Fastballs, the 2009 M's, and the New Acquisitions

Jeff and Matthew both have good posts below this one, so make sure to read them too.

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I've been wondering lately whether it's possible for a team to be vulnerable to a certain pitch type. It certainly seems possible. Team overloaded with left-handed bats will fare badly against changeups, a right-handed lineup might have problems with breaking balls. A bad lineup might have trouble with fastballs.

Poking around Casey Kotchman's Fangraphs page today led me to thinking about using their pitch value data in order to take a quick look at whether a team might exhibit splits of this nature. Kotchman's still pretty good at hitting fastballs, even if he can't hit anything else, so, I reasoned, perhaps the 2009 Mariners were deficient at hitting the heater, thus making Kotchman a better fit? Well, beyond their usual standards, that is. Chone Figgins and Milton Bradley are both above average fastball hitters too (hardly surprising since they're both still good at hitting, which is more than our new first baseman can say), but I suspected that there might be something to the idea that the team might not have been very good at hitting fastballs.

And boy, was I right. The table below is a set of rankings for the AL teams for three pitch types: fastballs (four seamers, two seamers, and cutters), breaking balls (sliders and curves), and changeups (changes and splitters).

Table 1: AL Rankings by pitch type, denoted r(XX) where XX is fastball (FB), breaking ball (BB), or changeup (CH).

The Mariners were dead last in the American League in hitting fastballs last year. The Royals can't hit breaking balls or offspeed pitches worth anything, but they can still hit a fastball much better than we could. The table's interesting in other ways, too. The Indians, for example, were collectively excellent fastball hitters but awful at hitting anything that moved. The Yankees? Good at everything. The Rangers were below average when it came to hitting fastballs or breaking pitches, but god help you if you throw a changeup to them. Etc, etc, etc. For the curious, the Mariners contrived to be a magnificent 44 runs below league average at hitting fastballs and cutters, a number rivaled only by Oakland.

So, why would a team be bad at hitting bendy/movey things and awful at hitting fastballs? Part of it is that fastballs are easier to hit and so the bar is higher, but I wonder if it might be because our poorer hitters are the ones with a semblance of plate discipline but nothing else. We can lay off sliders in the dirt, or what have you, but we can't punish a fastball over the plate (well, nobody but Lopez, Guti, and Ichiro can). That certainly seems to fit the type of hitter the Athletics carry too. Regardless of what caused our fastballitis last year, the hitters we've brought in this offseason have no such difficulty with heat, with the group coming in at around 40 runs above average against fastballs last year (in a down year for both Kotchman and Bradley). With any luck, the M's ranking last in the AL against fastballs will be a curiosity limited to the past.