Last year before the start of spring training, there was talk that MLB would be cracking down on the use of substances by pitchers to enhance their grip on the baseball and increase the amount of spin on their pitches. This, in turn, is one of the contributors to ever-increasing strikeout numbers in baseball. The topic took a back seat to worries about surviving a baseball season during a pandemic, but it's back now this spring as the country slowly moves towards a post-COVID world.
There was always some understanding among people who closely followed the game that the amount of spin pitchers could put on a baseball was important. It affects the movement of a pitch, whether it's a breaking ball or a fastball. Moreover, high-spin could affect the lateness and sharpness of the break. A pitch with a relatively late, sharp break is more difficult to hit than a pitch with a lot of break that takes place more gradually and predictably.
Sometimes when you read about all of the spin rate emphasis, it sounds like this is something new in baseball. It's not. What's relatively new is the sophisticated equipment available to track the spin pitchers are imparting on the ball. This allows more sophisticated analysis and coaching for pitchers to achieve maximum results. That, of course, is all perfectly legal.
Of course, the knowledge that getting more spin on pitches is important tempts pitchers to use substances to better grip the ball. In Joel Sherman's piece in the New York Post linked above, Sherman notes that MLB plans to use some of the fancy technology to catch pitchers who are artificially increasing their spin rate. The consequences could have a huge impact on modern pitching:
MLB's Statcast system allows the tracking of every pitch — its velocity, spin, and movement. MLB intended to use the data to compare with both career norms and in game to see if, say, a slider suddenly had more revolutions with runners on second and third in the sixth inning than with no one on in the first.
This could have seismic impact. There are those who believe that some organizations have worked to develop substances to help entire staffs improve their stuff and that removal could lead to significant decline in performance.
It's no secret that the use of illegal substances has become pretty widespread in the game of baseball. The current thinking is that most of the pitchers in MLB are using something at least some of the time. No one wants to challenge other team's pitchers because they know that their own are doing some version of the same thing.
Now I don't believe that any MLB crackdown on illegal sticky stuff will lead to a dramatic decrease in strikeouts and more balls in play, but it will probably help. I'm curious, though, how they're planning to do this with Statcast. I don't think it would be wise to penalize a pitcher based just on that data. I would expect that a funky Statcast result would be used as justification to search a pitcher to find if he's using something illegal. I would expect that only if they find something would a pitcher be penalized. This will bear some watching as the regular season begins.
4 comments:
Hefner is still a work in progress, but there are most definitely positive signs. It's interesting that at one end of the spectrum you have a relative journeyman like Jacob Barnes listening to the man and improving his execution, then on the other end you have the guy who was the most dominant reliever in baseball who embraced the 2020 advice he got and turned things around.
Where it's an issue are the folks like Familia who thinks he is better than he is and is not willing to make necessary changes to recover how he used to pitch.
I'm confused. . why do you think Familia pitches any differently than he used to?
His strikeouts are down in a very small sample size this spring, but overall he has been consistently a roughly 1K per inning and primarily a ground ball pitcher. Not much has changed. His walk rate has been around .5 per inning.
This, again.
You don't like Familia, that's fine. But you impugn his character with total bs. He "thinks he is better than he is" and he "is not willing" etc.
You are talking out of your butt and it's borderline disgraceful. Why put out total garbage like this?
You don't know any of that stuff. You don't have a clue. Just because you don't like a player, you don't need to make up garbage about that individual.
There's a tendency in sports to equate "character" with "success." The guy who does well deserves it, works harder, more dedicated, and so on. And the guy who fails is somehow morally inferior. It's lazy and stupid and we see it all the time in sports analysis.
All in all, I keep thinking that this isn't a real good time for sinker ball pitchers. It's never been a great strikeout pitch. It's a pitch that is most effective when it drops out of the zone. And we are seeing far more lowball hitters than ever before. Part of Familia's walk problem has been his inability to finish batters. I don't see any of that as a moral failure. I'm still rooting for him and I think there's a good chance he'll be reasonably okay there for the Mets.
The bullpen will get interesting when Lugo comes back and Vizcaino gets healthy . . . IF EVER.
Jimmy
Jimmy, I saw something where Hefner was getting Familia to throw more high strikes. Gotta keep hitter guessing and changing eye level. Familia walks were the results of guys knowing him and refusing to fish, to a large degree. I think we can see an improved Familia in 2021. His 3.72 in 2020 was, frankly, not bad. Maybe we can get him to the other side of 3.50 this year. That would be huge.
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