The June Picayune
Front-hip sinkers, a possibly unhinged helmet take, and the wisdom of Kuip.
1. June In Front-Hip Sinkers
There are very few things we all agree on anymore. In fact, I believe the last universally loved, totally uncomplicated pleasure might be the front-hip sinker, AKA the front-door two-seamer, sometimes AKA the comeback sinker:
I’d argue that it is the most satisfying and most envied pitch in all of baseball, particularly (due to center field camera angles and its associations with Greg Maddux) when thrown by the right-handed pitcher to the left-handed batter. When executed well, it is taken for a strike, because the batter has given up on it. It is the one pitch that, from the God’s Eye center-field camera, fools even the home viewer until the last second.
I spent June deliberately trying to notice all the well-executed front-hip sinkers, which got me wondering who is currently the best front-hipster. I started the month with a name in mind—Logan Webb—and, as Eno Sarris wrote earlier this year, that’s a good name. But after a little extra care and a little bit of structure, I think I end the month with a different personal favorite.
There are four standards to consider:
1. How many successful front-hip sinkers does the pitcher throw?
I limited my definition to: two-seam fastballs thrown by right-handed pitchers to left-handed batters in Gameday Zones 3 & 6, which are basically strikes on the inner third of the plate in the middle or top of the zone. It’s a pitch that begins off the plate inside, that ends up back over the plate, that isn’t low in the zone (which is, by conventional wisdom, easier for batters to hit), and that locks the batter up without a swing.
By those parameters, here are the leaders in executed front-hippers this year:
1. Michael King, 25
2. Logan Webb, 24
3 (tie). Miles Mikolas, 15
3 (tie). Javier Assad, 15
3 (tie). Sean Hjelle, 15
6 (tie). Joe Ross, 14
6 (tie). Zach Eflin, 14
8. Jordan Hicks, 13
9. Colin Rea, 12
Again, that count is only pitches taken, not swung at. That’s the superpower of the front-hip sinker: The batter gives up on it and doesn’t swing. Any swing would introduce some possibility of chaos—even a pitch that bounces in front of home plate could get hit, at which point the defense could start throwing the ball around the yard, and a runner could come around and score—but if there is no swing at all then no bad outcome is possible, other than umpire malfunction.
There’s a big drop-off in the count after King and Webb. We could just stop with two names right there and proceed. But we haven’t adjusted for total playing time (Webb has thrown thrice as many innings as Hjelle) or for how many attempts at front-hip sinkers the pitcher has made and missed. So, to the second question:
2. Of all his sinkers to left-handers, how often does he hit that spot/get that result?
We’ll take those names above, but reorder them. Now we’re looking at the percentage of all sinkers thrown to left-handed batters that ended up meeting my definition of a well-executed front-hipper:
1. Michael King, 16 percent
2. Joe Ross, 15 percent
3. Sean Hjelle, 11 percent
4. Miles Mikolas, 11 percent
5. Zach Eflin, 10 percent
6. Javier Assad, 8 percent
7. Logan Webb, 7 percent
8. Colin Rea, 7 percent
9. Jordan Hicks, 4 percent
One of the subtexts of the front-hip sinker is that it takes guts—it’s a low-margin-for-error pitch. If it misses inside, it hits the batter; if it misses arm side, it doesn’t fool the batter and ends up middle/middle. So a pitcher who attempts to throw a lot of front-hip sinkers but doesn’t execute them is taunting danger, in a sense.
Our conclusions from the list above can only go so far. Pitchers throw their two-seamers to different targets and for different reasons; Webb had great command and he moves his in and out of the zone, so we wouldn’t say he “failed” on 93 percent of his two-seamers. But we can at least say this: This year, Michael King has executed his sinker to achieve the front-hip called strike more frequently and more consistently than any pitcher in baseball. He’s two for two.
