The Brewers' Four Fastball Monsters Each Make Hitters Late Differently

Hitters love to boast about what they could time up, if you just told them it was coming. Henry Aaron talked about being able to hit a speeding bullet. Some people, strangely, say a hitter could hit a jet at top speed, which sounds like it would be the jet hitting them, really, or else would set off some cataclysm like the one xkcd imagined years ago—a scenario, by the way, that does sometimes feel nearly possible when you watch Jacob Misiorowski. Anyway, hitters (and baseball people in general) are eager to tell you that merely throwing hard is not enough to get the ball past big-league bats.

It's true, too. Now, we have Statcast data that lays out exactly how true it is. Of the pitchers against whom batters have swung at least 100 times on four-seamers and/or sinkers this year, do you know who induces the most late swings? Far from being either Misiorowski or Mason Miller, it's (this is truly delightful) the Blue Jays' Tyler Rogers. The submariner gives hitters such an uncomfortable look (and mixes in his perversely rising slider so often) that they're late on his heat over half the time, even though he throws in the low to mid-80s.

That doesn't mean that velocity doesn't matter, though. Of course not. Firstly, great velocity can often help a pitcher move off the center of the barrel horizontally, as a hitter rushes to get to the hitting zone. It can also get over a bat, because the batter has time to get to the contact point laterally, but not enough to get uphill into the pitch. This is why high fastballs are, generally, more effective than low ones.

Still, the idea behind the fastball is to force hitters to be late, right? The more often you force them to be late, the more they have to cheat to catch up, at which point they become vulnerable to your other offerings. And while a batter can hit the ball hard even if they're not on time, hard contact on late swings is less damaging than hard contact on on-time (or even early) swings, too. So, let's talk about how four Brewers hurlers do an exceptional job making opposing batters late on their heaters.

Misiorowski's method is obvious, and we won't spend too much time on it here. (There's more to come on him tomorrow; I promise you won't be disappointed.) His heater is faster than any in the history of baseball, especially when you factor in his elite release extension. That extension adds deception and makes it hard to time up 103 MPH. It's already hard to time up 103 MPH, of course, but Misiorowski's delivery makes it even harder. That covers him.

But (again, perhaps surprisingly) Misiorowski isn't even the Brewers hurler who best makes hitters late on his heat. That honor goes, instead, to an unlikely candidate: DL Hall. The southpaw reliever has been hunting for velocity he lost to injuries for years now, but he induces late swings on 39% of his four-seamers and sinkers, good for 13th of those 259 qualifying pitchers. That's remarkable, but the reason for it is remarkably simple: Hall is a hurler with lots of pitches, who works mostly in relief. Specifically, he throws both the sinker and the four-seamer, plus a changeup with about 10 MPH of separation from his heat and three flavors of breaking ball. For a guy opponents only see once in most outings, that's a dazzling array. It makes it very hard to sit on a fastball, and because Hall has two distinct heaters, even a hitter sitting on that speed has to wait an extra millisecond or two to decide which one he's attacking. This is the power of pitch mix (and a role that limits one's exposure) in action. (It also doesn't hurt that Hall, too, has exceptionally good extension.)

Next among the Brewers, though just one spot ahead of Misiorowski on the leaderboard, is another lefty: Kyle Harrison. We've already talked at length about what has made his fastball such a weapon this year, but let's briefly touch on it again. By slightly raising his arm slot to get into a position where he can better tunnel the fastball with his slurve (and perfecting the spin mirroring on those two pitches), he's made it almost impossible for a batter to recognize either offering early. They differ in speed by about 13 MPH, so if the hitter can't commit to either pitch right out of the hand, they're likely to get caught in-between, both in terms of timing and in terms of the X-Y movement of bat and ball. Harrison is getting late swings on 35% of his heaters, virtually identical to Misiorowski's rate, despite throwing about 5 MPH slower.

Finally, there's Chad Patrick. That name, too, might surprise you, but he's gotten late swings on 31% of swings against his four-seamer and sinker this year, good for 47th on the list. The reason here is simple, too: Everyone has to be ready for his cutter. That's the pitch Patrick throws most often, and it's about 5 MPH slower than his two true fastballs. Thus, hitters can't let themselves get all the way to those offerings very much. They're usually sitting cutter, which means that in addition to being late when he throws the sinker or four-seamer, they're usually underneath those pitches (41% of the time, easily above the league average) and often either jammed or getting the ball off the end of the bat. In fact, in this quartet, Patrick is the best at finding his way off the center of the barre with his fastballs by tying hitters up. Much of that goes back to what I wrote about earlier this year: being willing and able to throw glove-side sinkers and arm-side cutters, as well as the more natural, opposite locations.

Working east and west. Changing speeds often. Getting down the mound in an extraordinary way. Maximizing deception. There are a lot of ways to disrupt timing; that's why pitchers get hitters out most of the time. The Brewers have four aces in this aspect of the game this year, and while they're not all the guys you might first guess, these four hurlers have driven much of the team's success on the mound, by making hitters be late early and often.