This solution to Royals’ pitching woes is ‘against everything you learned growing up’
Over the course of spring training, a new Royals pitching staff is meeting frequently with its throwers, both in individual and team settings. But as pitching coach Brian Sweeney framed it, “if we have a competitive advantage, we want everyone in on it, right?”
And so this spring, before a player had even thrown a bullpen session, Sweeney gathered, well, everyone. The coaching staff had spent considerable time delving into this particular group of pitchers, a process that encapsulated video, data and everything in between. But in this case, one of its first messages was the most simple.
Like, first-time-on-the-mound simple.
Throw the baseball down the middle.
Seriously. Right down Broadway.
“It was definitely a little weird at first because your whole life you’re trying to practice throwing the ball on the edges,” Royals right-hander Jonathan Heasley said. “But after seeing the numbers, it’s not hard to buy into it and trust that process.”
The data was the selling point, and what’s to come in this column offers an example that we should preach more often:
The analytics can be complex in nature. Their purpose, however, is to simplify.
There’s nothing more simple than the theme impressed upon a pitching staff that led the American League in walks last season.
Um, how about throwing more strikes? How about you make it easier on yourself to accomplish throwing strikes and stop picking at the edges?
There are concepts like these, and this one requires a forthcoming explanation and therefore clarification, that we’re going to discover often about the 2023 Royals — in that they might frustrate you as much as they please you. The latter because the Royals are doing it. The former because they’re just now doing it.
A year ago, Royals left-hander Kris Bubic noticed that Tampa Bay, an organization from which the Royals plucked first-year manager Matt Quatraro and bench coach Paul Hoover, had their catchers most frequently set up over the middle of the plate in early counts. To hell with squatting over the corners. Other teams have done it too.
What he didn’t know then that he knows now: The Rays were already implementing this notion. It’s not new. It’s being used elsewhere in the league. And it’s not the world’s worst idea for the Royals to borrow from a team that finished fourth in baseball in earned run average a year ago.
They try to throw it down the middle.
Knowing that it rarely actually lands there.
If it does? So be it. But when major-league pitchers — those more capable than anyone of locating a baseball but also of throwing one with movement — attempt to send a ball down the middle, it usually winds up somewhere else. It’s hard to judge intent, but it’s thought that most pitchers miss their location by an average of at least half a foot, and some estimate that number is actually closer to a foot, combining the horizontal and vertical break.
Which is the point. If you target middle-middle, sure, sometimes you’ll make a direct hit. More often you won’t, and your misses will now be on the edges. You will be missing inside the zone.
When you target the black, contrastively, you had better hit it. Because a miss is either finishing over the middle of the plate, or it’s so far out of the zone that it’s not even a potential chase pitch.
“It seems super counterintuitive to big-league pitching at the highest level, where you have to be so exact with everything,” Bubic said. “These are the best hitters in the world. Usually you feel like you have to be so precise. But just because the catcher is set up middle-middle, pitchers don’t hit their spot perfectly every time. Now you have greater freedom. If you do miss your spot, maybe it’s a call on the edge.”
Walk around the pitching half of the Royals clubhouse, and the responses to the concept are remarkably similar. This is weird, but, man, the data is overwhelming.
It’s why Sweeney makes it a point to package his messages with the stats to back it up. The players have quickly picked up on that about the entire staff — an instruction, and then the reason behind it.
After all, we were here just one year earlier, having this same conversation about the need for the Royals to throw more strikes. Even this year, they’ve developed a catchy slogan — Raid the Zone — that they’ve printed on T-shirts. Scott Barlow wears his often.
But the majority of major-league pitchers have reached a point in which they thrive on numbers. The numbers have long suggested the Royals needed a change. But how? At least at the outset of this spring, they seem bought in that this is the change. The problem and the solution.
Middle-middle. Trust that your stuff — which got you this far — is good enough to get outs. The movement. The deception. No need to be absolutely perfect on the black.
“These guys are good at what they do, especially when they put the ball in the strike zone,” Sweeney said. “So we wanted to encourage that with data, and with a subjective lens too — with our eyes — and use that to reinforce that message.”
The emphasis is aimed toward the early counts — because when you get ahead of hitters, they’re more apt to chase, and then you can afford to miss slightly more. And it’s not for everyone. Some pitchers can effectively nibble. Some, like Zack Greinke, can work their way back into counts.
“Some people have earned the right to use the edge,” Sweeney said. “There’s room to individualize a lot of things.”
But if it is for anyone, man, this team needs it. The Royals threw just 58% first-pitch strikes in 2022, which was not only worst in the majors, it was 1.6% behind the Rockies, who were second-to-last in the category. That’s the same gap between 14th and 29th place in the statistic.
And here’s the data that Sweeney has really hammered. Hitters are considerably worse when they fall behind in the count. Using numbers collected on FanGraphs, MLB hitters batted .216 with a .598 OPS when behind in the count. They hit .251 with an .800 OPS when ahead in the count.
Or just look at the Royals’ own numbers. When they threw a first-pitch ball last year, they allowed a .413 on-base percentage. When they threw a first-pitch strike, that number dipped to .290.
Basically, as Royals pitchers tried to be perfect — backed by a mindset that boiled down to avoiding risk — they were increasing risk all along.
Now? Minimize it.
“We’re placing bets here,” Sweeney said. “You want to put yourself in the best position to succeed. And that first-pitch strike is pretty important.”
So important, in fact, that the Royals have essentially told their pitchers — hey, don’t worry if the hitter does damage on the first pitch. It will happen. Part of it. Heck, it might be most likely to happen on the occasion when you actually hit your spot — when you actually nail middle-middle. So what? Move on. Go there again.
Easier said than done. Especially for a group that has not done it. Or, as Heasley put it, “it’s a little bit against everything you learned as a pitcher growing up.”
And he’s bought in. Bubic too. Daniel Lynch as well. It is just a hurdle that a group of young pitchers have long known, but have yet to implement this simple of a solution.
Even if they’re borrowing it from someone else. This might be a good group to copy. The Dodgers, Rays, Blue Jays, Mets, Giants, Mariners, Guardians and Padres led MLB in first-pitch strikes in 2022.
All eight of those team finished in the top half of the league in ERA. All. Eight.
And seven of the eight — every team on that list but the Giants — were still playing baseball in October. That’s convincing.
No, that’s overwhelming.
“I think it’s pretty clear you have to be OK with just throwing it down the middle every once in a while,” Lynch said. “If you see the stats (when the pitcher is) ahead in the count, the numbers are astronomically high to the good side. The idea itself is simple, but it comes from the data.”
This story was originally published February 24, 2023 at 5:00 AM.