During his 17-year Hall of Fame career, Rockies first baseman Todd Helton’s strikeout rate was 12.4%.
“For Todd, that was a walk of shame when he walked back to the dugout after a strikeout,” said Bill Mosiello, Helton’s hitting guru at the University of Tennessee and throughout Helton’s pro career.
Current Rockies first baseman Michael Toglia has a 33.5% K rate through his first 140 games.
My, how things have changed.
“It’s OK to strike out now,” Mosiello said.
Clearly.
In 2005, 16.4% of plate appearances in the major leagues ended in strike three. That number rose yearly until 2020 when it peaked at 23.4%. It currently sits at 22.5%.
The strikeout epidemic presents an especially daunting dilemma for the Rockies, whose 31.7% strikeout rate and 25.9% chase rate are the highest in the National League. Hitting coach Hensley “Bam Bam” Meulens knows those numbers must come down if Colorado hopes to turn around a lackluster offense that’s been a drag on the club for five seasons.
“We’re leading the league in strikeouts again, so it’s not gone well, at least when you look at it purely from a numbers standpoint,” Meulens said.
Evolving game
As bad as Colorado’s numbers are, however, Meulens insists there are many ways to look at all those strikeouts.
First, despite high strikeout rates for core players like Ezequiel Tovar, Brenton Doyle, Ryan McMahon and Toglia, their offensive production is up. Second, Meulens says that hitting a baseball in the majors has never been harder. Facing pitchers armed with upper-90s fastballs, plus an array of breaking balls and offspeed pitches, presents a huge challenge. And there are more high-velocity pitchers, with more weapons, than ever before.
Third, young hitters’ approach to the game, which emphasizes home runs and launch angle, has changed.
“With all of this, there are going to be, perhaps, more strikeouts than you want,” Meulens said. “But, at the same time, our best (hitters) all have over 15 home runs and they’re driving in more runs. They are helping turn the offense around a little bit.
“But still, I’m not sure how, or what we can do, to minimize the strikeouts. Because it seems like the more we talk about it, the more (strikeout-prone) they become. So I’m focused on the guys, encouraging them to have productive at-bats and trying to stay positive.”
Former Rockies outfielder Ryan Spilborghs, the team’s TV analyst since 2014, has done a deep dive into the strikeout epidemic. He mirrors Meulens’ views about pitchers’ domination of hitters but adds some others:
• The traditional “fastball count” is an endangered species, putting hitters on the defensive.
• Teams have fallen in love with big, physical players who tend to be more strikeout-prone.
• There are financial rewards to being a powerful slugger, even if the slugger whiffs a lot.
As the old baseball saying goes, “Home run hitters drive Cadillacs, singles hitters drive Fords.”
Spilborghs asks, rhetorically, “When’s the last time you saw a .300 hitter get paid a lot of money? Survey the average fan. Would they rather see (San Diego’s) Luis Arraez or (Philadelphia’s) Kyle Schwarber?
“Would you rather have a guy like Schwarber, who hits in the mid-200s but pops 40 homers, or a batting champ like Arraez? OPS (on-base percentage, plus slugging) matters now, not batting average. So if you don’t care about batting average, it means you don’t care about strikeouts.”
Toglia, who entered the weekend leading the Rockies with 19 homers, would like to whittle down his strikeouts, but his batting average doesn’t matter much to him.
“For me, the holy grail of stats is OPS,” he said. “If I can get on base and do damage, that’s all that matters. I think OPS pretty accurately reflects the player. There is more value in OPS than batting average.”
Exploding sliders
As baseball philosopher Crash Davis once said, “They throw ungodly breaking stuff in The Show. Exploding sliders.”
That’s never been more true. Couple that with ever-increasing fastball velocity, and the advantage has swung dramatically to pitchers. The Rockies experienced that during a four-game series last weekend in San Francisco. They struck out an astounding 53 times, the second-most for a four-game series in franchise history.
In the first game of last Saturday’s doubleheader, the Giants’ Blake Snell struck out a career-high 15 over six innings in the Giants’ 4-1 win.Snell, the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner, struck out 15 of 18 batters in his no-decision. In a spectacular encore performance, Snell threw a no-hitter against the Reds in Cincinnati on Friday night.
“Hitting is hard, man, and getting harder,” the Rockies’ McMahon said earlier this season. “Guys come in and throw in the upper 90s, and they can spin the ball like never before. And guys come out of the bullpen with that hot stuff late in the game.”
The average four-seam fastball velocity is 94.2 mph this year, matching 2023 and an increase from 91.1 mph in 2008. Last year, 3,880 pitches of 100 mph or higher were thrown. In 2008, there were 214.
