With the Phillies season on the brink, and anxious murmurs that the last word on this entire era of Philadelphia baseball could soon be written, discussing individual matchups seems a little like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But though an iceberg has been sighted, no collision has happened yet. We might as well try to find the best position for some chairs.
Tonight, Yoshinobu Yamamoto takes the mound for the Dodgers. With an ERA of 2.49 and a WHIP of 0.99, he’s had an excellent season.
Having both a Japan Series and World Series title under his belt already, he’s got plenty of postseason pedigree as well. But there’s one area in which he’s a little lacking: fastball velocity. Hurling his heater at an average of 95.3 MPH, he’s just in the 66th percentile for fastball velocity. Above-average, yes, but not spectacular. You know what is spectacular? Kyle Schwarber’s performance against four-seam fastballs.
In the regular season, Yamamoto used his fastball as the primary option out of his six offerings, throwing it 36% of the time (and 38% of the time to lefties). He allowed a batting average of .194 and a slugging percentage of .280. He’s accrued a run value of 17 with the pitch; the best of any of his offerings; only 11 pitchers got more with their four-seamers. Despite the lack of top-notch velocity, his four-seamer is a good pitch.
But Schwarber hit .285 and .767 against four-seamers in the regular season. He accrued a run value of 28 against four-seamers. No batter accrued a higher run value against four-seamers this year. No batter accrued a higher run value against any type of pitch this year. The Schwarber vs. Yamamoto matchup, then, becomes a battle of strength vs. strength.
So who comes out on top?
Yamamoto would seem to be playing a dangerous game here. The high fastball may be in vogue, but Yamamoto is not one of its practitioners. He puts his four-seamer in the zone, towards the middle.
Mentally overlay that with Kyle Schwarber’s slugging percentage by zone…
And you can see where there might be a problem.
Yamamoto serves up his fastballs right where Schwarber likes them. There’s opportunity there. Schwarber, however, is far from the only hitter who likes seeing fastballs in the middle of the zone. Saying that Schwarber likes to feast on those is a little like me saying that I like to eat pizza; it’s true, but hardly distinguishing.
And the fact that Yamamoto has been so successful with his fastball despite putting it in the middle of the zone should give us pause. His good numbers with the pitch cannot be a coincidence; he must have a way of thwarting batters with his heater despite putting so many of them in the zone.
This excellent piece from Nate Schwartz of Pitcher List gets into the subject and is well worth reading if you want to kill time before tonight’s 9 PM start. Long story short: Yamamoto pairs his four-seamer with an excellent spliter that ends up low and outside the zone. The sinker looks an awful lot like one of those four-seamers in the middle zone right up until it doesn’t. In a vacuum, the pitch looks exactly like what Schwarber wants to see. But pitches do not exist in a vacuum; they exist as part of an arsenal. And the combination of Yamamoto’s four-seamer and his splitter is much more troubling for Schwarber. He’s hitting just .125 against splitters this year, with a slugging percentage of .250 and a whiff rate of 47.3%. Granted, he hasn’t seen so many splitters this year, so those numbers may be a bit limited by sample size. But the picture Yamamoto paints is still significantly less rosy for Schwarber when we consider it.
Schwarber and Yamamoto have only faced off across three plate appearances this season, all the way back on April 4th. Yamamoto wasn’t afraid to show Schwarber the four-seamer that day, offering it in eight of 16 pitches. Schwarber didn’t do much with it that day, flying out, walking, and grounding out. Granted, that’s just not enough data to draw any conclusions from. It wouldn’t be terribly surprising if Schwarber saw fewer four-seamers from Yamamoto tonight, in part because Yamamoto may want to use his splitter a bit more (with the four-seamer to set it up, of course), and in part because the Dodgers have focused on using curveballs against the Phillies. Yamamoto does have a solid curveball, which, as noted by the Pitcher List article, he likes to set up by throwing the occasional higher fastball. When Yamamoto does throw his heater tonight, he may throw it a bit higher than usual, in order to prepare for a visit from Uncle Charlie (not as in Charlie Manuel, unfortunately).
With a million thoughts flying through the heads of Phillies fans tonight, the narrow, salami-sliced question of how Schwarber will handle one particular pitch from Yamamoto seems awfully niche. And it is. In all likelihood, the game, and thus the Phillies’ season, will not hinge on how Schwarber approaches Yamamoto’s heater. But it will hinge on something, something small that expands into something big. That white mote on the horizon might be a fastball. It might be an iceberg. We’ll have to see.
