First-Pitch Swinging
There's a best pitch to hit in every game, and batters like Fernando Tatís Jr. are hitting it.
Day 25 Of The 2025 MLB Season
I’m going to skip Day 25 for now, and probably circle back to it another day.
Day 26 Of The 2025 MLB Season
The Serial Position Effect is what they call our tendency to pay the most attention to the first and last items in a sequence. The problem, in sports, is that the first item in each game usually isn’t that important. The first competitive event in a basketball game is the tip-off, but since start-of-quarter possessions are ultimately split up evenly the tip-off is basically an illusion1. The first competitive event in a football game, the coin flip, has a weak historical sway, with the coin flip winner purportedly going on to win ~50.2 percent of games.
Similarly, the first competitive act in a baseball game is generally a fastball, taken, for either a ball or a strike. A little early count leverage isn’t nothing, but it only changes the run expectancy of an inning by about .04 runs, and the win expectancy of a game by practically nothing.
So, that’s how it used to be in baseball. But about 10 years ago we started to see the rate of swings on the first pitch of a game go up. Ten years later, FPOTG swing rate is still rising. It’s not the most important change in baseball during that time, but it’s definitely one of the steepest: A batter is now 31 percent likely to swing at the first pitch of the game2, up from 12 percent in 2014. Each of the last six (full) seasons has set a new league record for FPOTG swing rate:
2019: 23 percent
2021: 25 percent
2022: 26 percent
2023: 27 percent
2024: 30 percent
2025: 31 percent
And, since we’re talking records: Fernando Tatís Jr. has led off 40 of the Padres’ 41 games this year, and he has swung at 22 FPOTGs. He’s on pace to swing at the FPOTG 87 times, which would pass Jose Altuve’s record of 81, set last year, if you’re willing to go so far as to call this a record. Here he is, on Day 26 of the 2025 MLB season, not wasting aaaaaaany time indeed:
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You can absolutely understand why batters would be swinging. The FPOTG is probably the best pitch any batter will see all game.
On 0-0 counts—against all batters, in all innings of the game—pitchers throw fastballs about 52 percent of the time. The second batter of the game can sit first-pitch fastball if he wants, but he’ll be wrong as often as a coin flip.
But on the FPOTG, pitchers throw fastballs 94 percent of the time. There are, famously, no fastball counts in baseball anymore—it’s total chaos out there, pitchers throwing 3-0 changeups and all manner of such nonsesnse—but the first pitch of the game is the one exception. That’s a pure fastball count. And I’m not even counting cutters as fastballs, just four- and two-seamers. Ninety-four percent, yo!
Not only that, but it’s usually a sluffed fastball. The average fastball velocity in the first inning this year is 94.0 mph. The average fastball velocity on the first pitch of the game is just 93.4 mph.
And not only that, but it’s usually a reachable 93.4 mph fastball. The league’s zone rate overall is just under 50 percent, but on the FPOTG pitchers find the strike zone about 60 percent of the time.
So the batter knows what he’s getting, it’s a pitch type he actually to hit, and it’s probably more hittable than the pitcher’s usual stuff. It’s obviously go time.
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Batters who swing at the FPOTG are teeing off. The league’s wOBA-on-contact against the FPOTG this year is .470, which means hitting the FPOTG turns the league’s leadoff batters into Yordan Alvarez.3 The league already has 14 homers on the FPOTG. (In all of 2010, they hit six.) And while swinging more often also increases a batter’s chances of picking up an early strike, that’s not really true on FPOTG, because batters almost never chase on FPOTG. The leaguewide chase rate overall is almost 30 percent; the leaguewide chase rate on FPOTG is only 11 percent.
It doesn’t seem to matter how much pitchers know you’re going to swing. Even Tatís, the swingiest leadoff hitter, is still getting fed almost exclusively fastballs. The 40 pitches he has seen to start games this year have a velocity range of 10 mph. That’s incredible, to me. The fastest FPOTG he saw was 97; the slowest was 87.
On April 4 and April 5 this year, Tatís led off against the Cubs. Here’s what he saw:
Shōta Imanaga: 91 mph fastball, up in the zone.
Matthew Boyd: 94 mph fastball, outer part of the zone.
He swung both times.
Eleven days later, on April 15 and April 16, Tatís led off against the Cubs again. They knew he was willing to swing. And here’s what he saw:
