Which pitches miss bats by the most? Now you can know

Last summer, Clayton Kershaw gave us one more memory for the road.

Pitching against Mets infielder Ronny Mauricio in June, and nearing the end of an all-but-certain Hall of Fame career, Kershaw unleashed the curve so memorably nicknamed “Public Enemy No. 1” by Vin Scully all those years ago. The pitch bounced in front of the plate, a classic 55-footer. Mauricio swung, but he’d lost before he even moved. He missed it by a mile, eliciting a “wow!” from Dodgers broadcaster Joe Davis. It was strike three. The game moved on. Los Angeles won in extra innings.

It wasn’t missed by a mile, exactly. It was missed by 57.5 inches, or, put another way, four-and-a-half feet. Of the nearly quarter-million missed swings tracked by Statcast since the 2023 All-Star Game, no one has induced a bigger miss in terms of distance from the bat than a 37-year-old legend still armed with one of baseball’s most famous pitches.

It looked the part, completely, on the broadcast.

It looked even more incredible from a different angle, showing the actual data, visualized.

We don’t know if Kershaw ever created a bigger miss, because again, the data starts here just a few years ago. We do know that even with Kershaw well past his prime in his later years, still no one has managed to fool a batter more.

(The next biggest misses: Tyler Kinley making Jeimer Candelario miss by 49 inches on a swing that looked even wilder than that, earlier this year; Chris Sale getting Kazuma Okamoto to whiff by 48 inches on a patented Sale slider just last week; Kodai Senga getting CJ Abrams to miss a first-pitch-of-the-game breaker by 44 inches last June; José Soriano getting José Caballero to flail at a curveball two years ago, missing by 43 inches; Andrew Chafin getting Brayan Rocchio to miss wildly, by 42 inches, on a ball that turned into a run-scoring wild pitch. You can see the full list here.)

It’s a fitting entry point into the newest Statcast metrics, now available at Baseball Savant's Miss Distance and Swing Timing leaderboards. Which pitches miss the bat by the most? Now you can know. You can drill down further, too:

• Which pitches make the batter's swing the earliest or latest?
• Which lead to misses above or below the bat by the most?
• Which lead to misses by the most inside (leaving batters tied up) or outside (leaving them flailing)?

Then there's this intriguing thought: Could this help lead to further understanding of something we’ve been chasing for years: Deception?

Let’s find out what we can find out. The leaderboards are all here.

• Watch the 10 most extreme whiffs on record

What makes for a big miss?

“Which pitches are missing the bat by the most?” might seem like a simple thing, but there’s some nuance here. It's not just about finding point A, finding point B and measuring the distance.

As defined by Statcast, the ‘bat’ in this context is not the entire bat, but rather only the fat part of the bat. (To be more specific, that's only the half of the bat away from the hands, so essentially the label, through the barrel, to the tip.) That’s because when the batter swings, his goal isn’t to make contact off the hands, and in fact when that does happen, it’s viewed as the pitcher “sawing him off,” a victory for the hurler.

The average miss, when there’s a miss to be had, is three inches. But as you’ll soon see, it’s pretty important to split that out by pitcher and pitch type, which leaves us with this tremendously satisfying leaderboard of 2026’s biggest average misses.

There’s Mason Miller, well ahead of anyone else, as befits baseball’s nastiest reliever – now and possibly ever. He doesn't just miss bats; he misses them by more than anyone, and it's not even close. On average, he misses the bat by nearly a foot. Sometimes, on his best ones ... it's considerably more than that.

There’s Fernando Cruz and his mastery of one of baseball’s truly dominant pitches; there’s Soriano in his breakout season; there’s maybe something interesting you didn’t know about Astros reliever AJ Blubaugh, who has been just-OK this year, but still has a sweeper capable of making batters look like this:

What you don’t see on that top-10 list, or really anywhere at all in the top 50, are fastballs. There’s no shortage of reasons why the sport has moved toward a “throw it harder, throw them less often” approach with regard to the heater, but let’s throw another data point on the pile. As you’d expect, good breaking balls or offspeed pitches miss the bat by a lot more than fastballs do – by a factor of five or six times, on average.

“Metrically, or analytically, offspeed are generally better-performing pitches than the fastball,” said Miller to MLB.com recently. "If you look at the big scope of data, most of the damage is done on four-seam fastballs.”

No kidding!

