May Happened And We Are All The Witnesses
The things I was especially attentive to last month.
1. May In Splits
I consumed a bunch of end-of-May podcasts, roundtables and articles, many of which made some reference to the end of May being the time to start taking statistics seriously, e.g. ESPN: “Among baseball fans, the saying goes that you should avoid checking the standings until Memorial Day,” e.g. The Athletic: “Memorial Day. This is riiiiight about the time you can start feeling confident about some baseball things.”
Yeah, well not if you live your life in dank pits of players’ splits pages. Down in the splits pits, it’s always Small Sample Season. One small sample is volatile enough; two in relationship to each other produces quantum volatility. Memorial Day on splits pages means nothing. There’s somebody in the splits right now whose 2024 stats are all still in Cyrillic.
Aaron Nola, vs
1-6 hitters: .156/.229/.291
7-9 hitters: .294/.318/.506
Lol. Or
José Alvarado, OPS allowed on
Groundballs: .719
Fly balls: .593
Line friggin drives: .539
Heh. But my favorite of these, and the one that has a slightly better chance of persisting for slightly longer, is one of Kevin Gausman’s splits. It really has defined his mediocre season so far.
Let me set this up. You’re Gausman. A fresh batter walks to the plate, an averageish hitter, let’s call him Anthony Santander. You have two options: Try to get ahead in the count, or try to fall behind. Which do you choose?
You chose wrong. Gausman’s opponents this year:
After 0-1: .298/.331/.443
After 1-0: .250/.329/.427
Since you chose “throw a strike,” now you’re ahead in the count 0-1. Too bad! Maybe you can fix this. Should you let the batter get back in the count by throwing a ball, or should you try to get a second strike?
You’re smart. You see where this is going, and so you chose “huck the ball eighteen feet high and even the count.”
After 0-2: .302/.345/.434
After 1-1: .195/.247/.299
Now it’s 1-1. This is arguably the most pivotal count in baseball; at least, Greg Maddux and Max Scherzer thought so. This is where the game will really be determined, since 1-2 and 2-1 set up an at-bat to go in dramatically different directions. And this is where it is really important that you go against every instinct you have and choose “stand motionless on the mound until the umpire calls a pitch-clock violation and charges Gausman a ball.”
After 1-2: .236/.282/.319
After 2-1: .103/.222/.154
Now, I would normally brush this off as entirely small-sample split chaos, but unlike the Nola and Alvarado flukes there is at least a coherent story you could tell here about Gausman. The count changes the way a pitcher pitches (and the way a batter bats). Gausman’s typical two-strike strategy has been disrupted this year by a less-effective splitter and by less effective fastball/splitter differentiation, as Michael Ajeto has described at Baseball Prospectus. That doesn’t explain how Gausman has managed to still be pretty good when he’s behind in the count, but it could at least partially explain why he has been historically, disastrously bad when he’s ahead. His OPS allowed while ahead in the count is the 11th worst in baseball since 2000; this is a guy who just finished third in Cy Young voting.
Those splits are through the end May, incidentally, because this is a newsletter about May. I did watch one batter of Gausman’s first June start on Monday night. He got ahead of Anthony Santander 0-2 and then he allowed a home run. That’s his third 0-2 homer allowed this year; he’s already within two of the all-time single-season record.
2. May In Skenes
If we remember one thing from May 2024 for the rest of our lives, it’ll be the dominant first month of Paul Skenes’ career, and perhaps specifically his second start: Six innings against the Cubs, no hits, 11 Ks, only one baserunner. He had the Kerry Wood start, except with modern pitch restrictions that Wood didn’t have. But otherwise.
Skenes might already be the best pitcher in baseball—I’m not saying he is, but I’m saying that in retrospect someday I might say he already was—but there’s something interesting about how he does it. Consider, for example, this plate appearance against the left-handed Cub Michael Busch on May 17, his third major league start and his second against the Cubs.
Skenes got ahead on a first-pitch fastball, which Busch—late—popped foul over the third-base dugout. Skenes followed with a curve, which Busch—early—tapped foul toward the first-base dugout. This is one of the most normal sequences in baseball: the pitch selection, the hitter’s swing decisions, the precise outcome of each swing down to the types of foul balls, the fact that a great pitcher was quickly ahead in the count 0-2, all extremely by the book.
Now Skenes gets to work. He tries to paint the corner with his splinker, and he does:
Busch is lucky the call went his way, though on 0-2 counts the umpire often shrinks the strike zone a little bit. But since Busch got the call, we can call it an extraordinary take on his part. What discipline!
Now a 1-2 count and Skenes tries something else—throws his splinker in a more traditional splitter location, starting at the bottom of the zone and diving down out of it:
I mean: What a pitch. Somehow Busch takes it again. In isolation, it’s easy for us to say “well, yeah, it was a ball.” But that’s a tough take on two strikes. Having to protect against pitches like that on two strikes is the primary challenge of hitting against normal pitchers, let alone pitchers with elite stuff who put an 5 extra mph on everything.
On 2-2 Skenes goes for the punchout again, this time trying to turn a back-door slider over the outside corner. He undercooks it, and Busch gets an easier take, though, again, even this relatively easy take is a pitch that batters on two strikes will often protect against:
Now, on 3-2, Skenes goes back to the heart of the strike zone. He throws what is, for him, a C-minus slider, but—crucially—nobody can hit anything he throws, he’s impossible, his pitches are vapor. Busch’s bat goes right through it:
So what’d we just see? We saw Skenes get a strikeout without getting any chase at all. This is pretty consistent with Skenes’ first month.
Statcast categorizes four broad “attack zones” for its pitch locations.
The least tempting is called “waste” pitches, and most pitchers get very few swings out there—around 5 percent. For what it’s worth, Skenes hasn’t gotten a single swing in the waste zones, but he has only thrown about 20 pitches out there. That’s a non-competitive region, not worth a lot of analysis.
The other three, though, show a real first-month feature of Skenes’ pitching:
Heart: 92nd percentile swing rate
Shadow: 89th percentile swing rate
Chase: 21st percentile swing rate
This backs up what my eyes have been telling me: Batters who face Skenes have, generally, made really good decisions on chase pitches, especially considering how hard it must be to make good decisions against perhaps the best stuff that has ever existed. Skenes is dominating hitters, even as those hitters seem to be doing about as well as they could possibly do.
**
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