A Study in Pitch Tunneling
Why hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports
I’ve been missing baseball a lot recently. We just now have an official date for when the season is going to begin (July 23rd) and it felt like reaching a deal took an eternity. In order to get at least some baseball in my life, I’ve been studying some of the most interesting parts of the sport. I studied hitting mechanics and then I found some information on pitch tunneling, and it got me thinking: just how hard is it to hit a baseball against major league level pitchers? I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer is either “incredibly hard” or “impossible”. So in this story, I’m going to study just what pitch tunneling is and explain just how good pitchers are at getting ahead of the hitters they face.
I like to think of pitch tunneling as an evolution of pitching. Pitchers are in direct control of the game when they’re on the mound, and they use that to their advantage. The goal of pitching is to throw strikes and get outs, but at a major league level, it just isn’t that easy. Pitchers like Marcus Stroman of the New York Mets have adopted methods to mess up a hitter’s timing. Stroman will mix up his delivery throughout an at-bat, sometimes leaving his leg in the air longer before he comes down to plant it, and even going to the slide-step when there is nobody on base. Many pitchers around the league do this now because every single year hitters become smarter than the year before. Pitch tunneling doesn’t have a concrete definition, but I see it as the art of making two different pitches (in most cases fastballs and off-speed) look identical out of a pitchers arm for as long as possible before the ball reaches the plate. The goal is to “tunnel” the pitch long enough so that the hitter has to guess what the pitch is, likely leading to poor contact or a swing and miss. Corey Kluber (in the video above) is among the best in the game at pitch tunneling — up until this past season he threw primarily three pitches; a sinker, fastball, and a slurve (a slider that slightly breaks downwards like a curveball). Kluber’s slurve is thrown so that to the (right-handed) hitter it almost looks like it is going to be a sinker or a fastball down and in, but instead, it goes away from the hitter, for about 10 MPH less at that. The “tunnel” in major league baseball is identified at 23.8 feet before home plate, so the goal for the pitcher is to have as many different pitches as possible go through that same tunnel, causing the hitter to miss more pitches. Pitch tunneling has nothing to do with mechanics and everything to do with a pitcher’s delivery. Pitchers always want to have the same delivery to the plate no matter what pitch they’re throwing. That way, the hitter won’t have any way of knowing what pitch is thrown until the ball is coming towards him.
In last year’s ALDS Game 5 (an elimination game), Tampa Bay Rays’ starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow got himself into deep trouble in the first inning against the Houston Astros, giving up 4 runs. After the game, many people including Glasnow realized that he was tipping his pitches. When he gripped the curveball in his glove, his glove would move slightly differently than when he was throwing his fastball, giving the Astros hitters a huge advantage. It was the Astros though, and with their history, we know this advantage could have been a mixture of pitch tipping and trash cans in the dugout, but I digress. The point is that major league hitters are very good at picking up a pitcher’s “tells” and if a pitcher noticeably moves his glove differently on certain pitches, then the hitters, if they’re attentive, will know exactly what pitch is coming. This can lead to a huge advantage, as we’ve seen from the Astros (okay I’m done talking about the Astros, I promise). If Glasnow had not been tipping his pitches, who knows what would have happened in that game. The best pitchers in the league such as Jacob Degrom, Max Scherzer, Gerrit Cole, and Kluber have mastered their deliveries, to the point that hitters can rarely get any tells off of them.
Jacob Degrom is the best pitcher in baseball. There should be no argument there. He has won the last two NL Cy Young awards and has shown no signs of stopping his dominance. One of the reasons Degrom is so successful is his ability to throw his fastball and sliders in the same range (fastball around 97–99 MPH and slider between 91–93 MPH), as you can see above. This is rare — he throws his “off-speed” pitch as fast as some other pitchers’ fastballs. He does this because he can tunnel the two pitches off of each other. The video above shows the hitter, Brock Holt, seeing the pitch coming in and moving his bat up and out to get the fastball. Before he knows it though, the slider comes in at the bottom inside part of the zone, an un-hittable pitch with his bat at the top outside of the zone. Mike Anthony, a baseball writer for PitcherList also studied pitch tunneling and found that Degrom gives the hitter eight milliseconds less time to react to a pitch than the average pitcher. To contextualize that, a hitter has on average around 100ms to gauge which pitch is coming, and about 25ms to start swinging for that pitch, so 8ms becomes an eternity for the hitter. How anyone manages to get hits off Degrom still amazes me.
There is no way to prove it, but hitting a baseball against MLB pitchers has to be the hardest thing to do in all sports. The simple fact that the league-average batting average is around .250, and the league-average on-base percentage is around .320 every single season means that pitchers are incredibly dominant. With the league-average OBP at .320 that means that about 68% of the time the pitcher walks away from an at bat with a victory. Yet pitchers still continue to get better every year. The same goes with hitters as well though. Evolution is a very fascinating thing, especially when it comes to baseball. Pitchers throw harder year in and year out; in 2008 the average fastball velocity for a pitcher was around 91mph, and now it is hovering around the 92.8–93 mph range. That may not seem like much, but to a hitter a 91mph fastball is a lot easier to hit than a 93mph fastball — it gives them just slightly more time to hit it.
Tunneling has become very popular in recent years simply because pitchers have more information/data at their disposal than ever before. Pitching has become an art of mastering one’s delivery and release point, opposed to just throwing hard. Pitchers also focus more on where a pitch starts opposed to where it’s going to end up. In the past when throwing a slider you would throw with the end target in mind, but now pitchers want to just make sure that the slider looks the same as a fastball to the hitter. The pitch will still break, making it look like it won’t is what’s fooling hitters. In recent years, Statcast has uncovered data on spin rate, and exactly how a pitch moves, and why it does. For example, Justin Verlander of the Astros has the best spin rate in the league on his fastball, moving on average at 2541 RPM (revolutions per minute). Luis Severino has the best spin rate on his slider at 2689 RPM. Pitchers use spin rate to study their mechanics and figure out how their arm should be moving if they want the most spin on the ball. Spin is what fools a hitter. Verlander throws a rising fastball at around 96–98mph but it moves up in the zone the closer it gets to the hitter. The hitter might see Verlander’s fastball coming down the middle of the plate and swing accordingly, but before they notice the ball is in the catcher’s glove at the upper part of the zone.
Baseball is a sport that is forever changing. Statcast was only introduced in 2015! Before 2015 pitchers were unable to study a lot of the things they study now such as spin rate, movement, and just how they get the velocity they do. It has also helped hitters. Statcast introduced the study of the launch angle, which shows the hitter why they hit the ball where they do. Launch angle has taken over the conversation on hitting across the league. It is common knowledge that when you get on top of a ball it will go into the ground, and when you get under the ball, it’s going to go in the air. Now hitters know how to improve their swing so that they can get a good launch angle (usually around 25–30 degrees) on the ball, and a good launch angle usually translates to lots of doubles, triples, and home runs, which are what hitters are looking for.
Pitch tunneling has become a tool that most pitchers across the MLB are adopting or trying to. Pitchers are becoming smarter than ever and same with hitters. When it comes down to it baseball is a series of battles between a pitcher and a hitter, and when both sides have a lot of information on one another it makes for an amazing display of analysis and sport. This is why I think baseball will continue to be interesting to watch forever, because no matter what, the hitter is always going to try and beat the pitcher, and vice versa. The more the game and players evolve the less easy at-bats the pitcher will have in any given game, which makes for better competition, year in and year out. Tunneling is just one of the many fascinating things that pitchers do, and I hope to dive into the art of pitching more with you guys soon.
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