As with any new metric, the first question won’t be “who’s good at it, or not,” but more “why does it matter?” You don’t, after all, get additional strikes for missing the bat by a lot as opposed to a little – in the same way that you don’t get more runs if your homer goes 480 feet instead of 380, or more base hits for having a high exit velocity instead of a bloop.

To some extent, it’s for fun, to answer the barroom questions fans have been posing forever. But there’s also evaluative value to it, too. If your pitches are missing the bat by a lot, you might assume there’s some wiggle room to decline while still being effective. If you’re already just a fraction of an inch off the bat, you might be walking a very, very tight line. It might be an entry point into deception, if a pitcher is clearly showing that he’s getting badly timed swings beyond what the quality of his stuff would indicate.

The “why does it matter,” we think, is best answered like this. Let’s take slider types (so lumping in sweepers and slurves as well), and break them into four groups, sorted by “largest miss distance,” so that Group 1 misses by the most, then 2, then 3, then finally the smallest missers in Group 4. Last year, nearly 300 pitchers had at least 100 swings against a slider.

Why does it matter? Because those who missed by the most also had the most success in every other metric – they allowed the lowest batting average and slugging, piled up the most strikeouts, and compiled the most run value, too. Missing a bat by six inches rather than two inches doesn’t count more, but also, in some ways, it does.

It is, like anything else, a piece of the puzzle. Pitchers with high-velo fastballs aren’t guaranteed to have success. Hitters with the best exit velocities aren’t guaranteed it, either. They’re just a lot likelier to find it.

Knowing that – knowing where the bat is from the ball at the closest point of contact – we can add some directionality to it, too. You can look above the bat, or below. You can look at who’s early, or late. You can go in/out too – who’s getting misses off the hands or way off the end of the bat.

1) Missing over -- or under

If you’re throwing a four-seamer, you generally are looking for misses above the bat – or, in this parlance, with the bat under the ball. If you’re throwing a breaking ball or an offspeed pitch, you’re probably expecting the bat to be over the ball.

Let’s focus on those fastballs. On average, 45% of four-seam misses come with the bat under the ball. (That doesn’t mean that 55% of misses come with the bat over the ball, importantly. You could be perfectly lined up in terms of up/down, but be late, or miss in an in/out direction. There are lots of ways to miss!) The top pitchers get misses under the ball more than two-thirds of the time, and there are some special names here.

Williams might be a surprise, because his four-seamer is generally considered more ‘good’ than ‘great,’ but it’s also clear what this is telling you. Because his famous “Airbender” changeup dips and dives at the last second, batters have a hard time differentiating between the two, leading to bats swinging under the fastball, because they are incorrectly guessing Airbender. You can see it pretty clearly here, watching the bat stay under the ball.

Any fastball list, we think, that includes Miller and Jacob Misiorowski is a good one. Don’t gloss over Sabrowski, who has a truly special fastball shape, and this is what he does with it. If we looked at 2023-’26 cumulatively instead of just 2026, Misiorowski would be at the top of this list, befitting what may be the single most dominant starting pitcher fastball of all time.

What about over?

Misiorowski's curveball (which has the bat going over it on 49% of misses) and Miller's slider (55%) appear again, and we’ll never tire of seeing Miller pop up on these lists – there’s a reason his slider cannot be touched. At third on the list, it makes sense to see Nolan McLean’s spinfest here, even with his recent struggles. But it’s the flame-throwing Chase Burns who gets the bat to miss over the ball the most, tied with the surprisingly effective (and newly hard-throwing) Caleb Kilian, tops at 57%.

There’s a third bucket here, too. It’s not missing over or under. It’s letting the swing be lined up. If you’re a pitcher, this is, truthfully, not ideal – a description that’s apt for Colorado starter Tomoyuki Sugano’s sinker, which gets lined up an MLB-high 88% of the time. On a very related note, he has allowed a .390 average / .537 slugging against that pitch – with a mere 1.4% whiff rate (which is to say: he’s garnered one single swing-and-miss).

2) Getting bats to be late -- or early

“Hitting is timing, pitching is disrupting timing,” goes the famous saying attributed to Hall of Famer Warren Spahn. No matter how much pitching has changed, that has been – and will always be – the case.

This is why splitting this all up by pitch type is so important, because fastballs are trying to make the batter late, while offspeed and breaking pitches are more about the batter being too early with his swing.

Knowing that, you think you might have a guess as to which fastball makes batters the latest. You’re thinking about a blazing triple-digit heater, or some elite, IVB monster with rising action, or perhaps a Cam Schlittler type who throws three different fastballs, all hard. It’s nothing like that. It quite literally is as far away from that as possible.

