Originally Posted on the Previous Iteration of Baseball.FYI by Daniel R. Epstein, @depstein1983
There is a 2,000-year-old story in the Talmud about a person who promised to convert to Judaism on one condition— a rabbi had to teach the entire Torah whilst standing on one foot. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will attempt the baseball version of this challenge. Can modern baseball be explained in just one at-bat? If so, which one?
It’s not easy to choose. It would have to encapsulate many of the modern trends of today’s game. It also needs to capture the thrill and excitement of how a game— or playoff series— can change with one swing. Joy, heartbreak, controversy, uncanny athleticism— all must be prominently displayed.
Game 2 of the Yankees’ series clincher in Cleveland on Wednesday, September 30 gave us just such an at-bat in the fourth inning. With the Indians leading 4-1, starting pitcher Carlos Carrasco allowed a triple and two walks to start the inning. Acting manager Sandy Alomar, Jr. brought in his best reliever, James Karinchak, to face Gio Urshela— potentially the lead run in a bases-loaded, no-out situation of an elimination game.
0-0: Karinchak’s Stuff
Urshela is late on a 96 mph fastball, fouling it off for strike one.
By definition, there is no worse position for a pitcher than bases loaded with no one out. On average, 2.292 runs score in that situation, and at least one run scores 86.1 percent of the time. A manager’s best chance is to bring in a pitcher with strikeout stuff, and there’s hardly anyone more qualified than Karinchak.
I wrote about Karinchak last month at Baseball FYI in a post titled “The Two Most Unhittable Pitchers in Baseball,” (the other being Milwaukee’s Devin Williams). That headline alone tells you what you need to know, but I’ll reuse a quote from the Baseball Prospectus prospect team. “It’s hard to describe Karinchak without resorting to complete hyperbole. His fastball and curveball are both true plus-plus offerings bordering on 8s (on the 2-8 scouting scale).”
Armed with two truly elite pitches, he struck out opponents more often than anyone else in the American League in 2020. He generated 53 K’s on just 109 batters faced— a strikeout rate of 48.6 percent. The next highest in the AL was teammate Shane Bieber’s 41.1 percent, which is a significant gap between first place and second. He recorded 81 outs this year, giving him 17.67 K/9, which ties an MLB record for relievers (Devin Williams this season and Aroldis Chapman in 2014). Basically, that’s an average of two strikeouts per inning. When just about any ball in play means at least one run, he’s exactly the right man for the job.
0-1: The Rise in Strikeouts
Another elevated 96 mph fastball, but this time Urshela lays off for ball one.
Karinchak is at the far right end of the strikeout bell curve, but he represents a major difference in today’s game from previous generations. Strikeouts are WAY up from where they used to be, especially by relief pitchers. MLB bullpens accumulated a league-wide 24.1 percent strikeout rate in 2020. That’s a new record, which is unsurprising because they set a new record just about every year. It was 20.3 percent in 2010, 17.9 percent in 2000, 16.1 percent in 1990… you get the idea.
No one threw quite like Karinchak in the 1990s— especially out of the bullpen. Most old school relievers were basically just bad starters whose teams didn’t want them to throw as many innings. Many of them topped out in the 80s with their fastballs. That simply doesn’t happen anymore. With rare exceptions, you can’t even get close to the majors these days without throwing at least in the low 90s. MLB average fastball velocity for relievers was 93.5 mph this season. The first year it was tracked was 2002, when it was 89.9 mph. Presumably, it was significantly lower in prior decades.
That’s not to say there weren’t outstanding relievers back then. On the contrary, the Dennis Eckersleys and Goose Gossages stood out that much more because there were much larger gaps between them and their peers. Karinchak possesses stuff that would have been nearly impossible to develop in Rollie Fingers’ era, and while he’s certainly at the top of the heap, the whole heap stands much taller than relievers of yesteryear.
That’s precisely one of the reasons why strikeouts are so much more common than they used to be. ALL relievers have strikeout stuff nowadays. Batters can’t just feast on soft-tossing middle relievers anymore. Karinchak is merely the poster boy for a larger trend of increased pitcher quality, especially in the bullpens.
1-1: Tunneling
Karinchak freezes Urshela with the first curveball of the at-bat. The pitch appears to catch the bottom of the strike zone, but the umpire calls ball two.
The beauty of Karinchak’s fastball/curveball combination is how they complement each other so perfectly. Other pitchers throw 96, and other pitchers have big 12-6 curves, but hardly anyone uses them to disguise each other better than him.
Three years ago, Baseball Prospectus introduced the concept of “pitch tunneling.” The idea is to throw different types of pitches that have similar initial trajectories, then diverge after the batter decides to swing or not. A fastball like Karinchak’s travels from his hand to the plate in about 0.4 seconds. The batter has 0.1 seconds to decide whether or not to swing and 0.3 seconds to actually do so. If the fastball and curveball look identical in that first 0.1 seconds, the batter is basically guessing.
When he’s locating well, Karinchak nearly perfects the art of pitch tunneling. He throws his fastball up in the strike zone and his curveball down.
