Fastballs That Got Crushed
I pick out starting pitchers whose fastball got barreled up at high rates in 2024, and I suggest what that could mean for 2025
I’m writing up Taj Bradley in the Rays preview, and I noticed that his four-seam fastball got absolutely torched last season.
He gave up a 14.9% Brl% and a .396 xwOBA on the pitch, surrendering a dozen homers on 957 offerings. A lot of people take that as a very bad thing for his future. And it is a bad sign to some degree. Clearly, this was not an elite pitch (although the SwStr% and Strike% were both pretty solid). He might have been tipping it, or maybe it just does not have the movement needed to avoid the barrel of the bat when a hitter can spot it.
In any case, one thing I can say is that he is unlikely to repeat this bad performance on the pitch next year. So that’s what I’m here to tell you about.
To prove my point, I went into the data and picked out every SP who gave up at least a 12% Brl% on their four-seam fastball from 2021-2023, and then I checked on what happened with the pitch the next year. I required at least 75 balls in play on the pitch for both years in order to do the comparison.
I found 73 examples. The data is here.
I have asked myself some questions and then answered them below.
Question #1: Did They Improve Next Year?
Yes. 77% of the pitchers saw their Brl% allowed come down the next year. 40% of them saw their Brl% allowed drop at least four points.
The biggest changes:
The average change a 3.1-point reduction.
Question #2: Did Anybody Get Even Worse?
Yes! 13 (18% of the sample) pitchers actually gained another point the following here. Here they are:
Question #3: Were They Still Worse Than the League?
The league average Brl% allowed on a four-seam fastball (the easiest pitch to barrel, mind you) is 10.0%. The average Brl% for the bad years (when they were allowing at least a 12% Brl%) was 14%, four points above that average. The following year, the average of this group of pitchers was 10.9%. That’s still almost a full point above the league average, but you can see how much closer to the average they got.
30 of the pitchers (41%) were able to get their Brl% allowed down to at least the league average. Here are those names:
Question #4: What Is Our Conclusion?
Barrel rates allowed tend to regress toward the mean. We’ve known this for a long time, and I talk about it all the time. But it’s very true even at the individual pitch level, and no pitch is thrown more and barreled more than the four-seam fastball. So this is a good pitch to zoom in on.
Question #5: Which Pitchers Are Most Relevant for 2025?
Knowing what we know now, we can target (or at least upgrade) pitchers who has four-seamers with high Brl% last year. There are 32 total pitchers who allowed at least a 13% Brl% on their four-seamers (at least 75 pitches thrown again). I’ve highlighted a dozen of them as fantasy-relevant SPs for 2025 that we should be upgrading a bit in our rankings.
The names I am most interested in this year would be the guys who posted strong K-BB% (imagine that!) while they were doing this. Those guys:
Taj Bradley (19.3%)
Bryce Miller (17.9%)
George Kirby (20.1%)
Carlos Rodon (18.8%)
Reid Detmers (19.7%)
Yusei Kikuchi (22.0%)
Ben Brown (20.3%)
While we’re here, it’s (sort of) safe to say the opposite is also true. Meaning that if a pitcher gave up a very low Brl% on their four-seamer last year, they’re likely to get worse in that in 2025. Here are some of those names:
Max Fried 4.5%
Nick Martinez 4.5%
Yariel Rodriguez 4.9%
Jordan Montgomery 5.2%
Justin Steele 5.4%
Luis Severino 5.5%
Bryan Woo 5.5%
Grayson Rodriguez 5.8%
Hunter Greene 5.8%
Hunter Brown 6.2%
Fried and Steele have proven themselves to be pitchers that somehow can avoid the barrel. They have done it repeatedly and consistently, so some guys do have this skill. I wouldn’t worry too much about those two names. The names you don’t like seeing here would be Nick Martinez, Luis Severino, Hunter Greene, and Hunter Brown. With Martinez and Greene, any upward movement on barrels allowed will turn into homers in a hurry in that home ballpark. Severino has also landed in a park that could turn out to be pretty brutal for the long ball (but we don’t know that for sure).
There you go! Hope this helps. I’m going back to the Rays preview.