Everything in moderation. Except breaking balls.
Earlier in the week, I wrote an article about the pitches Nick Castellanos is seeing this season (as well as about failed McDonald’s burgers from the 80’s and 90’s; do read it if you’re curious about defunct fast food promos). Commenter folesandpederson responded with an interesting note: “They ain’t pitching to Castellanos since Harper has been out… All junk”. Harper’s visit to the purgatory of the injured list has been seen in all sorts of highly visible ways: his absence from the lineup announcements, the team’s lack of punch, the slight downcast look which you can spot on the Phanatic’s snouted face if you catch him in a quiet moment, steadying himself between the hot dog launch and the dugout dance. But what about the less visible ways?
It stands to reason that without Harper’s hefty bat in the lineup, opposing moundsmen might feel emboldened, altering their approach to give the Bryceless Fightins’ less to hit. So what if they take a base on balls? Your dear MV3 is at home, watching Seinfeld reruns (more likely he’s ferociously rehabbing while taking the occasional break to film a TikTok in which he bakes a bundt cake with raw milk, but that’s not as punchy as a taunt).
Of course, just because something stands to reason doesn’t mean we ought to assume it’s really happening. This is baseball; we have obscene gobs of data available for the perusal, and we might as well use them. So let’s take a look at how the pitches the Phillies are seeing have changed since Bryce went down.
Harper was injured on the 27th of May at the hands of Spencer Strider, as devious and conniving as his name is alliterative, and a testament to the fact that not all who play for Atlanta are truly worthy of the nickname they claim (actually, I’ve only ever heard good things about Strider, but I suspect that few readers of a Phillies blog will object to my dubious characterization). Harper played a few games in June before heading to the injured list. Statcast does keep track of pitch type percentage by game, but for ease of reference we’ll look at month-to-month change between May and June, with the caveat that the latter isn’t entirely made up of Bryceless games, and as such the results may be slightly biased. (All data prior to Saturday night’s game, and please note that the tables may not show up properly on mobile).
Most of the Phillies are seeing more breaking balls in this summer of our discontent. As TGP writer Anthony noted a few days ago, the Phillies tend to struggle with those. And the three Phillies with the biggest increase in breaking balls are the trio that typically bats around Harper: Bryson Stott, Trea Turner, and Kyle Schwarber, giving us evidence that pitchers really are changing their approach to take advantage of Harper’s need for recuperation. Interestingly enough, Castellanos, despite his well-known vulnerability to the breaking ball, is not seeing more of them month-over-month, being one of just three Phillies seeing fewer of them in June. But that may be more noise than signal; the game plan against Castellanos was already to throw him as many breaking balls as is remotely reasonable, such that there was nowhere for their number to go but down, and the slight decrease in their number seems likely to be happenstance rather than strategy. As for Sosa and Marchán, their relatively slight number of plate appearances means that the fluctuation is probably attributable to small sample size more than anything else.
The data on offspeed pitches doesn’t show quite as clear of a signal as the breaking ball data. Of the Phillies that have played across May and June (sans the young Mr. Kemp, who made his debut in the latter month), exactly half have seen more offspeed pitches month-over-month, and half have seen fewer. The biggest change belongs to Sosa; again, this is probably just small sample size. The largest among the regulars belongs to Max Kepler, and given where he bats in the lineup, this isn’t likely to be a direct response to Harper’s absence. Schwarber and Turner have both seen more offspeed pitches in June, and this may be more attributable to the increasing boldness of pitchers who know that putting Turner on base won’t cue up Harper, and that Harper won’t be on base for a potential Schwarbomb.
So now we can say that the way pitchers have approached the Phillies really has changed in the absence of Harper. But has their stratagem been effective? Kyle Schwarber’s OPS is down to .721, whereas it had been at 1.047 in May; his batting average plummeted from May’s .288 to .200. Trea Turner’s batting average is down by the slightest degree (.317 to .307), but his June OPS of .916 is the highest he’s posted in any month this season. Bryson Stott’s OPS of .585 is far beneath the .807 he posted in April, but not much different than the .561 he posted in May. Castellanos’ batting average has dropped to .276 from May’s even .300, but his OPS is up to .840 from .731.
Schwarber typically heats up in June; every previous June of his Philadelphia career has produced an increase in his OPS from where it was in May. We could, perhaps, attribute Schwarber’s uncharacteristically tepid June to the relative dearth of fastballs he’s seen in the month, since he typically hits those much better than he does the breaking and offspeed pitches. And I do not think it would be entirely wrong to do so. But a single month of plate appearances is not enough to produce data with very much meaning, and there is every reason to believe that other factors, including simple randomness, could be contributing to his June torpor.
Of the batters who typically hit in the two slots in front of or behind Harper in the batting order, only Schwarber has seen a decline in performance. The success of the devious plan to capitalize on Harper’s misfortune appears to be partial at best. And while sapping the power of the mighty Schwarber would indeed count as a major victory for the Phillies’ rivals, we can’t be entirely certain how much of his June swoon is the result of the change in the mix of pitches he sees.
But even if the way opponents have handled the Phillies in Harper’s absence hasn’t produced a dramatic downturn for the rest of the team, Bryce can’t come back soon enough. At the very least, it’ll put the twinkle back in the Phanatic’s eye.