THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Very, very good questions and answers in the Kalk interview, and even the Nathan video one is good.

One thing which was said in the Nathan interview which I found interesting was that on pitches on the outside part of the plate, the speed was not correlated much to success whereas on the inside part of the plate, speed is very important.  That makes sense.  In fact, it may be to some extent that when you expect the batter to be late on a pitch, you ALWAYS want it on the inside and when you expect him to be early you ALWAYS want it on the outside.  That is one reason why change-ups are almost always thrown on the outside.

Anyway, if this is the case (that on the outside, speed does not really matter and on the inside speed matters a lot), it is imperative that hard throwers throw quite a bit on the inside and that soft throwers throw almost exclusively on the outside.  This is generally true, but if you see a hard thrower like Betancourt (who throws around 92 - pretty hard, but not terribly hard) throwing almost exclusively to the outside, that almost HAS to be incorrect.  And if you see a soft tosser throwing more than occasionally to the inside (which you almost never see) that also is probably incorrect.

Your percentage of inside to outside pitches depends on a lot of things, but any pitcher doing the extreme opposite of what he “should” do (as a general rule) is likely not pitching optimally.  Now, if a hard thrower just cannot locate his fastball inside for some reason or hits too many batters, then you should not force him to throw inside more than he does or as much as it appears (from his velocity) that he “should,” but you certainly should work with him on doing so.

It is a little like sac bunting.  How much, when, and with whom you sac or don’t sac is complicated, but any manager who either rarely sacs in a sac situation or sacs a lot when the defense is expecting it, is almost surely not acting optimally.