With data continuing to flood into the game of baseball and the swing-plane revolution rolling on, hitters are constantly evolving year after year, and in recent seasons, it’s been all about elevating the ball.
Fly-ball rates are sky-high and home run rates are even higher, and as Red Sox Vice President of Pitching Development Brian Bannister told Rob Bradford on the latest episode of the Bradfo Sho, the mass adjustment can be explained through analogies.
"It's definitely way more of a three true outcomes game at the moment, and it's been progressing that way for many years,” Bannister said. “From a hitter's perspective — I always do analogies. In my role, I find analogies are way easier than talking about the actual subject matter. Right now, if you're a hitter, it's like being on the freeway, and there's a traffic jam ahead of you. And then all of a sudden, to the left you see this carpool lane with nobody in it, and it's just like, oh, I'll just take the carpool lane with no cars in it. Because they look out, they know people upstairs are shifting on them, they know all their data, they know where they hit the ball, it's just so much more of a hassle as a hitter to try and deal with that, and it's just, oh, I'll just take the carpool lane and hit it over the fence. And because it's working, they've just gone that route. And that's kind of where I feel like the game's at right now.”
The struggle for pitching gurus like Bannister is trying to combat the adjustments hitters are making, from analytics-driven adjustments to brand new pitches.
“As coaches, we have to evolve, leveraging the data telling us 'this is what is working,' and then figuring out ways to teach it,” he said. “There are pitches that we've stumbled upon that I didn't even know existed a couple years ago, biomechanically how to teach it, what grip it takes, and which guys are candidates to throw that pitch.
“Like, I'll say it in a general way: usually when a guy throws a pitch, and nobody knows whether to call it a curveball or a slider or a cutter, and there's all these weird in-between pitches, they're like these things that have evolved out of the analytics. They work, but nobody would've taught them 10 years ago because we didn't know they were going to work, and we didn't know that they would be effective. So it's this whole subgenre where they're really analytics-based pitches and they don't have common terms, but we teach them anyways because when you look at the wOBA (weighted on-base average) against them, for example, they don't get hit hard, or they generate a lot of swings-and-misses. It's just, as a coach, how you have to keep evolving.”
Bannister said “there’s no such thing as just a ‘slider’ anymore,” because pitch breaks and arm actions vary so much from pitcher to pitcher, with biomechanics and spin rates creating all sorts of those “in-between” pitches that isn’t quite a curveball and isn’t quite a slider, and might not be one of the named intermediaries like slurves or sweeping curves.
Those new pitches have been part of fighting the battle, trying to win that cat-and-mouse game with the hitting side. Bannister, an avid golf fan, is just looking for some balance.
“I take everything from golf. In my coaching, everything is a golf analogy,” Bannister said. “I feel like the game, now that we have the data and analytics, we almost need to compete against ourselves, in a way, to keep the game in balance, the same way they do in the US Open. I love how they go, we want the winner to be the one guy who's under par, and everybody else got annihilated by the course. I actually like that, it makes for a very tense, very dramatic tournament. There's all these accuracy/command qualities to golf, and it's fun because it's all the best players in the world against the course. I feel like in baseball, we don't quite have that balance of risk-reward. Right now it's just flat-out, pure athleticism, it's just how hard can we throw, how nasty can we make breaking balls, how fast can we swing, how far can we launch a baseball.
“What's fun to me is if there's almost that US Open-like quality to it all, where if you made the strike zone maybe a little more horizontal, where it matches the shape of the bat, if the ball, the COR (coefficient of restitution), how far it flies, was a little less, all of a sudden you bring this risk-reward profile, where trying to hit a home run almost becomes the same as trying to go for the green in two on a par five in golf. There's a lake in front of the green, and if you go for it, you better do it. Same thing, if you're going to try and hit a homerun, except for the biggest, strongest guys in the league, you're going to have to try to swing a little bit harder, which opens you up for more swing-and-miss.”