Talk to any pitcher about command, and you might be surprised how imprecise they feel they can be. “I have command to one part of the zone, low and away,” said Javier Lopez. “Almost everyone has better command to one side of the plate or the other,” said Zack Greinke. Even Corey Kluber, who has great command of his breaking ball, said that he only aims his breaking ball for the beginning of the break, and then is at the whim of the actual break he gets for where the ball ends up. When Ben Lindbergh asked PITCHf/x how far the glove moves from target to ball on the average pitcher, they told him the glove moves 13 inches. When I asked for leaders on 3-0 counts, it was Dallas Keuchel… with a nine inch average.
So command is a general thing. And yet… there is such a thing as the useless pitch, the pitch with so little command that it serves no purpose. Pitches 2.5 feet from the center of the strike zone are balls 97% of the time. They very rarely get swings, and unless the pitch is behind the batter, they can’t serve much of a purpose if they don’t entice the hitter at all. The idea of the noncompetitive pitch was first mentioned by Jessica Mendoza and then statified by August Fagerstrom.
I ran correlations between non-competitive pitch percentage and walk rate (r2 = .085), strikeout-minus-walk rate (no significance), and soft hit rate (no significance), so at best, it’s a casually interesting way to try to quantify that elusive skill we call command. Let’s see what the leaderboards can tell us about this year’s best and worst at avoiding the noncompetitive pitch.
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