Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images
At-bats don’t exist without context. Hitters bring to the plate scouting reports, understandings from their previous entanglements with a hurler, and knowledge from plate appearances taken earlier in the day. Matt Wallner entered the game Saturday with a single and a walk against Kevin Gausman in five matchups, and had grounded out and walked against the hurler prior to the two facing off again in the sixth inning.
For pitch selection purposes, Gausman is a simple one to analyze. He’ll throw an occasional slider to keep a hitter honest, but is otherwise a fastball/splitter specialist. For a hitter, that makes sitting on a pitch easy. In practice, matters are more complicated, as evidenced by his 3.36 ERA since 2020.
Here’s a selection of two swings Wallner took off him earlier in the game:
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Two middle-middle fastballs. Two aggressive hacks. Absolutely nothing to show for it. I don’t think you need a damage heat map to know that throwing a pitch to Wallner there is a bad idea. Yet, Gausman escaped unharmed both times—he even earned a whiff in a previous at-bat, on a third heater chucked down the middle. Sometimes, that’s how it goes.
Fast-forward to the sixth, and Gausman was near the end of his start when Wallner stepped into the batter’s box again. Knowing the swings Wallner took off his fastball—and knowing that Wallner was likely to sit on the heat again—Gausman offered the lefty his signature pitch:
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Wallner barely taps it foul, as he clearly swings like a fastball is coming. It isn’t a great pitch—splitters generally don’t want to live too much in the zone—but it wrinkled just enough to elude Wallner’s barrel, handing the veteran pitcher the advantage. I find Wallner’s post-swing demeanor hilarious: he walks away disgusted by the notion that Gausman wouldn’t challenge him with a heater. Still, it’s 0-1, and time for another pitch:
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That’s why Gausman is a 13-year player with Cy Young votes in three separate seasons. Oddly, his splitter took a horizontal shape here. Usually, it’s a pitch that drops vertically, yet this thing took off running like it missed its exit on the highway. No matter. Wallner took a hack that had little shot of connecting, and his deficit moved to 0-2.
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Well, if two splitters lead to an 0-2 count, why not go to the well once more? It wasn’t the best split of his career, and the location was a touch too low to render as “nasty,” but that’s a pitch that could coax a swing from a more foolish hitter. Wallner was not that. He identified the split and took it easily.
Given the sequence of this at-bat and the ones that came before it, Wallner was in a pickle. Gausman hadn’t strongly favored the splitter in their previous encounters, yet he hadn’t seen anything straight so far, and the man on the mound is the type of pitcher to spam splitters until he nets the result he wants. So what would he see next? Another split? Or the first fastball of the plate appearance?
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He got it. He didn’t get all of it. But he got it. Catcher Tyler Heineman clearly wants to change Wallner’s eye level with a fastball either at the top of the zone or just above it. That, by itself, could have been the out-pitch. If Wallner did foul it off or take it for a ball, though, then a splitter was certainly arriving next. Instead, Gausman pulls the pitch to the center of the zone, and Wallner—determined not to simply foul a hittable fastball like before—elevates and celebrates for his fourth homer of the year.
Matt Wallner is a world-class hitter. For some reason, power hitters often receive less credit than contact hitters in our shared baseball discussion regarding the finest batters in the league. Make no mistake, though: Wallner is an elite craftsman of hitting. He has a supernatural ability to pull any pitch for a flyball, and his plate discipline separates him from someone like Miguel Sanó, who often ran into trouble tapping into his awesome power potential. He’s a consummate pummeler of baseballs, who has even shaved off some strikeouts while taking more walks. His ceiling is seemingly endless—and this homer from June 7 demonstrates that a pitcher can only make so many mistakes before he punishes them.