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Every July, a handful of familiar archetypes of player and role become transiently, disproportionately popular. It’s not like you can go months without hearing the phrase “controllable starter”, but in late July, you can’t go hours without hearing it. Everyone spends the run-up to the trade deadline either receiving frantic calls about their controllable starters, or shopping for them. “Right-handed power” also seems to get trotted out with strange frequency. I can find no evidence and can offer no logical theory for the idea that right-handed power is in unusually short supply in the middles of seasons, rather than during the winter, but it seems to get talked about more often. Maybe watching opposing lefties expose the frailties of a left-leaning lineup throughout the first half of a season makes teams and/or reporters especially aware of the need for lineup balance around the trade deadline. Some teams talk about hunting power arms. Some talk about diversifying their bullpen to give opponents a tougher look. There’s one archetype you hear about noticeably less than you used to, though, because it’s simply going extinct: the ground-ball guy.
Pitches can influence how often batters hit the ball on the ground. Their movement profiles and their command have a major effect on how often and how effectively hitters can elevate. There’s a limit on that influence, though. If a hitter builds their swing and hones their approach with the goal of hitting a fly ball, even a heavy sinker can’t necessarily prevent them from doing it. Then, too, there’s the way those tendencies interact in matchups: Research has shown that batted-ball proclivities work the same way against one another that handedness does. Opposite tendencies favor the batter; matching tendencies favor the pitcher. Over the last decade, we’ve seen fly-ball hitters populate the majors and neutral hitters engineer themselves into being more fly ball-oriented. Thus, ground-ball pitchers have harder work to do, and are less effective, on average. In turn, they’re less common—and less extreme. Faced with a choice between adding a pitch (or adjusting one’s mix) with the goal of increasing ground-ball rate or doing so with the focus on whiffs and even leaning toward inducing fly balls, more and more hurlers are opting (rationally) for the latter.
Here’s a chart showing the 1st, 25th, 50th, 75th and 100th-percentile ground-ball rates among pitchers with 50 or more innings, for each season of the pitch-tracking era. For fun, I’ve also added the names of the pitchers who posted each of those values.
