Happy Friday, Athletics Nation!
Eno Sarris gets deep into baseball nerd-lore like few others. Yesterday, in a terrific piece in The Athletic, he detailed the demise of the hitters’ count and its root cause: the rise of the slider. He also worked this fantastic sentence that any South Park fan should appreciate into the opening paragraph:
That was the time-honored, well-worn script for the hitter: step one, get a hitter’s count; step two, get a hittable fastball; step three, profit.
Sarris points out that the proportion of fastballs thrown in hitters’ counts—in which there are two or three more balls than strikes—dropped below two-thirds about ten years ago, and are now at an all-time low of 57 percent, at least since statisticians began keeping track.