The great Greg Maddux (355-227, 3.16 ERA, 3.26 FIP, 114.3 WAR) once said the key to pitching is throwing a ball when the batter is swinging and throwing a strike when the batter is taking. That’s a pretty good general rule, but an astute observer would certainly recognize that a pitcher isn’t really equipped to predict such a thing terribly well.

But this did get me thinking, is there something to this idea despite other intervening reasons that confound it? Certainly, if you have a crazy slider that no one can hit, it doesn’t really matter where you throw it. Or a fastball that the hitter can’t handle. It’s also not like where you choose to throw the pitch and if the hitter swings are independent of each other.

So this is an exercise, plain and simple. The Maddux idea is a good one in principle, but it’s not that simple. We know that, he knows that, let’s just look into it for fun.

I drew from the 2012 season and looked at qualified pitchers (n = 88). I developed a simple statistics to quantify how Maddux-y they pitched.

mPercentage = (O-Swing% – League Average O-Swing%) + (-1)*(Z-Swing%-League Average Z-Swing%)

O-Swing% is the percent of the time a pitcher induced the opposing hitter to swing at a pitch he threw outside the zone and Z-Swing% is the same statistic for pitches inside the zone. The -1 is included so that both Maddux attributes are positive and can be added together without converging toward zero.

The results were pretty surprising because some pitchers at the top of the list are awesome and some are average and some are terrible. There isn’t a ton of correlation between this statistic and actual production. The two league leaders in 2012 mPercentage are Joe Blanton and Chris Sale. Cliff Lee is 4th, which sounds right, but Verlander is 42nd.

If you take a wider angle and regress ERA or FIP on mPercentage, you find that on average a 1% increase (i.e. 5% to 6%) decreases your ERA or FIP by 0.06 runs, which is not very much at all. mPercentage is statistically significant in both models, but not substantively significant at all. (The R squared is less than .11 in both.)

So what this tells us is that the Maddux Method doesn’t really exist in practice. Pitchers who induce swings on balls and takes on strikes are no more successful than those who do not. However, there is a obviously a two-way street at play here like I mentioned earlier. The Maddux Method works perfectly in theory, but we have an observation issue given that Justin Verlander’s strikes are much harder to hit than Joe Blanton’s, so he can throw more of them.

I like the Maddux philosophy of pitching, but it isn’t enough. You also need to have good stuff.