Pitching to contact or pitching to avoid contact?

[dalgreen]

Just wanted to get some thoughts from people on this subject. Hopefully this won't turn into an anti-Baker, anti-Hendry, anti-Wood, etc. thread. But, in general, if you were a pitching coach or if you ran an organization, would your philosophy be for pitchers to pitch to contact or avoid it? I know power pitchers are more fun to watch, but I think I lean toward the finesse type of pitcher like Lieber (at his peak) and Maddux (at his peak) vs. Nolan Ryan, or Bartolo Colon. I'm just using these guys as examples and you could use your own, but I'm just asking what your philosophy is. It has always seemed to me that if you pitch to contact, with good stuff, more often than not the hitters will hit your pitch. Power pitchers look great when they aren't getting hit, but when a team is patient, they throw a lot of pitches and give up lots of walks. Ideally, I'd have a mixture, but if I could only have one kind of pitcher, I think I would lean toward the finesse pitcher.

[hawkeyecub]

Like you, I would ideally like a mixture.

 

However if I had my choice it would be a guy who pitched to contact, (provided he had the stuff where the contact wasn't consistent hard hit balls).

With the pitchers who really pitch to avoid contact, you don't see many complete games. You see a lot of pitch counts around 115 in the 6th inning. This exposes your middle relief consistently, which is usually the weakest part of your staff.

 

There's not much better in my opinion than seeing the occasional Lieber or Maddux 88 pitch complete games in their prime.

[dime]

every pitcher has to do what best suits their stuff...that said, the nibbler types don't seem to do as well in the postseason, when everyone is honed in on every pitch and every at-bat. in that situation you'll need to be able to beat someone instead of just coax or trick them into beating themselves.

[imb]

i dont think it matters, really. Just look at Prior/Wood/Zambrano.

 

When they were all healthy, each did a different thing, but their OPSA was basically identical. No one approach is better than the others, just certain pitchers are better than certain other ones.

[Guest]

Pitch to avoid contact, without question. Pitchers with the "stuff" to consistently miss bats will not only rack up large numbers of highly-important strikeouts, they also tend to get hit less hard than finesse pitchers. You'd think that the big downside to those types of pitchers is that they also tend to miss the plate, but that doesn't appear to be the case; guys that miss a lot of bats don't really walk any more batters than the finesse guys. The only real downside to such pitchers is that their infrequent rates of contact lead them to rack up large pitch counts rather quickly. If you can find a player who can maintain decent/good control while racking up lage numbers of strikeouts, he's a good bet to put up HOF numbers.

 

Here's a link to an article I wrote on this subject a few months back: The Art of Pitching.