The first time we saw pitchers, as a group, throwing breaking balls one-third of the time? The postseason. The first time we saw the league average reach 94 mph on the fastball? The postseason. The first time we saw reliever usage surge close to 50 percent of all innings? Postseason. The first time we saw an opener? Yep, you guessed it. It was in the postseason.
The season is grindingly long, and the stakes are so high in the playoffs that any tiny edge can make the difference, so the postseason has often functioned as an incubator for new ideas in baseball strategy before those ideas spread to the other months. So are we seeing anything new in the 2022 postseason? Or is this year’s trend perhaps a softening of the trends that came before, representing something of a turning back?
Let’s check in on past trends. The opener? that one’s easy. It’s been used a little less over time, even by the club that made it famous, the Rays, and when it might have made sense (National League Championship Series, Game 5), neither team opted for it. Maybe it has something to do with wanting all your good relievers for the endgame.
Breaking balls? Still going up?
Maybe this trend is slowing down in the postseason, but the regular season is still trudging along, with more sliders every year. It is interesting to see that regular-season curveball usage has fallen for two straight seasons, and cutter usage has been steady for a while. Maybe sliders will just eat up all the breaking balls, but sliders are still steady in the postseason, as well, at 21 percent. We could be nearing a new equilibrium in breaking ball usage.
For three years (2016-2018), league-wide fastball velocity stayed at 93.2 mph, after rocketing up from around 90 mph in the first year of pitch tracking. As with breaking balls in the previous example, it might be fair to wonder if we were nearing a physical limitation, a maximum fastball velocity for humans. Well, the regular season broke past that plateau and hit 93.9 in 2022 — and the postseason suggests there’s more to come, as it cleared 95.0 for the first time this year.
We’ve seen a lot of relievers pumpin’ hundos, but the velo trend is there even if we look just at starters. Starters are averaging 95 mph in the postseason this year!
Even though the velo trend stays true once we account for starters, there’s still a tricky subtrend to pick apart. Are starters only able to throw this hard because they are throwing fewer and fewer innings? Are they training to throw hard for five innings and then give the ball to players that have trained to throw hard for four? Yes and no.
In 2019, relievers threw 42 percent of the innings (42.7 percent of the pitches) in baseball, the most they’d ever thrown. That postseason, relievers only threw 43.4 percent of the innings, down from over half the year before. That was the season Patrick Corbin pitched in relief and the Nationals won the World Series on the strength of their starting pitching. Did the league copycat, and start to value starting pitching more highly? Here’s how the postseason has gone since then, in terms of pitches thrown by relievers.
Again, the regular season followed the postseason. The rate of increase in reliever innings has slowed. After the weird 2020 season, relievers have thrown 43.4 and 41.8 percent of the pitches in baseball the last two seasons. This is also the first season since 2016 where relievers have had an ERA under four. (In a related matter, relievers had a better ERA again, after nearly converging with starter ERA in 2020.) Managers have stopped going to the relievers more, and the relievers are better for it.
While it’s true that the Yankees (first in regular-season homers), Braves (second in regular-season homers) and Dodgers (fifth in regular-season homers) are all out of the postseason, is that really a trend? The Astros were fourth in regular season homers, and the Phillies were sixth, and the team that made contact with no homers (the Guardians) didn’t slay their Goliath. And there’s this, which is perpetually true.
Since the start of the 2021 postseason, teams that out-homer the opposition are 45-7 in playoff games.
— Dayn Perry (@daynperry) October 25, 2022
For the trends that have actually changed in the postseason, the game may have corrected itself. Maybe there’s a limit on how many innings the relievers can throw and still be good, maybe there are only so many sliders a pitcher can throw and still be effective.
There might be some evidence that the game is changing ahead of a forced correction, too.
Next year, there will be new shift rules. This year in the playoffs, shifts are down from nearly half the time last postseason to under a third of the time, the lowest in five years. Despite the favorable rules (and base sizes) for stolen bases, there’s been no increase in stolen base rate this year, with 28 so far after 46 through the full postseason last year.
Thanks to MLBAM, we know that pitchers were almost two seconds slower this postseason than they were in the regular season (19.8 seconds with no runners on, 18 seconds in the regular season, 24.7 seconds with runners on, 23.2 seconds in the regular season) , so pitchers haven’t adjusted themselves to be quicker between pitches — they’ll have some reckoning next year when the pitch clock is implemented. In other rules-based news, fastball spin rate, which dropped to the second-lowest playoff number since we’ve tracked it after baseball implemented more stringent sticky stuff checks, is back up to the second-highest postseason level since we’ve tracked it.
The playoffs are an extension of the regular season, since it’s the same sport in a different month, but it’s also different because of the stakes. Managers are willing to go to the reliever earlier, pitchers are willing to go to the slider more often, pitchers are willing to take a little longer between pitches so they can throw a little harder, everyone is trying a little bit harder to win. Eventually, though, those players often realize those strategies can help them all season long, and that’s probably why we’ve seen velocity go up, breaking ball usage go up, reliever usage go up.
The good news for some might be that the playoffs this year suggest that some of those trends are slowing down. Then again, it once looked like fastball velocity was slowing down, and then we blew right through that door. Maybe we are still headed towards a season with 95 mph fastballs, 40 percent sliders, and every other inning thrown by a reliever. After all, it’s happened in the playoffs before.
(Top photo of Spencer Strider: Dale Zanine / USA TODAY)
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