They want you to believe that good hitting in the game of baseball means being disciplined about which pitches to swing at and which to ignore. They tell you not to “chase”; they want you to swing only at pitches “in the zone.” No, it’s worse than that: they want you to actually swing only at pitches in the slightly inner part of the zone – the middle part – until the count of balls and strikes forces you to be as defensive as a hockey goalie. And who are they? Scolders! Idiots! Fun killers! To these freaks, taking a powerful overhead log-splitting hack at a fastball headed for the backstop is bad and wrong, even if everyone else agrees that it’s awesome and pretty cool.
Where would Nationals All-Star shortstop C.J. Abrams be today if he had followed these baseball greats’ advice? Yes, sure, if he wasn’t in the ninth percentile of the league Pursuit in percentage He probably should be hitting better than .246 this season. And yes, okay, have it your way: 17 of Abrams’ 18 home runs on the season have been successful On pitches inside the strike zone. But look at how you’ve gotten yourself ensnared, like a Wookiee caught in an Ewok’s rope net, by reaching too eagerly for the lower, uh, niggling meat of statistical reasoning. Because that’s the point: The numbers tell us that if C.J. Abrams shared your disdain for pitches that cross the plate more than four feet high, he would never have hit Hayden Birdsong’s furious eye-height sinker, and so he would have had one less dinger this season:
This birdsong fastball, at 4.42 feet, was for some time the highest pitch hit for a dinger in 2024, and the fourth-highest in the Statcast era. per Sarah Langs“I don’t know how he hit the ball. Good for him,” Birdsong said. said after the game“But not a lot of people are hitting that ball.”
Abrams wasn’t even sure what happened. “I was confused why I swung,” he said of his improbable dinger, according to MASN Sports. “But I was happy I did it.”
Abrams’ top spot on this particular leaderboard lasted about two weeks. In the second inning of a Thursday night contest that didn’t matter at all for the season, Los Angeles Angels pitcher Mike Bauman missed a 1-2 fastball against Ernie Clement of the Toronto Blue Jays. It was meant for chasing, but at the height at which it was thrown, most people would have considered it non-contestable, a futile effort. As catcher Matt Thaiss lobbed the ball to keep it from hitting the home plate umpire’s forehead (or possibly from going straight into the backstop’s protective net), Clement got really inspired and cut it up, somehow connected the ball with the barrel of his bat, and lobbed the ball into left field:
“I have never seen anything like this before,” accepted “I just said, ‘Oh, my God,’ to everybody in the dugout,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said.
Clement said after the game, “I probably shouldn’t swing at pitches like that.” To this I said: Who says that? Clement – Who says that statcast location in the second percentile in MLB’s chase percentage, and also in hard hit percentage, and in the first percentile in walk rate – should find myself repeating the very wise and truthful Wayne Gretzky’s statement that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. Translated into baseball-ese, that means you fail to smoke mondo dingers on 100 percent of the pitches you don’t swing at. Yes, even the ones that land at an astonishing height of 4.6 feet off the ground.
It’s hard to believe, but Clement’s heroic dinger still trails the record for the highest pitch hit for a home run in the Statcast era. In 2022, Kyle Higashioka dinged a pitch that was about an inch higher than Clement’s pitch at the point of contact. But where Clement hit his absurd homer against a pitch traveling at 97 mph, Higashioka, who was with the New York Yankees at the time, put up his prodigious and historic rip against a ball traveling at just a third of that speed.
The Yankees were thoroughly beating the Chicago Cubs in the final game of the New York sweep on June 12. In the eighth inning, with his team already trailing 17-4, Cubs manager David Ross decided to use journeyman utility scomo Frank Schwindel as his pitcher to save the arms of his pitching staff. It was the second of three career appearances on the mound for Schwindel, all from that season, all blowout losses. Schwindel did not have what one might consider juice as a pitcher. The fastest pitch he threw in that inning was about 53 mph; MLB think over Every one of his six deliveries against the Yankees were fives. The first of these, to Higashioka, floated home at just 35 mph.
Higashioka, who had already hit a dinger earlier in the game, was ready for the night to be over; at any rate he didn’t think he’d have to show much sense about swinging at one of those inflatable soap bubbles. “It was a lot of fun,” he said Later admitted“Someone once told me, the key to hitting the knuckle ball is, ‘Stay back, stay back, stay back.’ So that’s what I was trying to do there. I saw the ball coming in and thought, ‘Yeah, I can hit that.'” And he did: The ball fell at neck height, and Higashioka threw it to left:
Distribute your praise as you please. Maybe Clemente had more difficulty getting his barrel up at forehead height on a 97 mph pitch, or maybe Higashioka had to try too hard to provide exit velocity on a pitch that was headed nearly straight down at the contact point. To this day, the eephus delivered by Schwindel to Higashioka is both the highest and slowest pitch ever hit for a home run in the Statcast era, Per MLB.Pour it into your pipe and drink it, pipe-smoking baseball fanatic! You can’t get your name in the record books like that if you’re not willing to take some risks.