Let It Fly
Guys take pitches they wish they hadn't.
Day 132 & Day 146 Of The 2025 MLB Season
In the first inning on Aug. 19, with two strikes, David Peterson threw James Wood a fastball. In the fourth inning, again with two strikes, David Peterson again threw James Wood a fastball.
This newsletter blog is temporarily switching over to Highlights Magazine: Can you spot five differences in these photos of the two pitches? Answers immediately below.
In the second photo,
The couple at the top left have swapped seats.
The umpire has gotten self-conscious about his right arm placement and is trying something new.
The catcher has switched from one-knee-down receiving style to the-other-knee-down receiving style.
The woman from the seat-swap couple has changed her personal aesthetic from Cape Cod casual to Vermont fancy.
James Wood’s OPS has dropped from .833 to .831.
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The three tallest hitters in the majors last year, in a tie, were:
1a. Oneil Cruz, a Statcast supergod who is interesting for not being especially good at baseball
1b. Aaron Judge, a Statcast god who is interesting for being the best right-handed hitter ever
1c. James Wood, a Statcast demigod who is also interesting.
Most color commentators go silent when the ball is in play, but Frandsen, on the MASN broadcasts, would often gasp, choke, wheeze and snort at the force of Woods’ batted balls—home runs but also line drives, ground outs, anything dented. At one point this year I had collected about a dozen examples, such as this one:
Wood had a nice season. He was, for example, fifth in the majors in wOBA on balls put in play, and the four hitters who were ahead of him—Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Cal Raleigh, Kyle Schwarber—all finished first or second in MVP voting. He also had a weird season. He came within two strikeouts of the single-season record1, dropped 225 points of OPS from the first half to the second half, and got no MVP mentions.
But the most interesting thing about him was a subset of the strikeouts. Last year he struck out looking 44 times on fastballs in the strike zone2. That was the most in baseball, and it’s the second most3 in the PITCHf/x era, which goes back to 2008. Forty-four times when he was theoretically protecting the strike zone, when he was theoretically begging the pitcher to give him something to hit instead of something to chase, he was unable to get a swing off.
Assuming you’re not personally invested in Wood’s success, it can be a soothing thing to watch. Here’s two minutes and six seconds of James Wood taking two-strike heaters in the zone, or, alternately, a 2:06 tour of every umpire in the game’s punch-out mechanic:
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We can all tell that major league pitchers’ stuff is way nastier than it was even 10 or 154 years ago. The league has broken its own fastball velocity record 15 times in the past 18 years; high-speed cameras help pitchers perfect their spin efficiency; pitching labs have co-created a bunch of designer pitch types; and—perhaps because of all pitchers’ more specialized roles—almost everybody throws their nastier off-speed pitches more often than ever, and in more counts than ever.
If there’s an equivalent philosophical shift on the offensive side that has helped maintain parity, I think it might be this: Hitters have gotten more aggressive in the strike zone than they used to be:
