THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Not sure what I’m more wowwed about—the absolute rarity of 1st pitch curves, the fact that hitters do well against that, or that Ichiro acted like Pujols all over it. Of course, we’re talkin’ small sample, I know, but all around wow.

The sad thing is that we can be fairly sure that no one will ever throw him another first pitch of game curveball, so we’ll never know what would happen a second time.  Or, why baseball is not a laboratory.

Of course the idea that you don’t throw the same pitch to a batter who hit a home run in a previous a bat in that game is ludicrous, yet you hear that all the time from the TV and radio commentators, some of them former pitchers themselves…

That’s not what I was saying.  Given the premise of the linked article that first pitch curveballs are extremely rare in games, and then that Ichiro took one deep, who is going to emulate that extremely rare phenomenon against him again?  That’s significantly different from saying “don’t throw the same pitch on which he went deep one time.”

In the Science of Hitting, Williams said he would not swing until he had seen a pitcher’s fastball. I think that particular piece of advice, given Williams’s stature in baseball lore and having a pretty good track record when swatting at the ball, has been read by almost every major leaguer.

Bread, I wasn’t referring to your post at all. 

Again, if pitchers starting throwing more first pitch of the game curve balls, batters would start swinging at them.  If all batters took Williams’ advice to heart and literally, pitchers would simply throw get me over curve balls to every batter on every pitch.

I’m not sure there is such as thing as a get-me-over curveball.  Or put alternatively, every curveball a pitcher throws is a get-me-over curveball.  There’s not really a lot of aiming to spots going on with curves, except the spots called “down” and “strike zone”.

Curveballs are awful pitches when batters don’t swing at them because they go for balls so often.

I’d bet a dollar that Ichiro was fooled by the pitch. So just dumb luck that he hit it out.

If the pitcher had said, “Hey Ichiro, I’m throwing a curve right now.” On 0-0 he’d be taking all the way. Like Mike said, curveballs are good when people swing at them.

@Mike: Do you have swing% contact% etc broken out by all pitch types?

And he must have been fooled again by the 69 mph curve he hit out tonight against Jeff Francis.  I couldn’t find a video of Thursday’s home run, but it looked a lot like today’s. 

http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?tcid=mm_sea_vid&c_id=sea

If that’s being fooled, I hope he gets fooled again.

Geez, your leadoff hitter swung at a 1st pitch curveball that was a borderline strike.

Most likely this is one of those “bad process, good result” scenarios.

If he grounds out to 2B on that pitch does anyone even notice?

"On 0-0 he’d be taking all the way.”

No he wouldn’t. If he knew he was getting a curve and the pitcher hung one, he would be swinging out of his shoes.

As far as a “get me over” curve ball, obviously pitchers can’t put them where they want nearly as much as a fastball, but they certainly aim for a different location on 0-2 than on 0-0 (or a hitter’s count).

As far as how often they could throw a strike if they knew that the batter was taking, I don’t know.  It depends tremendously on the pitcher.  For some pitchers, I would guess 40%.  For others, maybe 20%.  If it were 40%, you would strike the batter out over half the time if you threw but curve balls and he never swing.