It’s OK — you can throw a high fastball
By Cary Osborne
After seeing Kenta Maeda pitch a little this spring, I’ve noticed his fearlessness in throwing a fastball up in the strike zone.
But after hearing countless commentators and broadcasters say through the years after a home run, “He got it up in the zone,” I’ve long had the impression that a pitcher is tempting fate by climbing the ladder with his fastball.
Maybe that’s not so true, as there are big league pitchers who can go to that quadrant and succeed, including some Dodgers.
But we’re going to start with an Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher to create some comparative analysis. According to Baseball Savant, Arizona’s Shelby Miller used the upper quadrant (numbers 1, 2, 3, 11 and 12 in the chart) with his fastball more than any starting pitcher in 2015 at 38.8 percent of the time.
The following pie chart shows the results for Miller when attacking a hitter “up in the zone.” We’re going to call hits and balls negative results and all other pieces of the pie positive results, even though “In Play” could also mean an error was made.
Miller got a negative result 42.8 percent of the time and gave up a hit just 3.3 percent of the time. You can understand why he threw 1,260 fastballs in that quadrant.
Now lets bring the pitchers with the best fastball in the game into this thought and use them as a comparison. According to Fangraphs, the three starters with the best fastball in 2015 — according to the stat wFB (Weighted Fastball Runs) — were Clayton Kershaw, Gerrit Cole and Jake Arrieta. The three relievers were Hunter Strickland, Will Harris and Wade Davis.
Here’s Kershaw’s chart:
Kershaw had even fewer negative results than Miller at 37.1 percent (though a higher percentage of hits).
The Dodger ace threw the high fastball nearly 25 percent of the time (845 pitches total). Two of those hits were home runs, meaning an opposing batter hit that ball out of the yard just 0.2 percent of the time.
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Here’s how often the four other pitchers with the top fastballs in 2015 experienced negative effects with the high fastball in the zone:
- Hunter Strickland: 37.1 percent
- Wade Davis: 42.0 percent
- Will Harris: 44.1 percent
- Gerrit Cole: 46.2 percent
- Jake Arrieta: 52.1 percent (He threw a fastball in that quadrant just 7.097 percent of the time)
Here’s a look at some current Dodgers and how often they saw negative results when attacking the upper third with a fastball, which could give you an indication of how confident they are pitching to that area:
- Kenley Jansen: 30.7 percent
- Yimi Garcia: 34.8 percent
- Chris Hatcher: 37.9 percent
- Adam Liberatore: 39.1 percent
- Pedro Baez: 39.2 percent
- Scott Kazmir: 41.6 percent
- Carlos Frias: 46.3 percent
- Luis Avilan: 46.4 percent
- Alex Wood: 47.4 percent
- Mike Bolsinger: 53.1 percent
Clearly, mixing pitches and movement impacts these numbers. But pitching up with a fastball isn’t taboo if you’ve got the command and stuff. Kershaw, Jansen, Garcia, Hatcher, Liberatore and Baez showed they had it last year. Maybe we’ll add Maeda to the mix after this season.