3. If the batter swings, is the pitch hittable?
The goal is no swing, but we’re trying to at least consider the amount of danger a pitcher is courting by attempting this delicate pitch. So, when he throws it to Gameday Zones 3 & 6, and the batter does swing, does the batter put the ball in play? Here’s how many balls in play each of our nine pitchers has allowed on front-hip-sinker swings this year:
1. Michael King, 2
2. Zach Eflin, 4
3. Joe Ross, 5
4 (tie). Sean Hjelle, 7
4 (tie). Miles Mikolas, 7
6. Colin Rea, 8
7. Javier Assad, 9
8 (tie). Logan Webb, 12
8 (tie). Jordan Hicks, 12
So it’s pretty clear: Michael King gets the most called strikes on front-hip sinkers, he throws the highest concentration of sinkers in the front-hip sweet spot, and the batter is least frequently able to detect and/or defeat the front-hip sinker. The only test left is the eye test.
4. How does King’s front-hip sinker look? 1
It looks, from the late movement into the catcher’s glove, like it’s ending up in the middle of the zone, even though (as the dots show) it’s actually just nicking the corner:
It looks like Elly De La Cruz is afraid of it:
This isn’t to say that Michael King throws the best two-seam fastball in the game. It’s to say that, for a very particular niche skill, producing a very particular and satisfying highlight, which is perhaps the last undiminished good that our fractured populace can all agree on, he’s currently the best. Good for him.
*****
2. June In Timely Helmet Droppings
I wrote about helmets this month so that I could finally quit paying such close attention to them; it’s been five years thinking about that article, and five years was enough. But, as these things always go, in the days immediately after I wrote up helmets there were two big helmet events. Both deserve attention:
First, Justin Turner’s helmet falling off earned him a stolen base. He appeared to be way out at second base, but his helmet had raced out ahead of him. When the tag came, the helmet jumped in front of it. The helmet took the bullet. The ruling on the field (out) was overturned on review (safe) and Turner got the stolen base.
Second, Randy Arozarena’s helmet falling off cost him a stolen base. He got a confirmed Good Jump
and, as nearly all Good Jumps lead to safe baserunners, we can take it as close to a fact that he would have been safe. But his helmet began to disagree. Like Turner’s helmet, it had ambitions of its own, desires to scout out ahead and prepare the trail. But this helmet first obstructed Arozarena’s vision and then, more consequentially, tripped him up. He fancy-stepped over it but the impediment was too much; he was thrown out:
When I wrote my piece about helmet droppings, I purposefully avoided any firm conclusions about whether wearing a loose helmet is generally good or bad for the offense, because both of the above situations can occur: The helmet can, in unlikely ways, impede the defense’s tags, throws, or attempts to field a ball; or the helmet can trip up or blind the runner. I still can’t conclude whether I would encourage my squad to tighten up those hard hats or not; I probably would, to avoid the injury risks that the Arozarena play suggests. But I will make one and a half points here:
A rule that allows Justin Turner to be safe on that play is a bad rule. The helmet didn’t just impede the fielder’s rightful tag—which should probably be a kind of interference on its own— but it did so while it was still in contact with Turner. The glove was touching the helmet and the helmet was touching Turner, which sounds an awful lot like the definition of “wearing clothes.”
I mean, where would the logic of that play end? Why not just let Turner carry his helmet around with him in his left hand, using it to fend off tags like a shield? Why not say that all helmets, indeed all clothing, even while worn, is only proximate to the runner, and therefore to truly tag the runner the fielder must tag the runner’s actual porous flesh? For that matter, solid particles don’t actually touch each other at all, their electrons merely repel other objects’ electrons from a distance, so all tags are technically impossible. And Zeno’s Paradox! And the simulation theory! It’s Turners all the way down.
That’s bad. Tagging a helmet that is touching the runner should count as tagging the runner.
And I’ll go further. If the helmet starts the play on the batter-runner—as it must, by rule—then it should remain part of the batter-runner’s body throughout the play, whether or not it remains in direct contact with him. What I’m saying is, if a runner’s leg were to fall off in the middle of a play, I think you should still be allowed to tag the leg, wherever it sits; it would still be part of the body through the end of the play. And if a batter’s helmet falls off in the middle of the play, you should still be allowed to tag the helmet, wherever it sits; it’s still part of his person. If he’s sliding into third base but his helmet is halfway between first and second, I think you can tag the helmet. If he’s caught in a rundown and the helmet comes off, well a new way of ending that rundown has just become available.
