Milwaukee Brewers: Long ball continues to bite Hader in 2019

While Josh Hader has still been quite dominant this season for the Milwaukee Brewers, the home run ball has given him some issues.

The Milwaukee Brewers’ star out-getter Josh Hader has developed into one of the most dominant relief pitchers in baseball over the last year and a half.

With Corey Knebel out for the season and Jeremy Jeffress not pitching as he did in 2018, Hader has taken on more of a workload which includes pitching multiple innings when he is on the mound.

For the most part, he has been his dominant self. In 51 innings this season he holds a 2.29 ERA, with a whopping 96 strikeouts, an opponent OPS of .538 and also recorded an immaculate inning earlier in the season.

However, the biggest issue for Hader this season has been giving up the home run ball and the most recent occurrence happened just last night against the Oakland Athletics when Hader would give up a walk-off home run in the tenth inning.

Compared to last season, Hader has already given up more home runs in 2019 than he did in 2018 and his home run per nine innings mark has nearly doubled from 1.0 to 1.8. And this all comes with about 30 fewer innings pitched at this point in the season.

There are a few reasons behind this uptick in home runs and one is his fastball usage. Hader relies primarily on his fastball and slider, but this season he has relied even more heavily on his fastball. According to Brooks Baseball, Hader is throwing the fastball 88 percent of the time which is an almost 10 percent increase in usage compared to last season.

While that pitch has still been very effective and generates a whiff nearly 26 percent of the time, hitters are waiting for this pitch and when Hader’s location is off, they’re ready to pounce.

This is a good segway to our next talking point, which is where Hader is locating his pitches. With Hader’s ability to just blow pitches by hitters, he is always going to catch a large portion of the strike zone. But in 2018 he was really working from the middle of the strike zone and down – particularly down and to the left with a heavy focus outside of the zone getting hitters to chase.

Yet this season, he is leaving his pitches in the upper half of the strike zone and isn’t hitting that lower portion nearly as often. In addition to his home run numbers being up, Hader’s groundball percentage has dropped seven percent to a mere 21.5 and his home run to fly ball ratio (HR/FB) is up seven percent to 21.3.

With the league average for HR/FB around 10 percent, Hader has had some bad luck when it comes to pitches leaving the park and hopefully, we see his 21.3 percent regress back towards the league average.

With that said, while Hader has still been very dominant overall for the Milwaukee Brewers, his fastball usage and the location of his pitches are two big factors in the number of home run balls that we have seen him give up so far this season.