Evaluating Pitching at Elevation
Everyone talks about how much of a hitting park Coors Field is, and how hard it is for pitchers to get outs there. Sprinkle this in with competing in a Loaded NL west, and you have a recipe for pitchers to have a gauntlet of a season year in and year out. However the Major Leagues aren't the only ones who have an issue with elevation and pitching. There are dozens of division 1 baseball programs that have to deal with elevation, and now given the restructuring of the Minor Leagues, the entry level Independent league has to deal with it every single year.
To be overly simple about the effects of elevation of pitch movement, they lose roughly 2% of movement per 500 feet. Take the average fastball in Major League baseball that has roughly 16 inches of induced vertical break (IVB). If you follow the 2% loss of movement per 500 feet, this same fastball would move 12.8 inches vertically at Coors Field, 13.8 inches for the Great Falls Voyagers in the Pioneer League, and 13.1 inches if you played for the BYU Cougars Baseball team. This takes a pretty average fastball (assuming average velocity), and makes it pretty bad. Sliding down 2-3 inches from an already average shape brings you into the “dead zone” fastball range. That is not where you want to be.
If that is what happens to an average fastball, what about if you have a fastball with top percentile IVB? Say you threw a 93 mph fastball with 20 inches of vertical break from a 5.5 release height. This fastball is very good, it would register a college stuff+ rating of 142, and a professional stuff+ rating of about 122. This pitch is elite in both areas, but what if you played at BYU? Your fastball would go from 20 inches of IVB to 16.4. This drops your college stuff + to a 117, still a good pitch, but not nearly the weapon that you had at sea level. If you pitched in the big leagues? This pitch drops from a 122 to a **below league average** fastball of a 97 stuff + rating. Stuff+ measurements are not the end all be all, but this drop is incredibly concerning.
Okay, but what about sweepers? Fastballs can be carried by other characteristics, but overall the sweeper is a movement dependent pitch. Let's say you had an absolute weapon of a slider, you threw it at 80 with -20 HB and 0 IVB. At sea level, this pitch grades out at a 127 in college and about a 112 in professional baseball. So let's assume the 20% loss of movement for the big leagues and the 18% loss for college. A 80mph sweeper that moves -16.4 inches horizontally (right handed) will rate at 107 in college and a 101 in the Major Leagues. Sometimes while digging into pitch shapes it's very difficult to remember how difficult it is to be truly “Major League average”. But even more impressive is the rating of 112 and 127 in MLB and College respectively.
What pitches are impacted the most
So what can we do with this information? As we said earlier, the fastball is a pitch that can be carried by other characteristics instead of pure IVB, but the sweeper is movement based. Given this, how would we go about developing an arsenal at elevation?
In arsenal development, a major trend is to build out a group of pitchers coined as “low slot supinators”, because of their ability to throw a ton of different pitches. They can throw the gyro, the sweeper, SSW sinker, kick change to serve as a splitter and a harder cutter to balance it all out. But these types of pitchers are the types that get crushed at elevation. One pitcher who fits this bill is Justin Lawrence, a pitcher with devastating stuff who’s ERA balloons at elevation because of the type of arsenal he goes with.
On the flip side of the coin, high slot pronators are looked upon as “inferior” in some regards, being a type of pitcher who struggles to really create a ton of separation in the movement plot. They generally thow high efficiency fastballs, gyro sliders and can also find a cutter to mix in there along with a changeup. They create a tight movement split, something that looks similar to this.
As you can see, Tyler Kinleys plot contains a FB and slider that quite literally overlap at certain points. Yet, Kinley has found success at the Major League Level while pitching high leverage innings. This is because Kinleys repertoire is carried by factors separate from IVB and other spin based movement parameters. Kinley ranks near the 80th percentile in fastball velocity in 2024, and in 2023 he was near the 90th percentile with a fastball averaging just shy of 97. This type of velocity is what is required to be considered “elevation proof”.
Lawrence averaging just above league average velocity with a unique fastball movement pattern paired with what should be a devastating sweeper should be able to succeed at the Major League level, but given he throws half of his games at an elevation over 5,200 feet, he finds himself struggling to avoid hard contact. On May 13th, Lawrence threw 2.0 innings against the San Diego Padres, in this outing, he averaged 18 inches of armside run on his fastball, while averaging about 17 inches of sweep on his slider. Creating a brutally tough split for hitters to cover with nearly 3 feet of difference. Yet, just three days before on May 10th, he pitched at home, and averaged 14 inches of run on his fastball and 12 inches of sweep on his slider. This leaves him having to try and compete at the Major League level with 25% less separation than he is able to compete with on the road.
What can Lawrence do about it? He can probably attempt to add a cutter, or a gyro slider, to make his arsenal less movement dependent. But with the current arsenal, competing at elevation is going to be a major handicap.
What types of pitchers should you have?
So if you are a team that plays all their home games at elevation, you should just refuse to acquire players that are IVB/IHB dependent right? Wrong. While these players may struggle at elevation, having pitchers like this ready to compete on the road will help you have an answer for a lot of options offensively. In addition, being able to showcase a plethora of different shapes out of your bullpen gives you a lot of options, and makes other pitchers who have tighter arsenals better because hitters won’t be seeing the same shapes every game.
However, say you are a team in the Pioneer league, where almost every stadium faces the issue of elevation. In this case, I would certainly make pitch shape a major priority when signing players. Independent leagues are very unique, in the amount of player turnover they have from one year to the next. This gives them the opportunity to reset every year, and change strategy more so than others. Given the pioneer league plays their entire schedule at roughly 4,000 feet of elevation, I would be extremely wary of making acquisition decisions without considering the movement effects of elevation.
On the flip side, as a player who’s best attribute was a sweeper that would consistently average -20HB, I would stay as far away from the pioneer league as I could. Independent baseball is very cutthroat, and having the black eye of poor performance at one of the younger indy ball leagues could have strong negative effects on your career as a whole.
Inning distribution at home vs. road
For a team that plays 50% of their games close to sea level, I would base decision making of inning load based on home/road splits more with an elevation based team than I would any other. Obviously teams who play 95% or more of their season at normal elevation won't need to worry about this, but teams who play 50% at severe elevation certainly need to take it into account. Specifically in the instance of comparing Kinley to Lawrence, I would lean in significant favor of throwing Kinley during high leverage innings (as he does already), but the biggest change for me would probably be how much leverage I am willing to give Lawrence a chance in on the road.
I know having defined roles in the MLB is something relievers value a lot, but with proper communication ahead of time as well as giving the players as much information as they need to fully understand this change, players would likely welcome the change in strategy. Also, this would be able to have built in workload breaks for relief pitchers.
Overall, pitching at elevation can be a handicap, but if you pay attention to what you need at home versus on the road, you can turn it into a massive advantage, as you are the team with a prepared gameplan and a roster tailored towards competing.