Ask any pitching coach what the best pitch in baseball is, and the chances are good he or she will say “Strike 1.”
With that in mind, I am revisiting some research I did a year and a half ago, about called strikes in Japanese professional baseball, and how it looks like there is a team that is good at getting called strikes because its pitchers throw first strikes, and a team that is good at getting called first strikes because it is good at pitch framing and gets lots of called strikes in all counts, and another team, the Yomiuri Giants, that is good at getting called first strikes despite not throwing a lot of first strikes or being good at getting called strikes in most other counts.
Thirty-eight percent of NPB’s home runs have disappeared, and anyone who tells you the ball isn’t the major factor, or that the reason is “the pitchers are better” is probably basing it on the games they watch without a broad sense of what the data is.
The wonderful thing about data is that if one gets enough of it, patterns can sometimes emerge that are not visible to even the most rigorous observer.
As Matt Murton said in 2013, when Japan’s previously soft mushy balls began flying better, “if it’s something that’s happening more or less across the board in both leagues, it’s not individual players doing something different.”
My podcast partner John E. Gibson (@JBWPodcast) has said he hasn’t seen balls that were really squared up and elevated dying, while he has seen balls that didn’t look like they had been struck that well go out. I saw a few of those this past week.