Know Your Averages 2024, Four-Seam Fastball Edition

It can be difficult to remember all these numbers. You hear phrases like “Garrett Crochet‘s four-seam fastball has a 15.7% swinging strike rate this season” or “Batters are chasing Cristopher Sánchez’s cutter 50% of the time!” Doing anything in baseball 50% of the time is typically standout behavior. Still, these quick statistical callouts can be hard to process without the baseline, or the average, ingrained in your mind. Luckily, sweet corners of the internet give us the data we need to process the things all these smart baseball people say without having to constantly hit the “-10 sec” button on our podcast episodes.

Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters

Alex Chamberlain’s Pitch Leaderboard is a great place to start. Of course, Baseball Savant offers endless opportunities to click, sort, and learn. But, now, you can also find Pitch Type Splits on our (New!) FanGraphs player pages. As you begin scrolling through this new plethora of aggregated pitch statistics, you may find it helpful to have a quick look at this season’s averages for comparison purposes. In this post, I’ll provide a visual of some of the more important pitch performance metrics and we’ll investigate a few pitches below, at, and above the average marks. Let’s begin with a visual:

 

Now, you get a sense of where to place Crochet’s fastball. A 15.7% swinging strike rate on a four-seam fastball is pretty dang good. Let’s look at pitches in different sections of the spectrum to get a sense of what’s what in 2024.

NOTE: The chart and table above do not include a minimum pitch qualifier. The players in the analysis below will fall under a 30-pitch minimum qualifier with some arbitrary author finagling.

 

Four-seam Fastball

—Zone%—

• Jordan Hicks – 33.7%
• Simeon Woods Richardson – 54.5%
• Max Scherzer – 69.9%

Questions or comments?: Scherzer still says, “Come and get it.”

 

—Swing%—

• Kyle Bradish – 25.8%
• Sonny Gray – 47.9%
• Shawn Armstrong – 68.1%

Questions or comments?: Why was no one swinging at Kyle Bradish’s four-seamer? Oddly enough, his CallStr% was an above-average 25.8%, making his CSW% (CallStr%+Whiff%) an excellent 32.6%. This is an example of why CSW% is a great statistic.

 

—SwStr%—

• Martín Pérez – 1.4%
• Bryce Elder – 10.1%
• Paul Skenes – 18.6%

Questions or comments?: Now is a good time to check out Martín Pérez’s player page and view his four-seamer pitch splits. Last season, he recorded a 6.8% SwStr% on his four-seamer. It is currently at a career-low with this 1.4% mark. The pitch also has a 100% zone contact rate. His ERA currently sits at 5.15 (5.78 xERA). Yikes!

 

—CallStr%—

• Jordan Hicks – 2.4%
• Pablo López – 16.7%
• Elieser Hernández – 37.1%

Questions or comments?: Jordan Hicks doesn’t get called strikes, but (above) he’s not putting it in the zone.

 

—CSW%—

• Jordan Hicks – 10.8%
• Gavin Stone – 26.9%
• Jack Flaherty – 36.1%

Questions or comments?: Jordan Hicks again!? He’s not getting called strikes, he’s not putting it in the zone and simply having such a low CallStr% will bring his CSW% down. But, with a SwStr% below average at 8.4%, we see why he doesn’t throw the four-seamer all that often (5.2%). Jack Flaherty has above-average CallStr% and SwStr% creating a nicely balanced pitch.

 

—Chase%—

• Trevor Williams – 11.1%
• Grayson Rodriguez – 20.2%
• Joe Ross – 32.8%

Questions or comments?: Joe Ross peppers the top part of the zone with high velocity (94.6 MPH) and hitters climb the ladder looking for a hit. That makes his SwStr% go up, but his CallStr% go down. The times when he misses and places it in the zone can be harmful. While the Statcast xBA on the pitch is .238, the xSLG is .474. His ERA for the year is 4.50.

 

We’ll let the fun continue next week when I replicate this article for sinkers. Until then, know your averages and click around Chamberlain’s leaderboard and the pitch type splits on your favorite pitcher.