In the Urshela at-bat, Karinchak started with two elevated fastballs. The third pitch was a curve, but it looked just like the fastballs until it started to break, by which point the batter was helpless. This was the best pitch of the at-bat and it should’ve been called strike two, but unfortunately, pitch framing is also important, and catcher Roberto Peréz tried to block it like it was bouncing in the dirt. The umpire doesn’t give Karinchak the borderline call.
2-1: The Decline in Batting Average
Karinchak drops another curve on Urshela, who fails to check his swing. Strike two.
We’ve discussed Karinchak at length thus far, but haven’t delved into Urshela very much. He’s a very good hitter who slashed .314/.355/.534 last year and .298/.368/.490 in 2020. That’s about 33 percent better than the league-average batter. Nevertheless, he’s looked foolish so far in this at-bat. He’s clearly guessing fastball on this pitch, thinks he sees one, starts to swing, then realizes too late it’s a curve and tries to hit the emergency brakes. Given the missed call on the previous pitch, this should have been the third strike.
Perhaps it’s unfair for Urshela to be the representative of declining batting average— he hit .310 over the last two years after all. This is really about Karinchak, though. When a pitcher with quality stuff is on his game, even the best hitters can’t do anything about it. Urshela may as well have been swinging a toothpick through this point in the at-bat— the pitcher was in complete control.
With a few exceptions, slap-and-dash contact hitters became endangered at the same time as junkball relievers. That isn’t a coincidence. With increased velocity— not to mention mind-bending breaking and offspeed pitches as well as precise pitch tunneling— it’s substantially harder to just make contact these days. Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs didn’t have to contend with anyone like James Karinchak on a regular basis. Once again, that doesn’t diminish their greatness at all, but pitching has undoubtedly gotten much, much tougher to hit.
2-2: Increased Walks
Karinchak throws a 55-foot curveball that bounces in front of the plate for ball three.
There is a downside to throwing like Karinchak: a high walk rate. 16 of his 109 batters faced this season reached on a free pass (though one was intentional). That’s a 14.7 percent walk rate— roughly one in seven batters or a little more than one every two innings. There are three reasons for this:
- Precision- As shown with pitch #3 above, sometimes a pitch can be too perfect. The downside of working on the top and bottom margins of the strike zone is that umpires are fallible humans. Sometimes, missed calls work in the pitcher’s favor. Other times, they don’t.
- Imprecision- Being unhittable cuts two ways. On pitch #4, he was unhittable because the pitch was nowhere near the plate. Karinchak throws incredibly hard from an insanely difficult over-the-top release point. Replicating that delivery on every pitch is simply impossible. This pitch missed badly. It happens.
- Worthwhile Tradeoff- In spite of his high walk rate, the Cleveland coaching staff wouldn’t want him to change a thing. He may have walked 16 batters, but only 14 collected base hits. A walk may be as good as a single, but if you only give up one and not the other, you’re in good shape. Given his pitching style, free passes are a necessary byproduct of crazy strikeouts and low hit totals. Besides, if he can strike everyone else out anyway, who cares if he strands a runner on first? Of course, that assumes a clean inning, not the bases loaded, no-out mess he inherited here.
Once again, Karichak is in a class by himself, but there are many other high-strikeout relievers in a similar mold. Those guys give up plenty of walks, too. When you can generate outs with swings-and-misses, it’s preferable to nibble the corners on a full count rather than throw a fastball down the middle that might get crushed. Speaking of which…
3-2: Dingers
Plot twist!
As we explored with pitch tunneling, Karinchak thrives on high fastballs and low curveballs because of how similar they appear to the batter. That pattern worked extremely well through the first four pitches of the at-bat.
The deciding pitch was a low fastball at 96 mph. That takes a different tunnel, which is immediately recognizable to Urshela. As soon as the pitch leaves Karinchak’s hand, he can tell it’s not like the others; there’s no guesswork.
Most of this article has described how much better pitching has become over the years, but the hitters have improved too. They see a lot fewer bad pitches than their predecessors. If there’s maybe only one hittable pitch in a given at-bat, the batter needs to treat it with extreme violence. They can’t afford to waste a mistake pitch or even try to slap a single up the middle. They probably won’t get a second opportunity.
The result is the home run craze. In 2019, four teams surpassed the single-season home run record of 264, previously held by the 1997 Mariners. The Twins and Yankees both eclipsed 300. Of course, there are other reasons for the increase in dingers– such as the juiced ball— but each baseball only flies as far as the batter tries to hit it. More than ever, batters step into the box with homers in mind.
That was certainly the case for Urshela, who was completely overmatched by Karinchak through the entire at-bat. But when he got a mistake pitch, it landed 432 feet away, deep in the left-center field stands. The Yankees took the lead 5-4 and would win the game 10-9, advancing to the Division Series. The prowess of both Karinchak and Urshela demonstrates so many of the trends in modern baseball, but also how the game is played at a much higher level than ever before. At least they don’t have to play standing on one foot!