Dominating Strikes

Amateur baseball analysts are very enamored of the "swinging strike" statistic, a count of how many pitches a pitcher throws which are swung at and missed by the hitter. And for good reason! Throwing strikes is, obviously, an important thing for a pitcher; if you don't do it, you just end up walking people. But you can, strangely, throw "too many strikes," creating a situation where the hitters know they're going to get a hittable pitch and that they should therefore swing at it, and you aren't walking anyone but you're giving up hit upon hit upon hit. The solution is, of course, the swinging strike. If you have pitches that are good enough to induce swinging strikes, you can throw "too many strikes" and get away with it. They'll know a strike is coming, but not be able to do anything about it. And, of course, swinging strikes lead to strikeouts. So there are lots of strategic reasons for liking swinging strikes, but they're also just symbolically important. A swinging strike represents pure and utter dominance by the pitcher. You threw a pitch, the batter thought it was good enough to merit a swing, and yet they failed so miserably at the very most central aspect of hitting that they didn't even hit the ball at all. Not even weakly. Not even so weakly that they fouled it back. They just missed it. Poof. Fail. Pitcher 1, Hitter 0.

Called strikes do not have that same feeling of dominance. Well, not all called strikes. A first-pitch fastball down the middle is not particularly dominating. The hitter just didn't want to swing at it. We don't know whether the hitter would've hit it well had they swung at it. It also didn't do a particularly impressive job of disadvantaging the hitter. No more than, say, a foul home run. A called strike is as much a choice by the hitter as it is a demonstration of skill by the pitcher: for whatever reason, he didn't want to swing, even though the pitch was in the zone. Okay, fine. Except, sometimes that's a choice no hitter would ever make. Sometimes you know for a fact that the hitter wasn't okay with the result "called strike," that something more must have been going on. Because no hitter ever wants to take strike three called.* When that happens, you just plain lose the battle, and you have to go sit down. If the hitter had known the pitch would be a strike, and had been able to swing at it, they would have done so. We know that of every called third strike. Which means that either the pitch fooled the batter into thinking it was a ball or it did something to them that prevented them from swinging at it, though they wanted to. In other words, it necessarily involves some domination of the hitter by the pitcher. It's not as physical domination as a swinging strike; for all we know, had the hitter managed to swing they would have hit a home run off that pitch. It might have been very hittable, had it only been hit at. But it wasn't, though it needed to be.

So I'd like to see a new statistic, a slight modification of the "swinging strike" count. It is, obviously, swinging strikes plus called third strikes. That is a measure, to my mind, of a pitcher's ability to beguile hitters, to overpower hitters, and to do every combination of the two. The great pitchers often have a specific pitch that reliably gets them strikeouts looking. Greg Maddux developed the tailing fastball over the inside corner to a lefty. Anyone with a great curveball, like the ones that Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw have showed off in this year's post-season, will be able to drop it into the center of the strike zone, disrupting the hitter's timing and making them abandon any thought of swinging long before the pitch crosses the plate. The called third strike is the only other pitch besides the swinging strike where the pitcher unambiguously demonstrates their superiority to the hitter, and we should have a statistic that counts both methods of dominating hitters equally.