Why Doesn’t Pitcher Pull Rate Seem To Matter?

Pulled fly balls, to me, are hitter highlights. Just as strikeouts showcase the nastiness of pitchers, and groundballs allow infielders to demonstrate what they can do, balls in the air promote the powerful sluggers who hit them.

I’m including “pulled” in the description because plenty of research over the past decade has established that pulled fly balls are more productive than their straightaway and opposite-field counterparts. We here at FanGraphs have certainly jumped on that trend. Even if you ignore all my articles about Isaac Paredes, our writing about hitters who either pull the ball a lot or should pull the ball a lot is voluminous.

With that introduction in mind: This article is about pitchers. Bear with me for just a minute, and I’ll explain to you how I got here. It took me a while to wrap my head around why pulled fly balls perform so well. It’s not like the wall is much closer to that side, at least not consistently, and given that both lefties and righties display this trend, that clearly can’t be the thing. But thinking about how it actually feels to swing helped clue me in.

To broadly generalize, hitters make contact with the ball out in front of the plate when they pull it. The angle of the bat starts pointing toward the pull side as soon as it crosses the plane running parallel with the front of home plate. For the most part, because bat speed and “attack angle” — the vertical angle of the bat path — increase throughout a swing, batters tend to hit the ball harder when they catch the ball out in front and put in in the air. As a result, pretty much every hitter produces better on pulled air balls.

Two quick examples: In his career, Luis Arraez has a .702 wOBA when he pulls the ball in the air. That number falls to .350 when he hits it up the middle or takes it the other way. Shohei Ohtani has a .965 wOBA when he pulls the ball in the air, and .567 when he puts the ball in the air to center or left. Those guys aren’t similar at all, but they both do more damage when they hit the ball in front of the plate and drive it to the pull side.

In the past, I’ve subscribed to a simple rule in thinking about pitcher influence on batted balls: Pitchers have influence on the batted ball type (grounder, line drive, or fly ball), but hitters control everything else. The pitchers who throw heavy sinkers get batters to swing on top of it more frequently. But once hitters make contact, how loud that contact is mainly depends on how hard they’re swinging. The bat, after all, weighs a lot more than the ball, and the pitcher doesn’t get to pick which hitter is swinging it. Pitchers get grounders or don’t, hitters get home runs on their fly balls or don’t, and that’s life.

Here’s an interesting counterpoint, though: If hitters make their best contact when they pull the ball in the air, regardless of whether they’re Arraez or Ohtani, maybe preventing hitters from pulling their aerial contact could be a skill. I didn’t have a strong hunch, but I had a medium one, and what with having already submitted something for Prospect Fortnight, I had a little time on my hands. The starter who allowed pulled fly balls most frequently in 2024? Tyler Anderson, who constantly looks like he’s getting shelled. The bottom of the list was full of successful pitchers. I decided that I was onto something.

Let’s get a little more specific. Here are the 10 pitchers (minimum 200 balls hit in the air) who allowed opponents to pull the ball least frequently:

That’s a great list. Could this be the one simple trick to understanding contact management from the pitching side? I ran the correlation with wOBA allowed on fly balls – and found nothing. Then I ran it with wOBA overall. Nothing again. This isn’t some issue where it’s good to either allow a ton or a few, either. Here’s a graph with wOBA allowed on the y axis and rank (left is highest frequency) in terms of pulled air ball rate on the x axis. In other words, it’s all noise:

What a bummer! I thought I had a good thing going. In fact, I was so excited about this that I’d already run the year-to-year reliability, and it didn’t disappoint. Pitchers who suppress pulled fly ball rate in one year tend to do it in the next. Why doesn’t it matter?

My first guess: sample size. I could imagine this being a useful metric that’s swamped by the year-to-year noisiness of batted balls, and xwOBA isn’t going to help here because it’s specifically ignoring whether or not the balls are pulled. To test this, I expanded my sample to five seasons. That gave me 83 pitchers who allowed at least 750 balls in the air between 2020 and 2024. There, elevated pull rate correlated with wOBA allowed on contact, just what you’d expect. But if you look at the data more closely, there’s a bit of a problem: Madison Bumgarner.

Bumgarner was cooked medium well by the time 2020 rolled around. He was basically lobbing up batting practice at the tail end of his career, and that meant a 39.3% pull rate on balls hit in the air. That’s miles ahead of the next pitcher – nearly three percentage points. He was something like three standard deviations from the mean. He got absolutely rocked, unsurprisingly. Remove him from the data, and the relationship looks much weaker. If one pitcher is driving the majority of my league-wide results, it’s probably not a real effect.

That took me back to the top – literally. I couldn’t stop looking at Tyler Anderson’s name at the top of the pulled aerial contact list in 2024. Anderson is third on the 2020-2024 list, too. But he’s pretty good at managing contact. He’s better than average, in fact, despite all these pulled fly balls. The pitchers who hitters can’t pull the ball in the air against? Many of them are excellent at suppressing hard contact. It’s people like Anderson on the other end who are the interesting ones.

When I dug into Anderson’s data, I got an idea of what was going on pretty quickly. Take a look at the useful radial chart that Baseball Savant showed me:

All those balls in the top left might be “pulled fly balls,” but they’re unquestionably wins for Anderson. It’s almost impossible to hit a home run with a launch angle at or above 45 degrees. Really, these swings hardly ever lead to hits of any kind. In 2024, batters put 16,177 balls into play with a launch angle of at least 45 degrees; only 287 of them resulted in hits and only nine were homers. Even if you limit it to pulled balls at high angles, you’re talking nine homers in 3,269 chances. Pulling the ball in the air might be good for batters, but popping it up to the pull side is pretty much worthless.

Anderson is an absolute master at this. From 2020-24, batters pulled the ball in the air 509 times against him, but 20.2% of his pulled aerial contact had a launch angle of at least 45 degrees — that’s one of the highest rates in baseball during that span. The guys ahead of him – Cristian Javier, Freddy Peralta, and Bailey Ober – also stand out relative to their pulled aerial contact allowed. Anderson’s skill here isn’t a matter of arbitrary cutoffs, either. For every degree of launch angle from 35-50, Anderson is one of the best seven pitchers in baseball at coaxing pulled contact.

How does Anderson generate all that extreme aerial pulled contact? I watched a few videos to get an idea of what’s going on. Here’s Jose Altuve ending up way out in front:

Here’s Manny Machado hitting what amounts to a fungo:

Here’s Giancarlo Stanton seeing 80 mph down the middle and wasting it:

Batters aren’t getting out in front of Anderson on purpose. Rather, there’s something in the way that he pitches that makes it difficult for them to wait on the ball, and they end up pulling it because they’re swinging too early. By the time his pitches reach the plate, their bats have traveled too far through the zone to make optimal contact.

You can’t make pitcher pull rate and production correlate well, because that air pull rate is capturing more than one thing. You can succeed if batters are constantly behind on your pitches, caught between speeds, or simply unable to get their bat on it the way they want. You can succeed if batters are constantly ahead of your pitches, like Anderson. Both of these work. Neither looks particularly similar. No wonder it’s so tough to figure out what pitcher traits are associated with weak contact.