MLB pitchers are shying away from the fastball

How much do MLB pitchers need to rely on the fastball? If this year is any indication, it is time to pitch backwards.

The New York Yankees have garnered a lot of buzz around MLB for their “pitching backward” strategy. In other words, they are using breaking and off-speed pitches in typical fastball counts and are using fastballs in typical breaking and off-speed counts.

As such, the Yankees have the lowest team-percentage of fastballs thrown (43.5%) by a considerable margin this season. After all, there are more “fastball counts” than any other counts.

To this point in the season, the Bronx Bombers have accumulated the second-best team ERA (3.34) and second-highest fWAR (14.0) in baseball. They have the best bullpen and a very underrated rotation. Put it together, and New York may be out in front of a trend which is being observed throughout baseball: less fastballs being thrown.

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For the most part, the league-wide fastball rate has been falling ever since it has been tracked over at Fangraphs in 2002. It peaked at 64.4% that year (although, pitch misclassification was a lot more frequent then) and has reached its lowest-point ever in 2018 at 55.3%.

In spite of the fact fastballs are getting thrown harder, they are used less often. After sitting  between 57.8 percent and 57.6 percent through 2011 and 2015, the league fastball rate noticeably started to decline in 2016. It fell one percent that year and did so again the next year in 2017. It has only fallen .3% this year from 2017 (55.6% to 55.3%) but there is evidence that this could be much lower at season’s end.

Check out the 2018 league fastball-rate by month:

• March/April: 55.8%
• May: 55.2%
• June: 54.7%

This is a small three-month sample, but the rate has dropped about half of a percent each month. While it is hard to see that significant of a drop for the remaining three months of the season, the downtrend could certainly continue.

Despite the increase in velocity, most hitters are more adept at hitting fastballs than any other pitch. Sure, that can be attributed to the fact they see it more often than other pitchers, so they are able to adjust to it. With that said, a fastball also obviously has less movement and stays in the strike zone more frequently than other pitches.

Pitches work together, though, and it is a sequence thing above all else. Pitching is about deception and disrupting timing, so hitters are unprepared for the pitch. If a hitter is sitting breaking ball, he can wildly swing and miss early on a 90-mph fastball (meatball) right down the middle of the plate.

That is why the Yankees’ pitching strategy has been so efficient. They are defying conventional wisdom by deploying breaking/off-speed pitchers in counts where the batter is not expecting to see one and vice versa. The fractions of a second are in their favor, which is ultimately the difference between a hard-hit baseball or a swing-and-a-miss. It is the fraction.

As Fangraphs’ Travis Sawchik illuminated in a recent article, two-seamer/sinker usage is on a downward slope. The cutter-rate has also seen a decrease over the past couple of years, while four-seamers are actually being thrown more often.

The fastball (4-seam) with the least amount of movement, but most velocity, is enduring, while its sister pitches are becoming increasingly rare.

Relievers have actually increased their fastball usage this season from 57.2% in 2017 to 57.5%. Relative to previous years, though, the overall reliever fastball-rate is down markedly. Starters, meanwhile, have seen a fairly drastic decrease in fastball-usage this year and are responsible for the drop. The league-starter fastball rate has fallen from 54.6% in ’17 to 53.8% in ’18.

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There seems to be a new pitching philosophy sweeping across MLB. This will be incredibly interesting to watch as the year progresses and to see if it continues to fall in the coming months. Fastballs, despite 100 mph being the new normal, are no longer the rage these days.