No one makes mountains out of molehills quite like baseball fans, so you can be sure that I’m going to write entirely too much about Bartolo Colon’s start against the Blue Jays. However, instead of writing one big post and stuffing it all in there, I’m going to break it up into a few smaller posts this morning just so there’s no information overload and the discussion can remain focused. We’ve already talked about Colon’s velocity, and how he attacked Jose Bautista, but now let’s separate the right-handed batters from the lefties…
Pitching away has long been one of baseball’s old fall-backs. We see pitcher after pitcher pound guys away in an effort to prevent the batter from pulling the ball with authority. Former Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone and current Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan have been preaching this for years, especially the down-and-away pitch. It’s a style conducive to ground balls more than anything, and while those tend to go for hits more often that balls hit in the air, the rarely go for extra base hits.
Against the Jays last night, Colon threw pitch after pitch away from right-handed batters, almost to the extreme. Check out the strike zone plot above. That’s nothing new either, click here and you’ll see that Bartolo’s been attacking righties almost exclusively by pitching to the outer third of the plate this season. Although just five of the ten balls put into play by Toronto righties batters last night were on the ground, same-side batters have a 52% ground ball rate against Colon this year, which is a pretty big number. Balls hit on the ground on outside pitches will (theoretically) go towards the right side of the infield, which works for the Yankees since Robinson Cano and Mark Teixeira will get a chance to field them instead of the two mid-30-something guys on the left side.
It was a bit of a different story against left-handed batters though…
Obviously it’s a small amount of data, but Colon appears to have thrown a greater percentage of pitches inside to lefties than he did righties. A look at his season graph supports this even further. We’ve all seen him throw the Greg Maddux pitch a bunch of times, the two-seamer that starts inside to lefties and darts back over the plate for a called strike after the batter has bailed out, and that’s what the majority of the inside pitches to lefties have been. Maybe Colon is just more comfortable throwing that two-seamer to his glove side, maybe he commands it better, who knows. But it’s definitely a trend to batters of both hands.
Left-handed batters have done a much better job of not just putting the ball in the air against Bartolo (22.7% ground ball rate), but they’re making hard contact (40.9% line drive rate). Regression is going to come one way or the other; he simply won’t keep giving up that many line drives to lefties and watch them maintain a .261 BABIP. It’s probably correct both ways actually, the line drive rate will come down and the BABIP will still go up. The approach though – pitching away from righties and slightly in on lefties – has worked so far and if it’s what Colon is comfortable with, then by all means he should continue doing that.
Strike zone plots via Texas Leaguers.
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