It is – and we swear this is true – baseball’s slowest fastball, delivered from baseball’s funkiest angle, and if this is opening some doors into how we quantify deception, then it sure would explain a lot about how Tyler Rogers has been able to succeed. We’ll have more on him in this space later this week.

Interestingly enough, No. 2 on the list is a Toronto teammate, but not one of the bright shiny names who helped lead them to the World Series last year. It’s rookie Spencer Miles, plucked out of the Rule 5 Draft. While “being late” is a little harder to see on the broadcast camera than missing north-south or east-west, you can also see White Sox outfielder Derek Hill regretting going after this sinker as soon as it was thrown.

The top 80 or so “making batters late” pitches are fastballs, with the one notable exception being Tanner Banks’ slider. It doesn’t visually look like anything special, but it’s his primary pitch for a reason, and you can see here that even a very accomplished hitter like Matt Chapman has barely gotten his bat to the hitting zone when the pitch gets to the catcher’s glove.

We are sorry to report that the pitch type that gets the most on-time swings is also Sugano’s sinker, at 93% of swings. It’s not what you want. Interestingly, the pitch type that gets the lowest rate of on-time swings is Patrick Corbin’s changeup, at just 16% of swings, which might help explain how he’s still got at least one weapon that batters can’t figure out.

3) Getting hitters to flail outside, or be tied up inside

The third dimension is the in/out dimension, so in on the hands (‘tied-up’) or off the end of the bat (‘flailing’). As you’d expect, this is largely about pitch movement combined with platoon advantages, because sinkers and cutters are the most likely to result in tied-up swings, while changeups are overwhelmingly what get flailing swings – which are all flipped if the batter is opposite-handed.

That’s what we see on this leaderboard of the most misses off the end of the bat, and there are some satisfying names here.

Skubal, before his injury, was not only appearing high on the list for "most often getting batters to flail" at his changeup, but he's also in the top five in terms of by how many inches batters flailed, too -- as Boston's Willson Contreras found out earlier this year.

On the other end, you may not know the name Jesse Scholtens, but no one is tying up batters more than he is with his sinker, just ahead of Nathan Eovaldi.

But there’s one more aspect to all this, too.

If we have three dimensions – up/down, in/out, early/late – and each of those three dimensions has three groupings, with the middle ones (on time, lined up, and centered) being an outcome the pitcher would very much like to avoid, we can start doing some combining.

For example, if a swing is zero of those three good things – it’s not on time, and it’s not lined up, and it’s not centered – it’s a “flawed swing,” which are relatively rare, comprising 8% of swings. If if a swing is on time and lined up and centered, it’s essentially the best thing a batter can do (or, conversely, a massive failure by the pitcher). We’ll call those “perfect contact,” which applies to approximately 20% of swings.

As you’d expect, these are huge value propositions, looking at outcomes in 2026. It’s not difficult to express how badly things go for a batter on a flawed swing, because by definition it's not just a miss, it's the ugliest kind of miss -- one where a batter has failed in all three dimensions. We'd show you the details, but it's zeroes across the board. It's a 0% contact rate, and a .000 average, and it just leads to zero success, for a batter, ever.

It's quite the opposite, though, on perfect contact.

• Perfect contact (20% of swings)
• .333/.329/.593 (.394 wOBA)
• 54% hard-hit rate
• 0% whiff rate

As a pitcher, you obviously want to get flawed swings as often as you can, and only two pitch types do this more than 30% of the time – Miller’s slider (37%), of course, and Garrett Whitlock’s slider (30%). It’s the opposite for batters, where Zach Neto has a higher flawed swing rate against curveballs than any hitter on any pitch type, and he’s unsurprisingly hitting .059/.118 (BA/SLG) against them.

Avoiding perfect contact, for a pitcher, is important too, and it’s pleasing to see that Giants reliever Erik Miller has allowed just 5% perfect contact on his slider, because he’s thrown that pitch 40% of the time and yet allowed a mere four hits against it. That plays. On the hitting side, the batter and pitch type that results in the most perfect contact (64%) is actually pretty entertaining: Rays speedster Chandler Simpson against sinkers.

There's not one right way to miss a bat. There are so many ways, with so many stories to tell. As we've come to understand how pitchers are so dominant over the last decade, now we have another way to do it -- and another way to wonder how anyone hits anything at all, really.