Coming Straight at You: Key Brewers Thinkers on the Rising Threat (and Opportunity) of the Inside Pitch

Blake Perkins is almost philosophical about the foul ball that fractured his shin and will delay the start of his season. That injuries like his are happening more and more often throughout the league, as the frequency of high-speed offerings bearing in on batters, is just the way things are.

"I think it’s just part of it. That’s why you see everyone wearing protective gear. I’m gonna be wearing a leg guard up to my knee, pretty much, when I come back," Perkins said Friday, with a half-sheepish, half-rueful laugh. "Pitchers are getting really good. It’s a reactionary job that hitters have, and sometimes stuff just happens that you don’t want to happen. You’ve got to live with it."

Perkins, a switch-hitter, almost has it easy, compared to many of his contemporaries—almost. Sinkers running in on same-handed hitters pose the greatest threat, both to force a self-harming foul ball and to plunk a batter, but the problem is fairly pervasive. Some pitchers specialize so much in the back-foot slider that they've become prone to making that term momentarily and painfully literal. Some, like new Brewers southpaw Tyler Alexander, use a cutter to get in under the hands of opposite-handed batters—for two distinct reasons.

"I’m not 100 percent sure if this is accurate, but I feel like when you throw up and in, it plays harder, as opposed to throwing away," Alexander said Sunday in Maryvale. (That is accurate, by the way.) "So with my four-seam fastball, which is around 90 miles an hour, if I can locate that well up and in, that plays harder—and then I can work a cutter and a two-seamer off of that. The way I pitch, I have to locate, because 90 doesn’t play as well down the middle as 98 down the middle. So the cutter was a huge thing for me to kind of open up the inner half of the plate, so I can go back away."

Unsaid there, of course, is that if Alexander misses with that cutter (or the much tougher-to-locate glove-side sinker), it often ends up moving the feet or bouncing off the butt of a righty batter. Again, Alexander (a thoughtful, articulate, and open speaker, and no intimidating tough guy by nature) is just trying to live. If he can execute any of those hard pitches against righties on the inner half, everything else he does improves.

"I’ve been ramping it up this spring, in terms of throwing [the sinker] glove side, like back toward a righty’s front hip. It’s something I do in-season," he said. "It’s a freeze pitch for me. It’s a very hard pitch to locate, in my opinion—especially front hip to a righty, backdoor to a lefty, it’s like you’re just throwing into open space, or throwing it right at the righty. I’m doing it more this spring; I’m just trying to get better at it. It’s something I like to do, [but] it’s a hard pitch to do it, so if I can really nail down that usage, it helps with the cutter in to righties, it opens up the sweeper away to lefties. It opens up my arsenal a lot.

The inside pitches won't stop coming, then, because they're part of how pitchers like Alexander survive—and, equally, part of how much harder-throwing hurlers like Freddy Peralta and Jared Koenig dominate. Peralta and then-Brewers righty Colin Rea each plunked 10 batters last year; Koenig hit four in just 62 innings of work. New Brewers starter José Quintana hit 11 guys, working along the same lines of theory as Alexander. Of the 115 pitchers who threw at least 1,000 pitches to right-handed batters last year, Alexander had the 14th-highest rate of working inside on them.

Some hitters have taken the initiative, of course, by making this a part of their game. A wave of players who love to get hit—who consider it an indispensable, if painful, means of contributing—entered the league a little over a decade ago, led by the likes of Anthony Rizzo, Starling Marte, and Mark Canha.

"Yeah, I’m definitely not trying to get hit less," Canha said Saturday. He's a pledged and proud plunkster. "I want to get hit by pitches if I can. It’s a free base. It helps the team; it helps me. It’s the easiest way to get on base. I just have a certain approach; I don’t move too often when the ball’s coming at me. It’s kind of built into my game, and it’ll always be there for me."

The same is true for Caleb Durbin, though at the moment, the diminutive infielder might wish it weren't so. He's as unrepentant and willing to wear one as Canha is, but after he was hit in the same part of his arm for a second time this spring on Saturday, manager Pat Murphy removed him from the game (over his objections) and compelled a day of rest and recovery that Durbin didn't even want.

"He didn’t want to come, but I said he’s out," Murphy said Sunday, stressing that the move was precautionary. "And I’m not letting him play today, or even practice today. I just want him to be healthy. He’s that kid, you know? That he’ll play hurt."

Murphy shares Canha's view that getting hit is a skill for batters, and a valuable one. It stems, he says, mostly from not moving too soon—from turning away from the ball, back toward the catcher, rather than being too ready to move the feet or bend the torso backward.

Hitters, pitchers, and even catchers are in a fight of ever-increasing intensity for hegemony over the area just behind and over home plate, and a few inches on either side of it. That's why we've seen hit-by-pitch rates rise steadily, and the frequency of catcher interference rise much more than steadily, over the last 15 years. Ironically, much of that squabble over the inner part of the plate is really about the outer part. That, as Alexander noted, is why pitchers most often go inside in the first place: to set up something away. In Murphy's opinion, though, any need to crowd the plate is a symptom of a mechanical flaw in a batter.

"I think the biggest thing is staying square. You can’t come off with your front side and cover away," he said. "So if your tendency is to come out with your upper body—which you shouldn’t do—but if that’s a habit of yours, you might have to scoot onto the plate. But you’re still not gonna hit that [outside] ball really good."

Every hitter needs a plan for when hitters try to get into their kitchen. Every pitcher needs a way to force hitters to cover a wide zone. Every manager and coach, meanwhile, has to strike the balance between rewarding selfless and tough-minded play, and trying to help their players stay healthy. In the modern game, like most things, that balance is more delicate than ever.