How to pitch to best hitters in 2024 World Series

The 2024 World Series has no shortage of offensive firepower, obviously; each team might have three Hall of Fame bats apiece hitting in their top four, and it’s that offense that’s a large part of why the Dodgers (.854 OPS in the NLCS) and Yankees (.809) are here. So: how should opposing pitchers try to neutralize the big trios? Given the incredible offensive talent here, there may not be a perfect way. We, however, have suggestions.

Juan Soto, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton combined for nine homers and a 1.112 OPS in the ALCS. The remaining Yankees combined for zero homers and a .708 OPS, though since they had a higher batting average (.281) than the Big Three (.255), there might actually be those who think the other Yankees did more to help the team win. (Those people are wrong.)

The real key is to make sure you get Gleyber Torres out, really, because the resurgent leadoff man has reached base to start the game eight times in nine Yankee postseason games. The best way to attack The Big Three? Make sure you have an out already in the books, not a man on base.

Let’s stipulate “this is an all-time hitter and there may not be a great plan” for Soto and everyone else here, and move on. You still have to pitch to him. You still have to try something. It might not work, because he’s that good. But the other guys are good, too, right?

If we learned anything about him in the ALCS, it was his elite ability to waste pitches he didn’t want until he got to the one he did, as he showed against Hunter Gaddis in Game 5, fouling off breaking and offspeed pitches until he got to the fastball he wanted to crush.

But there’s a lesson in there, and it’s that Gaddis was completely right to try to avoid that fastball for as long as he could. In the regular season, Soto had a positive run value against every pitch type other than sliders (.169 average, .338 slugging), and he was particularly deadly against fastballs, against which he slugged .737 (four-seamers) and .717 (sinkers), giving him two entries high on the list of best hitters vs. particular pitch types.

It was more of the same in the postseason, where he destroyed four-seamers and sinkers (1.200 SLG), yet turned 36 sliders into only a single hit and zero walks – and even that one hit was a mere single to the right side, just out of reach of the second baseman.

You can’t, obviously, throw Soto 100% sliders. You probably can’t fully avoid throwing him a fastball. But since we all know Soto is more than willing to take a walk rather than expand, you might just need to let him do that – which is part of why retiring Torres is so vital.

This might be a rough matchup for Game 1 starter Jack Flaherty, who had his slider absolutely mashed as a Dodger (.317 AVG / .635 SLG, including the postseason), and, despite the platoon disadvantage, might line up well as a matchup for Blake Treinen, who probably has the nastiest stuff of any Dodger pitcher and has allowed lefty batters a mere .108/.175/.189 along with a wild 52% whiff rate on his slider over the last three years.

How to attack: Aaron Judge

How about: wave four fingers to send him down to first

If only it were that simple; if only Judge didn’t have Soto ahead of him and Stanton, at times, behind him. At the risk of repeating ourselves, Judge essentially cannot be challenged with fastballs; no one in baseball was more effective against a particular pitch type than Judge was against four-seamers this year, and he put up a .381/.481/.780 line against four-seamers and sinkers in the regular season.

It seems so long ago now, given that Judge did end up hitting two big homers in the ALCS, but for the first two weeks of the postseason, the only talking point was how he hadn’t exactly come up big in October. That is still, technically, the case; Judge hit .167/.261/.500 in the ALCS, and after his Game 3 homer off Emmanuel Clase, he had merely a single and two walks (one intentional) in his final 11 plate appearances. When looking at the two homers, they were each outliers in some way; his Game 2 shot off Gaddis was the second-highest pitch (and highest fastball) he’d ever homered off, and his Game 3 blast off Clase was off a low and outside cutter of the type that Clase had never, ever allowed an extra base hit to a right-handed hitter before.

It might be a fluke. It might also be the result of a strategy seemingly intended to frustrate such a prolific home run hitter, and we can show it in just two images. First, look at four-seam fastballs: They are, in October, higher than in any month of his career, by kind of a lot.

OK, so keep that image in your mind, of high fastballs, high in the zone, and then realize that the breaking balls he’s seen this month are … lower than any other month of his career.

