Red Sox Hitters Appreciate Slow Jams

The drumbeat about pace of play and the duration of major league baseball games has continued this season, and is getting to the point where some are welcoming ties into the standings. While I generally ignore this sort of stuff – sure quicker, shorter games would be nice, but they won’t increase my watching habits much – an article by Paul Swydan at FanGraphs points out that the Red Sox are a main offender of the dreaded turtle-speed play. Swydan shows that this season’s versions of the Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays are probably the two slowest teams in the history of baseball. That sentence brings back all the horror of the 4hr and 32min affair on Mother’s Day. Swydan focuses most of his article on the pitching side of things, but also points out that according to FanGraphs’ Pace measure, Red Sox batters have been taking their sweet time in-between pitches:

I can’t say that I noticed Red Sox players taking a lot of time to clean off their cleats, get their batting gloves tightened, and anticipate the next pitch, but it turns out they have been taking 1.4 seconds more between pitches than the league average. Couple that with the fact that Red Sox batters are seeing the third-most pitches per plate appearance and the ridiculous length of Red Sox’s games make sense. Interestingly, each of the top five teams in pitches-per-plate-appearance (Yankees, Twins, Red Sox, Rays, and Athletics) are found among the ten slowpokes above, but beyond that there is not much of a relation between those two measures (r = 0.35).

Recent research shows that taking more time between pitches could be beneficial for pitchers in terms of their fastball velocity, so why would batters want to do it? Well there is previous evidence that batters, particularly older batters, benefit from taking more time between pitches. Look again at those slowpoke batting groups in the table above and you may note that they are many of the stronger offenses in the game to this point in the season: by True Average (TAv) seven of the ten are above league average, with only the Tigers, Angels and Athletics falling below the mark. But contrary to the finding that older players in particular benefit from more time between pitches, those better hitting teams are not the older teams. In fact, the Tigers, Angels, and Athletics are on average three of the five oldest teams, but not really seeing the benefit of the extra time taken. Perhaps, as Swydan found with the pitching data, the positive effect of a slower pace does not clearly show up when evaluating things at the team level.

With that in mind, and given that we are focused on the Red Sox on this website, here are Pace, TAv, and Pitches/PA for Red Sox hitters who have accumulated at least 75 PA:

All told, I don’t see much of a relation between the player’s age and pace, or their pace and TAv, but there does appear to be a clear relation between seeing more pitches and hitting well. However, as with the team-age comparison made above, using aggregated data is not really the best way of looking into this situation. Using pitch-by-pitch information to compare outcomes on pitches where the batter took a lot of time getting back in the box, as compared to when they got right back in there is a much better approach – and exactly what Rob Arthur did in the articles linked above.

A positive note in all of this slow play for Red Sox fans is that while Red Sox hitters are taking a lot of time between pitches and seeing a lot of pitches in their plate appearances, they tend to eventually put the ball in play. To date, the Red Sox lead the way in making contact and accordingly have the lowest three-true-outcome percentage (TTO%) in baseball. This differentiates them from those other slowpoke, see-many-pitches-per-plate-appearance teams discussed earlier. The Rays, Yankees, and Athletics are frontrunners in ending their plate appearances with one of the three true outcomes (i.e., home run, walk, or strikeout); over 40% of Rays’ hitters plate appearances have ended with one of those three results. That can’t be much fun to watch. Knowing the Red Sox have a chance to string hits together and not wait for the three-run dinger is somewhat reassuring, albeit a difficult way to do offense in the current game.

In the end, I am not sure what to make of all of this. The Red Sox are slow, which can be junk to watch, except when it means they (might) perform better. For me, the pace of play is not a huge deal, but for a more causal fan, it is likely a deterrent and for that reason matters for the future of the sport. Unfortunately, with both hitters and pitchers apparently gaining something from taking more time between pitches, the slow pace is likely here to stay. If something leads to better on-field outcomes, or is even perceived to do so, players are likely to keep doing that thing. Remember Phiten necklaces?

With that said, the revelation of a slow-play-based pitching advantage is more recent. I wonder if, given that pitchers have perhaps found this advantage from taking more time, the batting advantage from taking more time, which was based on data from 2014, still holds. After all, league-wide BABIP is at its lowest point since the early 2000s and the strikeout rate is at its highest ever. In general, pitchers are dominating. Fortunately, the Red Sox’s offenses have still managed to be some of the best in these recent pitcher-dominated years, perhaps, at least partly, because they take their time between pitches.