Doing 95 in Your Blind Spot: The Pitch Twins Pitchers Use to Make Opposing Hitters Cover a Bigger Zone - Caretaker Exclusive

[Matthew Trueblood]

Hitters hate this one weird trick.

Image courtesy of © Bruce Kluckhohn-Imagn Images

span>Though he's fundamentally a competitive, instinctual hurler, Chris Paddack has no problem switching into a more cerebral mode when it comes to his favorite subtopic: being a fastball pitcher, and locating that pitch up and away from opposing batters.

"I call it the blind spot, because I feel like there’s not a lot of guys who work on hitting up-and-away pitches," Paddack said Wednesday afternoon, inside the Twins clubhouse at Target Field. "Usually, you see them working on the tee down in the zone, or top-of-the-zone heaters from tee work or flips, or against the machine, but you don’t ever see them trying to extend their hands."

You can quibble with Paddack's results, or even with the logical underpinnings of his theory, but you can't accuse him of not being committed to the concept. Some 147 right-handed pitchers have thrown at least 100 fastballs this season. Among them, Paddack throws the largest share of his high and to the glove side—that is, the outside edge of the plate to righties, or the inner edge to lefties.

Nor is the efficacy of that pitch, in broad strokes, up for much debate. Right behind Paddack on this (carefully defined) leaderboard is Tyler Mahle, the ex-Twins righty who now toils for the Rangers. Mahle had a few pitching nerds a bit stumped Monday, when Thomas Nestico shared the leaderboard for in-zone whiff rate against fastballs—topped not by any of the league's hardest-throwing or most famous fireballers, but by Mahle.

Mahle's heater doesn't even have as much life on it as Paddack's, which itself is not beating hitters with its raw velocity. He gets all those whiffs because, by and large, hitters really do have a blind spot when it comes to pitchers consistently executing the high fastball to their glove side. Hurlers who can do that gain a small but crucial advantage. Their opponents feel more defensive, like they're trying to cover a larger strike zone and can't commit as readily to a swing that will do so. Within the top 10 on the same leaderboard, even in their old age and having lost some of their ability to fire into that corner, are Jacob deGrom and Justin Verlander, each of whom benefited enormously from creating that kind of discomfort at their peaks. Throwing your fastball high and to the glove side can make a mediocre pitcher average, an average pitcher good, and a good pitcher downright great.

Paddack's fastball consistently rates as average-ish, in Stuff models. When he commands it to that quadrant, though, it plays up. Indeed, because it bakes in his locations, Baseball Prospectus's PitchPro rates Paddack's fastball better than its location-agnostic StuffPro does, both this season and for his career. Not only that, but the more he hammers away at that high, glove-side target, the better his StuffPro is. This year, it's been a better-than-average pitch, as illustrated by the new graphics that capture a pitcher's arsenal at a glance on BP's invaluable player cards.

"There are a couple of guys that do get to that pitch fairly well, and targeting in is better than away," Paddack acknowledged, "but I would say a majority of the time, there’s more swing-and-miss up and away, just because there’s not a lot of guys that also can command their fastball to that quadrant."

While he's the league's preeminent practitioner of the pitch, though, Paddack is far from alone in that Twins clubhouse in understanding the importance of the blind-spot fastball.

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