I’d like to think that I’ve become a more “enlightened” baseball watcher over my years as a writer. I’d like to think that I understand the game’s nuances and know how to look for what really matters instead of getting distracted by the superficial, and that I know how to focus on the big picture rather than getting swamped by small-sample noise. But for all that fancy schmancy talk, one thing gets my blood boiling as much as it used to: uncompetitive pitches in hitters’ counts.
I’m pretty sure you can picture it. There’s a runner on first in a close game, and a 2-0 count with a slugger at the plate. Your team’s high-octane reliever peers in for the sign – a fastball. He takes one or two deep breaths, maybe flutters his glove a few times to calm the nerves, then winds and delivers. A foot outside, ball three. Even Javy Báez wouldn’t swing at that thing. Ugh, this inning is already spiraling away.
There might not be a more maddening experience in all of baseball. Come on! Buddy! Just throw a strike! How hard can it be? You know the hitter isn’t going to swing if you can’t at least get the ball near the plate. A lot of the time, baseball is a game of inches, with fine margins separating success from failure, but not when a pitcher misses by a ton in a count where they should have been trying to throw a strike.
This happens a lot, and not just to your favorite team, despite what the eye test would tell you. All told, nearly a quarter of pitches thrown with hitters ahead in the count miss the plate by a wide margin. If you define “a wide margin” as pitches that end up in the chase or waste zones as defined by Baseball Savant, you can make some categorical statements about these pitches, such as: 1) Batters swing only around 17% of the time at them, a minuscule chase rate, or 2) In terms of run value, a pitch like this is worse than leaving a fastball over the heart of the plate against Aaron Judge.
As you can probably imagine, the players who do this most frequently are relievers. A reliever who can’t find the zone is “effectively wild.” A starter who bounces pitches like this will probably end up in the bullpen anyway. Reed Garrett throws the highest rate of uncompetitive pitches when behind in the count, at 36.1%. As someone who has watched a lot of Garrett this year, that sounds exceedingly reasonable. Behind him, we’ve got Andrew Chafin, Elvis Peguero, Andrés Muñoz, Aroldis Chapman, Austin Adams; the top of this list is exactly what you’d expect it to be.
As you can see, a high rate of wasted pitches doesn’t mean that a pitcher is bad. Plenty of effective relievers are featured at the top of the list. Heck, Garrett has been solid this year, albeit in a streaky way. The trick is to have such overpowering stuff that you can afford a few wasted chances. If you throw a 100-mph fastball that batters frequently miss even when it’s in the strike zone, it’s a lot easier to climb back into counts after falling way behind.
However, baseball might be a better viewing experience if that weren’t the case, quite frankly. The cost of those wasted pitches just isn’t sufficient to prevent teams from stocking their bullpens with live arms regardless of command. But there’s another way to succeed. You could take the complete opposite tack and miss as infrequently as possible. Miles Mikolas is an example of this strategy: Only 13.4% of his pitches when he’s behind in the count miss badly, the lowest mark in baseball and roughly a third of Garrett’s rate.
The plan of overwhelming the strike zone to avoid falling further behind in the count is mostly a starter’s tactic. It fits the skillset better; starters generally have more command in the first place, and they’re also generally interested in keeping pitch counts low. George Kirby, Zach Eflin, Bryan Woo, and Joe Ryan are all among the best in the game at giving themselves a chance when behind in the count.
Those two polar opposite pitcher archetypes are interesting, but I’m most fascinated by a pitcher who doesn’t fit either mold. In fact, I bet you’d think he’s part of the first group. He throws 100 in short-burst relief appearances and leans heavily on a wipeout slider. He strikes out a ton of batters, too, just like the relievers who are most likely to miss wildly when they’re behind. But he’s among the most efficient pitchers when it comes to making hitters work for their walks. He has the 12th-lowest rate of wasted pitches when behind in the count; the only relievers ahead of him on the list are Jared Koenig, a sinker-dominant guy with below-average swing-and-miss stuff who lives in the strike zone, and teammate Matt Strahm. Would you believe that Orion Kerkering is a paragon of command?
I wouldn’t have until I started looking, but to be fair, my view of Kerkering is based heavily on his work in the 2023 postseason. He pitched five wild innings, and he just seemed like the kind of pitcher who doesn’t mind if he misses wildly every now and then. And because he’s a reliever, every now and then he has games where he looks completely lost; just this Saturday, for example, he walked one and hit one in a disastrous three-run appearance that lasted just two-thirds of an inning. Take my initial impression – Kerkering doesn’t know where the ball is going – and add the occasional laborious outing, and the conclusion feels obvious.
