The Brewers Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Sliders | Baseball Prospectus

You’re on the mound in a tie game with the bases loaded and no outs. You’re a right-hander facing a right-handed hitter, whom you’ve put in a 1-2 count. You badly need a strikeout to have any hope of getting out of this jam unscathed. What pitch do you throw?

Without knowing other important variables like who the batter is and what kind of arsenal you’ve got, this is an obvious situation for a slider or sweeper. Of the four major pitch types, sliders are right behind offspeed pitches in league-wide whiff rate, with the former being used primarily against same-side hitters and the latter against opposite-side hitters.

The slider pitch group, which includes sliders, sweepers, and slurves, generates a big chunk of MLB’s whiffs and strikeouts. It’s hard to fan a high percentage of batters without a good slider variant, so you might expect that the team that strikes out the most hitters would throw a lot of sliders.