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.

According to Delta Graphs, in 2024, an at-bat that stands at 1-0 with no outs and no runners will score an additional 0.411 runs in the remainder of that inning. Start that at-bat at 0-1 and the run expectation drops to 0.352. That’s a drop of 14 percent. With one or two outs and no one on, the run expectation drops by 22 percent.

Sports writing tends to focus on payoffs and finishes: “It’s what a team does in September and October that matters.” “Bobby Gobsmacked scored 18 points from the floor but 16 in the fourth quarter to lead the Worriers to victory.” Yet, everything that leads up to the finish contributes as well.

That’s why baseball reporting used to all be about payoff stats: pitching wins and RBIs, while things like runs and on-base-percentage were largely left out of the picture, and ERA was a secondary stat.

So if one asserts a team is consistently getting favorable strike calls, the first thing one thinks of are payoff counts, with three balls or two strikes, because that’s the most visible thing, but after the 2022 season, I found that there had been an insidious favoritism toward the Yomiuri Giants in called strikes, not in payoff counts but in 0-0 and 1-0 counts over a period of years.

When I told people about this, the standard answer was, “That’s because the Giants pitching is good.”

But if the Giants pitchers and catchers were so extremely good at getting called strikes in 0-0 and 1-0 counts, why were they so ordinary at getting called strikes in other counts? I constructed a model that simulated 1,000s of seasons with various “abilities” to get called strikes and found that if the Giants were getting THAT many called strikes in 0-0 and 1-0 counts, it was virtually impossible that they would be so ordinary in other counts.

That study was made possible using data sets supplied by Scout Dragon’s database guru Michael Westbay that included the non-payoff counts from 1999 to 2022. I had a full set of 2022 data on my own, but the Westbay data allowed me to notice a remarkable change that took place after Japanese teams began installing Trackman systems in their parks.

The favoritism that had been shown in early counts from 1999 to 2017 — particularly to the Giants and to a lesser extent the Hanshin Tigers — diminished remarkably after it was announced that Trackman data would be used in umpire strike zone evaluations.

Within a couple of years, however, it became clear that Trackman was never used in an extremely critical fashion, since the Giants and Tigers went back to getting their previous early-count bumps from the umpires.

Another evolution following the introduction of the Trackman data, was that the Hiroshima Carp, who had been very good at getting called strikes relative to the league, suddenly lost ground, while two of Japan’s most data-driven teams, the DeNA BayStars and Nippon Ham Fighters went the opposite way.

I am bringing this out again, because I am back tracking pitches again and have just updated my personal data set to include all but a handful of pitches from 2020 to 2021 and all of the pitches thrown in regular-season and playoff games since. And because the data is complete, I can investigate the three-ball and two-strike counts that my previous data did not permit.

To get called strikes, pitchers need to throw the ball in or next to the strike zone. Because of this, there is, at least in the data from 2020 to 2024, a positive correlation between the percentage of a team’s pitches that are called strikes and the percentage of swings by opposing batters in the same counts. Throw in or near the zone and batters are more likely to swing and pitches that are not swung at are likely to be called strikes.

The Giants are no longer Japan’s kings of first-pitch called strikes. That honor now belongs to the Yakult Swallows’ Pacific League-style pitching staff. Batters looking first pitches from Swallows pitchers since 2000, have taken called strikes 46.2 percent of the time, over 1.5 standard deviations above the NPB average of 44.2 percent.

The Swallows, though, come by their first strikes honestly, by throwing strikes. We know this because batters offer at 0-0 pitches from Yakult pitchers far more often than against any other team in Japan.

Next come the Giants. Their pitchers get 0-0 called strikes 45.8 percent of the time, which is still quite egregious, 1.2 standard deviations above average, while batters swing at their first pitches at about the NPB average. The Tigers are right behind the Giants, and then come the poster boys of Japanese pitch framing, the Fighters.

No team in Japan right now is as good at getting called strikes as the Nippon Ham Fighters. Unlike the Giants, whose advantage is extreme in 0-0 and 1-0 counts but non-existent in most counts, the Fighters are good in every count, while getting relatively few swings at their pitches.

The explanation people gave two years ago for the Giants, actually applies to the Fighters batteries. They excel at getting strikes that are near the zone, and they do it in all counts, because they are good at it.

If the Giants were actually good at getting called strikes, they wouldn’t be just a bit better than average in 2-0 and 0-1 counts, average in 1-1 and 2-2 counts, and terrible in 3-0, 1-2, 2-1, 3-1, 0-2, and 3-2 counts. I can’t say the umpires are giving the Giants more 0-0 and 1-0 strikes than they deserve, but the data definitely points toward that conclusion.