According to a recent story by The Associated Press, spin rates on sliders, sweepers and slurves have increased from 2,106 revolutions per minute in 2015 to 2,475 this season, and the use of breaking pitches increased from 10.9% to 22.5%.
“Pitchers are evolving and adding pitch types to their arsenal,” Meulens said. “Look at the riding, two-seamer. In the past, you focused on the two-seam fastball as a sinker. Now, pitchers are making that pitch ride, and it’s going above hitters’ hands. That’s tough to handle.”
Friday night in San Diego, the Rockies faced rookie right-hander Randy Vasquez, who uses six pitches: a four-seam fastball, cutter, sinker, slider, curve and changeup. Atlanta ace Max Fried mixes seven pitches: four-seamer, sinker, cutter, slider, sweeper, curveball and changeup.
The percentage of fastballs — four-seamers, sinkers and cutters — is 55.5% this year, just above last season’s 55.4%. It was 62.5% in 2015.
That means hitters can’t hunt for fastballs like they used to. Not so long ago, a batter could gear up for a fastball on a 2-0, 3-1 or 3-0 count. Not anymore.
“There is no longer a fastball count,” Spilborghs insists. “Hitters can’t gear up for a fastball even though they should. That’s a pretty massive seachange. Why do you see more offspeed pitches? Because it leads to more swings and misses.”
Big sluggers, more K’s
Spilborghs offers another theory regarding the rise in strikeouts.
“This is my opinion, OK?” he said. “I think we have just gotten so focused on ‘showcase baseball.’ That means the type of athletes we’re seeing are bigger, stronger, faster than they have ever been. You watch batting practice and you see more guys hitting the ball out of the yard than we have ever seen.”
But there is a downside to the power, Spilborghs said.
“Big, strong guys have bigger, longer swings, and that leads to more swing and miss,” Spilborghs said. “So I think a lot of it has to do with personnel.
“I think organizations have drafted, at times, very poorly. They have drafted based on potential from these baseball showcases.”
Spilborghs sees some teams, notably the Guardians, Brewers and Red Sox, beginning to turn back the clock.
“Those teams are focusing on players who might not look the part, but they know how to hit,” he said. “When you’re shorter, you have a smaller strike zone. There are more contact-based players coming, guys who might not look like the next Mike Trout.
“I think it’s starting to trend that way a bit. You’re seeing some teams move away from the next 6-foot-5 stud athlete and toward a player who makes more consistent contact.”
Rockies predicament
Some teams, like the AL Central-leading Guardians, try to strike a balance. The Guardians have the fourth-fewest strikeouts in the majors (789) but the 12th most homers (123). The Rockies have hit 122 homers (15th), while their 1,068 strikeouts are the second-most behind Seattle’s 1,121.
Meulens, however, sees signs that the Rockies are improving. Doyle is slashing .269/.330./.473 with 18 home runs. He retooled his swing in the offseason and has drastically reduced his strikeout rate from 35% to 25.9% while increasing his walk rate from 5.1% to 7.9%.
Tovar, Colorado’s prized shortstop, is an ultra-aggressive hitter. He has not matched Doyle’s progress in terms of plate discipline. Tovar’s 62.4 swing percentage is the highest in the majors, and his 132 strikeouts are third-most. Tovar is striking out at a 27.8% clip, up from 20.7% last season. He’s also walking less (4.1% to 3.2%). Still, Tovar is slashing .286/.311/.485 with 18 home runs and is one of Colorado’s best run producers.
“Tovar just turned 23 (Thursday), so he’s still young,” Meulens said. “Tovar tells us all the time, ‘I don’t want to swing at that pitch outside all the time.’ Every day, all day, he talks about it, but then he goes out there and still does it.
“Very seldom does he go up there and take a pitch. He wants to hit. But little by little, you hope he gets some understanding that certain pitchers are not going to give them anything good to hit.”
Meulens said that most of Colorado’s young players are aggressive hitters, sometimes to a fault.
“We have multiple guys going up there, not trying to work the count,” he said. “They are going up there hitting, going up there swinging.
“But one of the things you want to be careful about as a coach is taking away that aggressiveness.”
Meulens said he’s encouraged but acknowledged that there’s a lot of work to be done in an era when K’s have become commonplace. He doesn’t want his players waving over the top of sliders falling out of the zone.
“That’s something we’ve talked about a lot in the two years I’ve been here,” Meulens said. “It’s got to get better.”
Toglia understands that, but he doesn’t want to go up to the plate handcuffed by the fear of swinging and missing.
“You can’t go up there thinking, ‘I’m not going to chase,’ ” he said. “That’s the mind battle of this game. If you’re trying not to do something, you’re more likely to do it. That’s what makes this game so tough, and that’s what makes hitting so tough.”
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