Talk about “changing the eye level,” which is why that home run against Gaddis was both important and impressive. Judge, for as great as he is, can be had low in the zone, or really under the zone. On breaking balls and offspeed pitches less than 2.5 feet above home plate this month, which comprise 40% of all pitches he’s seen, he’s yet to have a single hit — and he’s whiffed on 20 of the 26 swings he offered, a wild 72% whiff rate.

No Dodger pitcher in the playoffs buried breaking and offspeed pitches low more than Flaherty, which might make for an interesting matchup, though his outcomes on those pitches were poor. The real matchup to keep an eye on here is Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who can get low with the splitter and curveball, though he was unable to actually do it during a June matchup when Judge reached base twice in three times.

How to attack: Giancarlo Stanton

Tanner Bibee showed us the way in the final game of the ALCS. Even though it ended in disaster, the problem Bibee eventually ran into was one of execution, not approach. In Stanton’s first plate appearance, Bibee attacked him with sinkers in on the hands, along with breaking and offspeed low and away, collecting a strikeout on a cutter. In Stanton’s second plate appearance, there wasn’t a fastball to be had. All five pitches had movement, all were low or low and away, and Stanton struck out on a cutter.

It was a good plan, and Bibee went back to it for the third time. Again, there wasn’t a fastball to be found, as Bibee threw nothing but sliders, curveballs, and changeups, getting ahead 3-2. On the sixth pitch, another slider, catcher Bo Naylor was extremely clear about where he wanted the pitch to be – outside, far off the plate, hoping for yet another chase.

Instead, Bibee missed his spot badly, putting it in the middle of the plate. For the first time on the night, Stanton made contact, if “made contact” is accurate enough to describe “a game-tying 117.5 mph rocket that went 446 feet.”

The intentions were good, at least from Bibee, even if his inability to place it properly ended in disaster. The real question, then, is why the Royals and Guardians chose to attack Stanton so differently in October.

Stanton has played in parts of 15 seasons, and (including the postseason) he’s seen at least 25 pitches in 81 different months. Why, then, has he seen only 23% breaking balls this month – the second-lowest breaker rate of any month of his career, and the lowest since way back in 2012? And especially so after he saw almost an overwhelming amount of spin in June?

Like Soto, it’s not like the answer here is “never throw a fastball ever.” But Stanton runs a roughly 40% swing-and-miss rate on breaking balls, and even if he’s still able to get to power there – we’re hardly suggesting that slugging .567, as he did on breakers this year, makes this a huge weakness – it’s clear that what Kansas City and Cleveland were trying this October, before Bibee’s start, simply wasn’t working.

This is an absolutely perfect setup for Treinen and his deadly breaking ball, as well as Evan Phillips. Interestingly enough, among pitchers likely to appear in the World Series, the Dodger arm with the highest breaking ball chase rate against right-handed hitters is lefty Anthony Banda, even if it’s a little difficult to see Dave Roberts selecting him for this mission.

How to attack: Shohei Ohtani

Ohtani, like many lefties, does have some notable platoon splits, in that his regular-season OPS was 261 points worse against lefties than it was righties – not, of course, that “merely slugging .518 against left-handed pitching” makes him vulnerable. Plus, after a relatively slow few days after his NLDS Game 1 home run, he’s now up to a solid .286/.434/.500 postseason line. Like most superstar sluggers, he splatters four-seam fastballs (.639 SLG), but you can’t even really go after him with sliders, either, unless you want to wear an .826 SLG.

But there is one particular area of weakness, and the Yankees, in the biggest spots, are surprisingly well-equipped to take advantage of this. In the NLCS, Mets starter Sean Manaea struck out Ohtani three times in five plate appearances, holding him to a mere single. New York reliever Danny Young faced him three times, getting three outs. What do Manaea and Young have in common, other than being Mets lefties? It’s that after Manaea’s much-discussed in-season conversion to try to pitch like Chris Sale, they’re two of the only pitchers in the game to throw from an extreme low and toward-first base release point.

If we set that as a lefty release point no higher than 3.5 feet above the ground, and also at least 5.5 feet toward first base from the center of the mound, then over the last four seasons, Ohtani is 2-for-19, with just one hard-hit ball, and a 42% strikeout rate. If we go with something a little fancier and just find lefty pitchers with an arm angle under 25 degrees (where 0° is sidearm and 90° is straight up; Manaea dropped from 28° in April to 15° in October), then Ohtani, over the last four seasons, has hit .165/.231/.340 in 108 plate appearances, with only eight extra-base hits.

