Stealing strikes — the Giants Way?

Published by on August 18, 2012 | 3 Responses

Earlier today, ESPN turned over the keys to the SweetSpot blog to me. My topic: Giants starters seem to throw a lot of nonfastballs to start hitters off. In short: I found that, after running some numbers, three of the top 10 starting pitchers in baseball that start batters off with nonfastballs were Giants starters — Cain, Vogelsong, and Bumgarner to be more specific.

A quote and the link below:

I have to admit that I love this table because I think it shows exactly why Cain is such a tough guy to face. If you sit on Cain’s fastball, there’s a good chance he’s going throw something else. Cain shows a preference to the curveball (20.3%) in 0-0 counts, but the changeup (17.2%) and the slider (12.7%) are not far behind. For years, Cain has been defying the standard batting average on balls in play (BABIP) mindset and one has to wonder if his ability to throw multiple pitches in the early stages of at-bats has had an effect on his low BABIPs year after year.

You can read the rest of the post on the SweetSpot blog, here.

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RogerM
RogerM

Vogelsong's inclusion is especially surprising because he throws such a high percentage of fastballs the rest of the time.  I would think (though I haven't bothered to look it up) that he's pretty high on the list of highest percentage of fastballs thrown.

guest
guest

Now all we need to do, is to have Bam Bam convince his batters not to swing at the first ball pitched, which results in a quick out, roughly 74% of the time it's put into play!

blanktx
blanktx

This is fascinating Chris! The next obvious step is to see whether the top 10 list of strike thieves have generally beat their BABIP values.  If so, this could lead to a new models like xFIP/SIERRA that include strike stealing. Very interesting.