Kris Bryant has been a very good player for the Chicago Cubs since his rookie year in 2015. He was Rookie of the Year in 2015 and won the NL MVP in 2016, the same year the Cubs finally broke their World Series drought. In the 2015 through 2019 seasons, KB was way above average in terms of OPS+. He’s continued to play at a high level but 2020’s pandemic shortened season he was nagged by injuries and did not hit very well. Naturally, this got a lot of people wondering if his days as an elite hitter were over. While it does seem that he has trouble catching up to the fastball (which hitter doesn’t have those problems these days) the 2021 season has seen KB bounce back to pre-2020 levels.
With that being said, I’m interested in what kinds of pitches Bryant has seen so far this season. As of July 2, Bryant has seen 1,203 pitches this season. 31% of pitches thrown to Bryant have been four-seam fastballs, typically a pitcher’s fastest pitch, followed by 26% sliders, which tail away from Bryant, 17% sinkers, which as the name implies sink down and away from the batter, followed by 10% change-ups, which pitchers usually throw with the same arm action as a fastball but have a different grip, giving the appearance of a fastball coming out of the hand but deceiving the batter by being 8–10 MPH slower than their fastball.
Now I’m interested in how Bryant does against the four-seam fastballs, sliders and sinkers that he’s seen so far this season.
The fastballs Bryant has seen average almost 95 MPH, about 1.5 MPH faster than the league-wide average. As the four-seamer is the pitch that Bryant has seen the most, it’s pretty clear that pitchers think they can beat Bryant with their straight hard stuff. It looks like they might be right. Here’s a chart of every swinging strike from four-seamers that Bryant has faced this season.
Once again, this is from the catcher’s point of view. The majority of these pitches are in the zone but Bryant also looks prone to be chasing fastballs above the strike zone as well as those off the outside corner. Most pitchers aren’t challenging him with fastballs on the inside half of the plate as Bryant has great power and if he can get his hands through the swing zone quick enough he could definitely put a charge into a fastball.
Let’s see where sliders and sinkers are ending up when Bryant is at the plate. Sliders are coming in at Bryant at an average of almost 85 MPH. What’s more important with a slider than its actual velocity is the movement of the pitch. This season, pitchers throwing sliders to Bryant have averaged just under 6 inches of horizontal movement and just above an inch of vertical movement. In the chart below, it’s clear that pitchers are throwing sliders that are low and outside the strike zone most of the time against Bryant, trying to get him to chase the pitch.
The sinkers that Bryant has seen this year are coming across the plate around 93.5 MPH, slightly slower than the average speed of the fastballs he’s seeing. This makes the sinker an even more deceptive pitch due to the additional falling, or “sinking” (get why it’s called a sinker?) action, as the pitch gets closer to the plate. Sinkers thrown to Bryant average nearly a foot of vertical movement change. So the sinkers are coming in just slightly slower than fastball but then have a dramatic drop once they’re getting closer to home plate. I’m guessing that, similar to the slider, many of the sinkers thrown to Bryant that he’s swung and missed at are going to be low and below the strike zone.
Hmmm, I was definitely wrong. There’s some sinkers below the strike zone, but many are within the established strike zone here. This could indicate that pitchers know that Bryant is weak against the sinker and don’t feel they need to throw it outside of the strike zone against him.
So those are the top three pitches Bryant has seen so far this year. In future iterations I’ll work out some of his batting metrics against this pitches and whether the opposing pitcher was lefty or righty.