After that playoff run, I quite honestly lost track of him: The Phillies have so many good relievers that I think of their bullpen as an elite group rather than a few standout individuals. Four different current Phillies relievers have entered in higher-leverage spots, on average, than Kerkering this year. He’s a cog in a great machine, no doubt, but let’s be honest: Guys like that don’t always leave an impression.
In Kerkering’s case, we should be making an exception. Sure, the Phillies might use other guys in bigger spots, but it’s not because he’s bad. His 2.35 ERA isn’t some fluke; he has a 2.34 FIP, a 2.80 xFIP, and a 2.57 SIERA. He’s striking out nearly 30% of his opponents and walking 6%. If you ignored roles and names and just looked for relievers who absolutely dominate the opposition, he’d probably finish in the top 10. That’s what his run prevention numbers say, and the peripheral statistics all agree.
The key to his game is a single pitch: his sweeping slider. He throws it more than half the time, and with good reason. Look at this nonsense:
That’s a pretty simple explanation of why Kerkering has been so successful. He commands the pitch well to his glove side and he’s adept at throwing it differently depending on his objectives. Behind in the count? He lives in the strike zone, with a 62% zone rate – league average for sliders in this spot is roughly 53%. Two strikes? He’s suddenly down around 40%, basically bang on average. In other words, he waits to fish for strikeouts until it makes sense.
Throwing in the strike zone when you’re behind and avoiding it when you’re ahead is a pretty obvious plan. Kerkering is hardly alone in doing it. But he’s one of the best in baseball at adjusting his location based on the count. Out of 80 pitchers who have thrown at least 100 sliders when behind in the count and 100 sliders with two strikes, his zone rate gap between the two situations is 20th. Only four relievers are ahead of him on the list, which is populated mostly by starters like Mikolas, Kirby, Logan Webb, and Chris Sale.
Of course, you have to throw more than one pitch type to succeed these days (unless you’re Pierce Johnson). It’s all well and good to use your slider like a scalpel, but major league hitters are pretty good. Luckily, Kerkering’s fastball is too. Or rather, his fastballs are too; like many Phillies, he mixes sinkers and four-seamers evenly against righties but exclusively uses a four-seamer against lefties.
A lot of this description sounds like a boring, mid-rotation starter. Mixed fastballs based on handedness, a slider that can be shaped to fit the occasion, an attacking mindset: These are the traits of the Kyle Gibsons of the world. The difference is that, unlike Kerkering, they don’t have a plus-plus slider and a fastball that tickles triple-digit velocity from time to time.
I don’t think that Kerkering is a true-talent mid-2.00s-ERA pitcher, but I do think that he’s being overlooked thanks to the sheer bounty of options in the Philadelphia bullpen. On a different team, Kerkering would have seized the closer’s role by now. Guys with his arsenal generally fail because they can’t limit walks – think Camilo Doval or late-career Craig Kimbrel. With those pitchers, it’s not a question of intent: They just can’t throw strikes often enough to make things work. Kerkering has already answered that question. Even if his command backs up a little bit, he has room to spare on that front. His slider is so good in terms of raw stuff that it would be a good pitch with even league-average command. I’m not quite sure the same is true of his fastball, but that’s much more of a show-me pitch anyway.
The next step for Kerkering, then, isn’t adding stuff or learning to harness it. It’s performing in big spots. There’s no time like October to do it. Rigid bullpen hierarchies become flexible when every game has high stakes. Sure, Carlos Estévez is the closer now, but well, he’s Carlos Estévez. You don’t need to be a fiction writer to come up with some scenarios where that might go wrong. Some of the other top Philly relievers have been tailing off of late, too. José Alvarado has been downright bad in the second half, and Strahm and Jeff Hoffman need breaks from time to time.
What’s more, there’s good evidence that overusing the same reliever in a short series, particularly against the same hitter, has downsides. The Phillies are well-situated to avoid this penalty by mixing and matching and not overusing the same reliever against a certain cluster of hitters. That means caring a little less about the situation and a little more about the matchup, which means we might be seeing more of Kerkering in big spots if he hasn’t already faced the batters due up at those exact moments.
None of this is complicated. Great slider and good command? It’s pretty easy to see why he’s doing well. But if you haven’t been watching the Phillies closely all year — if you saw them have two relievers in the All-Star Game and trade for a closer and just assumed those guys were the ones doing the heavy lifting — you’ve been missing out. You haven’t been wrong, really; those other three pitchers are really good. But Kerkering is every bit their equal, not just the next in the line of hard-throwing guys who need to figure out how to put everything together. When you see him in October, think finished product, not prospect.