***
3. June In First-And-Third Basestealing
I can’t help my obsession with first-and-third basestealing game theory. It continues to be so fascinating to me that teams are in complete disarray about a) how to defend a play that we thought only Little Leaguers were vulnerable to and b) how far on the offensive side to push the opportunity.
So—
[Interrupting this section because Substack has scolded me for writing a post that is too large to send as email. So, instead, I’ll send June In First-And-Third Basestealing as a separate post, sometime soon. I know what you’re thinking, but in my opinion the findings are interesting enough to justify it.]
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4. New (to me) baseball phrase: “Let’s Win Infield.”
From: Giants’ broadcaster Duane Kuiper
Meaning: Do a small, performative good in the hopes of bump-starting the whole engine.
Usage: Kuip and Mike Krukow were talking about Matt Chapman and Nolan Arenado playing high school infield together, when Krukow suddenly veered off to a different topic:
Krukow: When we were playing together [1983 to 1985], and there would be a rough spell, I always loved it when we went out to take infield…
Kuip: Which was every day, we took infield every day.
Krukow: …and you’d run out there and say “Let’s Win Infield!”
Kuip: And we did.
Love, love this. Partly because I remember the feeling of taking infield in Little League, when the other team had nothing to do but sit on the bench watching you, and you really actually did want to impress them—to intimidate them—with your team’s collective sharpness.
But more, I love it because of what I take to be Kuiper’s premise. Like this: I floss every night. I don’t do it because I enjoy it, and I definitely don’t do it because I always make responsible far-thinking decisions about my health. I do it because, if I don’t, my entire life starts to fall apart. If I choose to fail at flossing, then that choice triggers something in my psychology that says, “yes, that’s right, you suck, you’re lazy, you’re going to make the next wrong choice, too, give in to that.” It turns out my discipline is very flimsily constructed: If I skip flossing, I’ll probably also go to bed too late, wake up tired and eat a less healthy breakfast, spend the morning doomscrolling, get snippy at my family later that day, develop a sense of malaise that saps my energy and precludes any hope of exercising, etc. This isn’t a theoretical risk; I’ve observed the sequence happen. I have to floss last night if I want to write this article today.
My point is, a lot of us are at the mercy of our narratives. Some of those narratives are enormous, life-spanning mythologies we tell ourselves about our identity and the meaning of our lives and even the metaphysics of reality. Some, though, are just monster-of-the-week episodes. And those can flip in a moment. I can totally see the practical purpose here of Kuip screaming Let’s Win Infield! Sometimes you just need to do one thing well to remind yourself that you can do a lot of things well.
Enjoy the weekend. You’ll do great!
You could also include “inches of run” here but in my experience “inches of run” are, beyond a certain point, not all that reliable as statistical or aesthetic factors. Different pitches have different attributes, and “inches of run” correlates to some of those attributes but only imperfectly. And, as it happens, the only hit Michael King has allowed on a front-hip sinker this year was the one he threw that had the most inches of run.
“Why not just let Turner carry his helmet around with him in his left hand, using it to fend off tags like a shield?” Man would I love this version of baseball.
If a runner’s leg were to fall off in the middle of a play, would tagging it count as an out? I'm not 100% convinced. It might not matter, practically, because the rest of the baserunner would likely still be nearby and moving slowly. What if the rest of the baserunner scored but the leg was between third and home and the play wasn't over yet, could the opposing team tag the leg for an out? Would the run count? Could other baserunners run past the leg and score? What would happen to the player who tagged the dismembered leg for the out, would they be credited with a high baseball IQ or become a pariah?
What if it was a finger, or half a finger? Maybe the batter swings at an inside pitch, dribbles it in front of the plate off their fingers and somehow one pops off. Could the catcher pick up the ball and tag the finger? Also, which player in modern baseball would be most likely to attempt running to first in that situation? Bumgarner? Bobby Bonilla? Pete Rose? Kyle Farnsworth?