2020 Team Pitch Usage In Six Charts

This will be a visual post. Pitch type data, aggregated at a team-wide level by FanGraphs, has been visualized below in six different snapshots. These charts offer insight into how teams generally pitched in 2020 and where cases of outliers existed. Very simply, these charts aim to answer the question: who threw what, and how did those tendencies relate to the rest of the league?

Fastballs probably represent a good place to start. As such, below is the percentage of pitches by each team’s staff that were either two- or four-seam fastballs.

So fastballs are popular: all MLB pitching staffs threw fastballs between 40% and 60% of the time in 2020. Some teams considered to be particularly analytics-oriented, like the Dodgers, Athletics, and Brewers, in part occupy the top five in fastball usage. That said, the pitching development machine that is the Cleveland Indians organization utilized two- and four-seam fastballs more than only one other team, the Red Sox. It should be noted that cut fastballs are not included in this bar chart, which seemed sufficiently distinct to warrant their own chart later on.

Of course, fastball usage is not independent of other considerations, i.e. what grade of fastballs are at any given team’s disposal. As just one example of this point, the scatterplot below suggests that team-wide fastball velocity does in fact play at least some role in usage. The Dodgers, who tied for highest FB velocity among teams in 2020, employed seven players (Brusdar Graterol, Dustin May, Blake Treinen, Walker Buehler, Tony Gonsolin, Víctor González, and Jake McGee) who threw 95+ MPH fastballs on average while also contributing >20 regular season innings.

So there is a weak, but not insignificant, relationship between fastball usage and velocity at the team level in 2020. One obvious counter-example to that general relationship came courtesy of the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds (along with the Dodgers) had the hardest throwing staff in baseball in 2020, but threw fastballs just 48.5% of the time, or in the bottom third of baseball. Michael Lorenzen, Raisel Iglesias, and Tejay Antone all threw fastballs that averaged at least 95.7 MPH while each using those pitches 46.3% of the time (in the case of Iglesias) or less.

Meanwhile, offspeed pitch usage was more variable than that of fastballs.

Five teams (including the World Series champion Dodgers) generally spurned offspeed pitches, using them for just 10% of pitches or less. Conversely, the Giants used offspeed pitches nearly 4% more often than the next closest team.

While the variance in offspeed usage was greater than that of fastballs, breaking ball usage is more widely dispersed still. Breaking balls, in this case, include only pitches classified as curveballs and sliders; together, those two pitches made up anywhere between 20.1% and 40.6% of pitches delivered by a given staff in 2020.

The Athletics, who threw the second-highest percentage of fastballs and employed offspeed offerings at an above average rate, threw breaking balls the least of any team in 2020. The Twins, led by Matt Wisler (83.4% sliders), Sergio Romo (64.6% sliders), Rich Hill (46.2% curveballs), and Taylor Rogers (45.5% sliders), depended on breaking balls more than any other team.

The cut fastball, omitted earlier among two- and four-seam fastballs, is the final bar chart included here.

The Red Sox and Cubs were each bottom five teams in fastball usage above in large part due to their reliance on the cut fastball. That strategy worked better for the Cubs (4.04 xFIP, 8th overall) than the Red Sox (4.67 xFIP, 21st overall), but that point is rather spurious anyway. In all, the cutter wasn’t a significant part of a full third of teams’ plans, as 10 organizations relied on them 5% of the time or less.

Finally, a percentile breakdown across six different pitch classifications.

This is a succinct illustration of team pitch usage in a number of ways. For one, it highlights team preferences for one type of offering versus another. A strong negative correlation between slider and cut fastball usage, two pitches with fairly similar movement, suggests the two are generally treated as substitutes by teams, for instance. More fundamentally though, this contextualizes each team’s pitch usage amongst the field.