Talkin' fastball

Talkin' Devers, Ramos, and the Schmitt

If there’s one thing that’s been frustrating about the Giants this year (last five games aside), it’s been watching them. It’s hard to get more specific, considering everything about the team, but the team has been undeniably bad against fastballs, haven’t they? It seems like every other game, they’ve got the tying run on third and they swing through a four-seamer, or take one down the middle with two strikes and then trudge back to the dugout.

When you see it, it’s flabbergasting. It’s absurd. Why are you taking that fastball? You should be swinging! It’s right there! In the zone! And then, three minutes later: why can’t you hit that fastball? You’re paid to hit fastballs!

The Giants have to be uniquely bad at this, don’t they? There’s no way fans of other teams are a tenth as annoyed at all this as we are, is there? Well, let’s look into it.

No.

The Giants are moderately below average at swinging at fastballs in the zone, and exactly average at swinging through fastballs. League average in the NL is swinging at 65% of four-seamers in the zone, making contact with 86%, and swinging through 8.5% of four-seamers. The Giants are swinging at 64.6% of four-seamers in the zone, making contact with 85.1%, and swinging through 8.5%. If you add in sinkers, those league numbers are 63.1%, 87.9%, and 7.4%; the Giants’ numbers are 62.7%, 87%, and 7.5%. Throw in cutters too, and it’s still the same story (though the Giants actually catch up a little on the in-zone fastballs).

The Giants are, if not exactly league average on fastball swing decisions, barely below. Those bad takes, those bad swings: the whole league is doing the same thing. Hell, the Dodgers swing at fewer fastballs in the zone than the Giants, and swing through more of them. So all that “What are you looking for, moron?” stuff is misguided. They have basically the same process as the rest of the league.

But their results are worse.

The Giants are 23rd in the majors against the four-seam fastball (hereafter called “the fastball” for convenience; sorry to ignore you, sinker and cutter) in terms of per pitch value, meaning that if every team in the league was thrown a fastball, on average only 7 of them would do a worse job with it than the Giants. Why? You might think that they don’t have a ton of power, but their ISO is actually slightly (very slightly) above average. Their walk rate is slightly (very slightly) below average, but not enough to explain the problem. No, the problem is actually One Of Those Things We’re Not Supposed To Care About: batting average.

The Giants are hitting .237 against the fastball, which is 24th in MLB, and they have seen more fastballs than any team in baseball. I would say that presumably these things are related, but the teams that have seen the second- and third-most fastballs, the Brewers and Red Sox, are both excellent at hitting fastballs, so that’s not necessarily a one-to-one correlation. They’re striking out at an average rate against the fastball, as you would expect from the average swing-through numbers, so that’s not why they’re below average.

No, it’s BABIP that’s the problem here. The Giants have a .276 batting average on balls in play against the fastball, which is why their overall batting average is so below average. Why do they have a low BABIP? Because they hit more fly balls against fastballs than any other team, and they’re second worst in the league at hitting the fastball hard. What that adds up to is a bunch of medium fly balls that are easy to catch, and therefore a low batting average.

So what’s the fix? It’s tough to say “hit more line drives” — the Giants hit the fourth fewest line drives against fastballs of any team in the majors — but they do need to work on hitting the ball harder. This is why Rafael Devers, for example, is still a good hitter against fastballs even though he swings through a terrifying number of them. When he does make contact, he hits the ball hard 76% of the time, compared to the team as a whole, who hits the ball hard 42% of the time. It’s frustrating to watch Devers swing through 96 in the zone, and it’s the sort of thing that you’ll grumble about to everyone on Grumbl, the social media app for grumbling, but that’s just part of who he is as a hitter, and the overall package works enough that it’s not worth complaining about.

The core of the problem, then, is that the Giants don’t hit the ball hard enough. They need bigger, stronger boys who can wallop the hell out of a fastball. Other than Devers, Heliot Ramos consistently hits fastballs hard, and in his incredibly small sample size, Jerar Encarnacion hit every fastball hard that he made contact with. The next two on the list are Willy Adames and Casey Schmitt, and while they have done a good job on fastballs, it’s worth noting that both of them would bring the average down on the Yankees or Red Sox.

So that’s the real problem the Giants have with fastballs. It’s not that they take a lot of them or swing through too many — though in absolute numbers, they do that more than any other team, because they see more fastballs than any other team — but that when they do make contact, the contact isn’t good enough. From the eye test, I honestly thought that they would be worse at the swing decision/swing ability part of the game, but that’s why you trust numbers instead of vibes.