. We have numbers to quantify almost everything in the game, but when we are viewing those numbers we somewhat assume that hitters have all seen the same set of pitches. Everybody knows this isn't actually the case, of course, but it's not an easy thing to quantify, and after the sample size gets large enough the quality of pitches seen will more or less even out for all hitters. However, just seven weeks into the season, there very well could be large disparities between individual hitters in terms of how hittable the pitches they've faced his year have been.

I wanted to go ahead and take a crack at this challenge. My goal was to find which pitches are the easiest to barrel up, and then see how often the league's hitters have seen these pitches and how they've done against them.

I'm focused only on barrels in this example. 85% or so of the league's home runs come from batted balls that are classified as barrels, and a large portion of the extra-base hits come from barrels as well. So I went ahead and broke down the league's barrels into three categories.

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1. Pitch Location

I took all of the league's 2,841 barrels and then broke them down by zone location - accounting for hitter-handedness. Here it is:

My takeaway from this was basically that barrels come from everywhere in the strikezone except the corners. This isn't an exact correct interpretation, but it's a good start for our purposes. So for my final subset of data to study, I'm using only pitches that end up in zones 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 (when numbering them from top left to bottom right one row at a time).

2. Pitch Type

Here is the barrel breakdown by pitch type.

So you see that 43.4% of the league's barrels have come on the four-seam fastball. The main reason for this is that the four-seamer is the most commonly thrown pitch. Here's the distribution of these pitches this year:

So if we're taking the barrel distribution in proportion to how often each pitch is thrown, the pitches that are most conducive to the barrel would end up being the four-seamer, the changeup, the cutter, and the curveball. The slider turns out to be the toughest pitch to barrel up since it makes up 39% of the league's pitches but only 16% of the league's barrels. Therefore, I'm using these pitches to study: four-seam fastball, sinker, changeup, cutter, curveball.

3. Count

Here's how barrels have broken down by what the count was when they were hit.

This also would need more context, because obviously there are way more pitches thrown in an 0-0 count than any other count, so it makes all the sense in the world that the 0-0 count would have the highest percentage of the league's barrels.

I don't want to restrict this too much, because it seems like barrels can be had in any count besides 3-0 when hitters typically do not swing. I decided to just leave off 3-0 and 0-2 from our final data set because of the radical change in approach hitters make in those counts.

Analysis

So now what I have done is ignored all of the pitches that do not fit the above criteria, and looped through every hitter to see how they've performed when they see the most vulnerable pitches.

It turns out that about 24% of the league's pitches fit into the bucket of "vulnerable pitches" that I have created. Therefore, if you have seen a significantly lower share of your pitches being "vulnerable", you've had some tough luck, and vice versa. I found the percent of total pitches that were labeled by me as "vulnerable" for each hitter and compared that count with their total pitch count. Here's an interactive leaderboard that you can parse through (it is sortable & searchable, but best viewed on PC):

You can see that the hitters that are seeing the highest shares of these vulnerable pitchers are pretty light-hitting names. This suggests that opposing pitcher approach factors in heavily. It makes sense that pitchers wouldn't try to pick the corners and throw a bunch of junk to guys like Kevin Plawecki and Eric Sogard.

On the flip side, you see some really talented hitters like Kris Bryant, Nick Castellanos, Salvador Perez, and Aaron Judge. So we should not expect these vulnerable pitch rates to normalize out like you might expect other statistics too. But it's useful to see which hitters have had the most and least pitches to hit.

Here's your top 5o in barrel rate on vulnerable pitches, restricted to hitters that have seen at least 50 pitches that I've deemed as vulnerable.

Austin Hays is your winner here as he's barreled the ball on 15.8% of his 76 swings at these pitches. You have the usual suspects in Byron Buxton, Giancarlo Stanton, Rafael Devers, Shohei Ohtani, Kris Bryant, Fernando Tatis Jr., and J.T. Realmuto all in the top 15. You also have some much more interesting names in Taylor Ward, David Bote, Seth Brown, and Adolis Garcia. Those guys have not been missing the pitches they've been given to hit, and they are widely available in fantasy. I would be giving those names a hard look if you're in need of some more pop.

Here are your top 50 in slugging percentage against vulnerable pitches.

One good way to approach this analysis would be to keep an eye on these above leaderboards for low pitch counts. This will show you guys that have been very successful when given pitches to hit but haven't gotten too many of those opportunities. Those chances will continue to come in the future, and these hitters have shown early on this year that they are capable of doing damage when given the chance.

Full Data

I'm going to drop the full data extract on you here, there are 354 players here, so the best way to view this is to use the search functionality. Enjoy!

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