And the Kit Keller Award 2025 goes to…

I got sick last week. My wife did that too. We canceled our plans. We spent the weekend horizontally. We watched television. Sunday morning I woke up and saw my wife sitting on the couch watching Its own competition. I did what everyone does when they catch a glimpse of the best baseball movie of all time on television. I sat down and looked at the rest.

I’m still a little sick. My wife is still completely ill. Its own competition is still on my mind. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the scouting report that Rockford Peaches catcher Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) delivered to pitcher Ellen Sue Gotlander (Freddie Simpson) with two outs and the tying run on first in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 7 of the World Series in Racine. I had some helpful thoughts, and we’ll get to them in a moment. But first, let’s go through some useless thoughts. I beg you to humor me, because I’m about to critique baseball strategy in a perfect movie. I told you I’m sick.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a mound visit at a big time, giving the pitcher a break and reminding him of the scouting report. But the hitter was Hinson’s sister Kit Keller (Lori Petty), who spent almost the entire season with the Peaches and then faced them for the entire Series, including three starts alone in Game 7. Ellen Sue definitely didn’t need a refresher on that particular scouting report. Then there’s the scouting report itself. “High fastballs,” Dottie said. “I can’t hit them, I can’t fire them.” It was good for the money, but they didn’t have to follow it on every roll, right? Did it never occur to Dottie or Ellen Sue, after taking a 0-2 lead, to waste a breaking ball in the mud to bring Kit to eye level? I don’t care who’s at the table; you can’t throw the same pitch to the same spot three times in a row and expect to get away with it.

Okay, criticism over. The idea we’re going to pursue today is a question: Who has a scouting report most similar to Kit’s? That’s right: it’s time for the first-ever Kit Keller High Fastballs Can’t Hit ‘Em Can’t Lay Off ‘Em Award. Almost every hitter has this problem, at least to some extent. Every pitcher with a good four-seamer uses it to make swinging shots above the plate. That’s what that field is for. Still, some players are more sensitive than others. I looked up the numbers for the 2025 season. I focused on hard pitches – four-seamers, sinkers and cutters – in the upper third of the strike zone and above. For those of you familiar with Statcast’s strike zones, that means any zone that ends in a 1, 2, or 3. I used a sample of 308 players who saw at least 1,000 of those pitches this year.

Looking towards the top of the zone and above, I came upon many altitude-related distractions. Aaron Judge saw 1,381 pitches outside the strike zone in 2025, but because he is 6-foot-4, less than 10% of them were actually above the zone, the lowest rate in baseball. Oneil Cruz, Jordan WalkerAnd James Wood were also at the bottom of the list. Their zone is so high that it is almost difficult to locate the ball above it. The huge one Giancarlo Stanton And Matt Wallner swung at just five and fourteen pitches above the zone, respectively, and missed them all. As you might expect, the other side of the list is populated by smaller players such as Davis Schneider, Jose Altuve, Matt McLain, Brayan RocchioAnd Sal Frelick. The top of their zones starts a lot lower.

The player with the highest swing rate on high fastballs, inside and outside the zone, was Josh Naylor. Naylor had an absurd 66% swing rate on high fastballs. He really can’t fire them. But the thing is, he can really hit them! Naylor whiffed just 15% of the time on those pitches, putting him in the 89th percentile. Not only did he make a ton of contact, but he posted a .417 wOBA as those pitches ended a plate appearance. According to Statcast’s run values, he was worth 3.6 runs per 100 pitches, the 10th best mark in the league. Naylor is the anti-Kit Keller.

It may be a surprise that the guy swinging the highest fastballs turns out to be great against them, but the relationship between swing speed and whiff rate on high fastballs is extremely weak. In 2025, the correlation coefficient of the 308 players who saw at least 1,000 total pitches is -0.07. The graph below shows what that looks like. Naylor is the pink dot at the bottom right, and Luis Garcia Jr. of the Nationals is right next to him. I’ve also highlighted the actual Kit winner in this and the next chart, but what I really want you to notice is the general shape of the scatter chart.

Yep, it looks like a big old blob. In any case, with the naked eye there is hardly any correlation. Some players swing a lot on those pitches, and some players make a lot of contact with them. But that’s about all you can say. However, if you throw away high fastballs within the zone and only look at over-high pitches, the correlation jumps all the way to -.28. The scatterplot is still a blob, but at least you can see the outline of the overall trend.

That may not be the direction you expected the correlation to go. The negative correlation means that players who swing more on those pitches make more contact with them. That’s because players who hunt a lot generally can’t afford to miss much. If you chase all the time and whiff when you do, you will strike out constantly, no pitcher will ever throw a strike at you, and you will end up in another profession. For that reason, the top right corner is free of dots. And because no one is able to completely clear those fields or achieve a perfect contact rate, the bottom left is also empty. Contact hitters can position the barrel anywhere so they can swing more freely at anything. And because they can hit anything, more throws seem hittable for them. The graph should go from top left to bottom right.

Okay, I think I’ve put you off long enough. Gabriel Arias of the Guardians, Naylor’s former teammate, is our Kit Keller Award winner. Arias is the green dot at the top right of both charts, where ‘Can’t Hit ‘Em’ and ‘Can’t Lay Off ‘Em’ finally meet. In 2025, Arias hit just under 60% of the high fastballs he faced, landing him at 21st on our list of 308 players. He whiffed just under 54% of those pitches, which ranked fourth on the list. Put those two numbers together and 32% of the high fastballs he saw turned into whiffs. No other player was above 29%. Arias also topped the list if you focus only on pitches above the strike zone, turning them into scents at a rate of 29%, again a few percentage points above the second-place player. Please note that the 76-pitch supercut below is just an example. It only shows four-seams and sinkers, and it only shows fields in the shadow, chase, and waste zones. I left 28 scents on the table, both to save myself some work and because I didn’t want Baseball Savant to think I was a bot and block my IP address.

None of this is necessarily a surprise. “Arias looks like a stallion at 5 o’clock when he takes batting practice and infield,” Eric Longenhagen wrote in 2020, “but his swing decisions in the game have been a problem… The Padres threw every development trick in the book at him during the offseason, including virtual reality training, to try to get him to recognize balls better on strikes and chase them less often.” Eric went on to say that in the unlikely event that Arias learned to swing on the pitches he could hit and the pitches he couldn’t, he would be a star. Ben Clemens wrote about that star potential last spring training, but Arias posted a career-high 34.4% strikeout rate during the regular season. It was the most of any player with at least 400 plate appearances. Arias is now 25, and that future where he figures it out and turns into a fearsome power hitter with a killer glove at shortstop seems weaker than ever, all because he can’t hit or sack high fastballs. Still, you probably shouldn’t throw it three times in a row.