That funky kind of lefty arm angle does seem to make Ohtani uncomfortable, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

These are not large samples, we admit, but a big part of what we’ve see in October is lefty pitchers trying to jam Ohtani with sinkers, preferably from a low angle:

The Yankees, however, have a plan for this. They have a lefty with baseball’s lowest arm angle, who recently went nearly two months without throwing a non-fastball before he finally showed a slider in the ALCS. They have … a man who was cut free by the 121-loss White Sox in June.

Tim Hill isn’t just going to be on the staff. He (and Nestor Cortes, if he makes the roster) might just be plan number one against the nearly certain National League MVP, whenever Aaron Boone can get to him. What an incredible sport we have.

How to attack: Mookie Betts

It seems like years ago that we were reading articles about Betts’ postseason struggles, but when you look now, Mookie carries a .295/.404/.659 line this October into the World Series, with four homers. Set aside the one he hit against a Dylan Cease fastball, and see if anything stands out to you here:

Spin in the zone, pulled to left. Spin in the zone, pulled to left. Spin in the zone, pulled to left.

Betts is a power hitter, but he’s not a powerful hitter, if that makes sense, because with below-average bat speed and just-OK hard-hit rates, he really only finds power when he’s pulling the ball – 21 of his 23 homers this year, playoffs included, were pulled. Just look at his slugging percentage chart for the season to really get the idea, that when he finds slug, it’s mostly inside or low, so that he might best pull it to left field.

That’s particularly coming on breaking balls, which he’s pulling 62% of the time in October after doing so only 42% of the time in the regular season. It might sound relatively simple to simply say “well, don’t hang breaking balls,” as though pitchers don’t know that.

Yet while we can’t take much of anything at all from Betts going 0-for-6 against Game 1 starter Gerrit Cole and top reliever Clay Holmes over the last two years, we can at least see that they’ve understood the assignment: Stay out of that inside power zone.

Betts is a good enough hitter that he can put a single anywhere, and run them into doubles. As with everyone else here, “keeping him off the bases entirely” is not really a realistic outcome. But keeping him from pulling spin into the seats is a victory in itself.

How to attack: Freddie Freeman
How to attack: Max Muncy

Freeman’s a future Hall of Famer, but you know what? He’s not part of The Big Three right now. He’s been limited by an injured ankle all postseason, and while he claims he’ll be in the lineup for Game 1, it’s clear he won’t be at 100%; he’s hit just .219/.242/.219, and, most surprisingly, has drawn just a single walk in 33 plate appearances.

Instead, the real third threat here is Muncy, who isn’t going to end up in Cooperstown without a ticket, but is still a tremendous offensive threat in his own right, thanks to four seasons of 35 homers since 2018 – tied with Judge, Pete Alonso and Kyle Schwarber for the most in baseball – and the record-tying 12 consecutive times on base against the Mets.

The dozen postseason walks are impressive. So are the three homers. But the most standout thing here is that Muncy has been managing to do just about the most valuable thing a hitter can do, even if it’s wildly easier said than done: act like Juan Soto.

Soto, as we noted, was waiting out the fastballs he wanted. Muncy, in the postseason, has all three of his homers and an .810 SLG against fastballs. He’s got just one hit, a single, against all other pitches, which is happening in part because he’s just refusing to swing at them. Against non-fastballs, Muncy swung at 41% percent in the regular season, which was a lot higher than Soto’s 32%. But in the postseason? Muncy is down to 30%, basically the same as Soto’s 29%, and that’s especially shown up when you look at Muncy’s nearly complete refusal to go chase at offspeed pitches out of the zone – the kind of pitch you really can’t damage.

The Yankees need to know that Muncy just isn’t going to chase, and challenge him in the zone with offspeed pitches, which happened 52% of the time in September – remember, that was exactly half, 26%, in October – during which time he had two hits all month. Tommy Kahnle, Lord of Changeups, with no appreciable career platoon split, we’re looking in your direction.