![]() “‘If you want to get better at hitting the slider, hit the fastball.’ And the idea is when they throw a fastball, don’t miss it.” “There’s a funny saying that a lot of baseball people say,” Canha said. 212/.265/.355 batting line against sliders and sweepers, whiffing on 34.2% of their swings. “There’s a reason they’re throwing sliders more often. “The way guys are throwing breaking balls now, there’s a reason, right?” New York Mets outfielder Mark Canha said. ![]() Put together, they make up 22% of MLB pitches, and that’s before considering the also-related cutters that have similar but less extreme movement profiles at fastball-esque speeds. In 2023, they have proliferated so thoroughly that there are now two categories where there used to be one: sliders and the newly designated sweepers. Sliders made up 14.3% of MLB pitches in 2015, the year Statcast data became public. The prototypical slider is designed to look like a fastball and sit in a velocity band just below the fastball but swerve down and to the pitcher’s glove side just before reaching the plate. In particular, sliders have become a much more frequently used weapon. In 2022, that rate dipped below 50% for the first time since the advent of pitch tracking in 2008, and in 2023, it has dropped further to 47.3%.Įspecially since Statcast began providing more granular data on pitch qualities in the mid-2010s, teams and players have leaned into a cycle of spin. In 2013, 56.9% of all pitches were either four-seam fastballs or sinkers. ![]() MLB has stepped in on the game time front and has attempted to work on the strikeouts indirectly, but the fastball graph is still looking like a smooth, if slow, downward slope.ĭespite ever-increasing velocity (a borderline natural law itself that has recently begun to hit a plateau), fewer and fewer of the pitches thrown in major-league games are pure fastballs. There are a few trends that have become something like the natural laws of modern baseball: Unencumbered, strikeouts go up, game times get longer, and fastball usage goes down.
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