Examining The Most Effective Pitches in Baseball

January 26, 2021

Jon Anderson dives into pitch data to determine which pitch types are most effective against MLB batters. The pitchers who utilize these pitches most could be top draft targets for fantasy baseball in 2021.

There is just nothing better in sports than Baseball Savant. We can derive almost any insight we want from their pitch-by-pitch dataset. One challenge I wanted to take a crack at was to see if I could find which individual pitches in baseball are most effective regardless of who throws it, just looking at pitch type and location. I did a little Python scripting and generated a data set that has information about each pitch type in each possible pitch zone. The zones break down like this (from the catcher's perspective), so a pitch that ends up in zone one will be up and in to right-handed batters.

The data is 313 rows deep as I broke it down by handedness as well. Here is what I found to be a few of the most effective pitches in the game, and then I add on which pitchers throw these pitches most often.

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Low Changeups To Same-Handed Hitters

The pitch class that had the most success in terms of swinging-strike rate (swings and misses divided by total pitches thrown) was the low changeup thrown by pitchers to hitters of the same handedness. Even when contact is made, hitters are rarely able to do damage with it, slugging well below .300 on average. Here are the swinging-strike numbers:

Pitchers that throw this pitch most often:

This goes a long way to explain the success Davies has had recently. He is not an overpowering pitcher and has not generated many strikeouts in his career. However, he has attacked hitters in a really smart way, putting his changeup in the right spots at a very high rate. Everybody knows about how awesome Luis Castillo's changeup is, and a lot of that has to do with how he locates it. He attacks righties with the low changeup a ton and has had a ton of success doing so, and there's no reason to expect anything to change.

If we look at what percentage of every pitcher's changeups end up in these desired zones, here are the leaders:

Low and Away Sliders To Same-Handed Hitter

The low slider that runs away from a hitter is probably the most common putaway pitch in the game, so it is no surprise that these pitches are the highest in whiff rate (swings and misses divided by total swings). Here are the two leading sliders:

Note that zones 13 and 14 are not in the strike zone. Of course, the pitches that lead the way in whiff rate will be pitches that aren't in the strike zone since we are only looking at pitches that generated swings. It's not very prudent to throw this pitch in any count, it is most effective while ahead in the count, specifically in 0-2 or 1-2 counts. That means that you have some work to do to get yourself to the spot where you can utilize this weapon. Here are the leaders:

The leaders are all righties just because lefty vs. lefty doesn't happen nearly as often as righty vs. righty in baseball. If we look at the lefty leaders here:

This brings up a natural disadvantage left-handed pitchers have. They just don't get to face batters of the same handedness nearly as often as righties. Here's a breakdown of the handedness matchups over the last two seasons:

If we look at just the low-and-away sliders that stayed in the strike zone, here are the numbers:

And the leaders:

Low Curveballs

Much like the low changeup, low curveballs are also a very commonly used pitch. Here are the numbers for curveballs in the lower third of the strike zone.

Here are the leaders in this pitch:

If we include zones 13 and 14 in this, the leaderboard looks almost exactly the same with Jorge Lopez entering the picture.

If we look at what percentage of every pitcher's curveballs end up in these desired zones, here are the leaders:

Low Sinkers

The sinker is not a pitch that gets many swings-and-misses. The pitch is mainly used to get ground-balls. Unsurprisingly, of course, the best sinkers at doing this are the ones low in the zone. Here's the rundown:

Here are the pitchers who most frequently locate their sinkers in these zones.

High Four-Seamers

If you look at where four-seam fastballs do the best, the top of the zone really pops off the page. Looking at all possible zones, here are the top five in swinging-strike rate:

The top eleven four-seamers by swinging-strike rate are all in the top third of the zone. Pretty convincing. Here are the pitchers that throw the highest percentage of their four-seamers in these zones:

Takeaways

Pablo Lopez's name appeared a few times here. He was already one of my favorite mid-round starting pitcher picks and I am even more firm in that stance now. Some other names that appeared multiple times would be Jose Berrios, Aaron Nola, Jacob deGrom, Shane Bieber, Zach Davies, Kenta Maeda, Julio Urias, and Carlos Carrasco.

This may not have been the most relevant article for concrete fantasy draft-day advice, but I hope you can take away some information that will be useful. There is a lot more to this story, and if you want to take a look into my data source yourself, you can do that here!

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