I was recently looking at spray charts, provided by FanGraphs, of batting results against pitchers.

Specifically, I was looking at Clayton Kershaw’s page. It turns out that of the 15 home runs he’s allowed this year, 10 have been to right-handers and five to lefties. Of the 10 hit by right-handed hitters, nine were pulled. Of the five hit by left-handers, all five were pulled.

This, initially, came as a shock to me.

Hitting opposite-field home runs is clearly a much more challenging feat as you need to be stronger, but 14 of the 15 home runs allowed were pulled. It seemed strange so I decided to investigate.

I first needed who should be included in this study. Clearly I didn’t want relief pitchers, as their numbers are highly volatile due to the limited number of innings they pitch each year. I also didn’t want starting pitchers who didn’t pitch much/frequently. Therefore, I decided to only include pitchers who recorded 30 starts in 2015. This generated a list of 66 starting pitchers to better understand.

From there, I went to FanGraphs’ Spray Charts page. I manually looked at how many home runs were hit against them, how many were pulled by right-handed hitters and how many were pulled by left-handers. Here are the results:

These aren’t exactly very interesting statistics. They actually fit perfectly in line with the idea that most home runs should be pulled, as hitting an opposite-field homerun is much more difficult.

However, there were some interesting cases.

Here are Zack Greinke’s spray charts:

The graph on the top shows where right-handers put the ball in play against him. Notice that there are no home runs to the right side of the field (represented by little black dots). Now check out the graph on the bottom. This time it’s where lefties put the ball in play against him. And again, there are no opposite-field home runs. Of the 66 pitchers I looked at in this study, Greinke was the only one who never allowed an opposite field homerun this year. His fantastic season was unique in just one more way.

All the other pitchers were remarkably unspectacular. There were only seven pitchers who gave up only one opposite field homerun: Kershaw, Edinson Volquez, Jordan Zimmerman, Madison Bumgarner, Andrew Cashner, Gio Gonzalez, and Lance Lynn. This list of names isn’t all that remarkable. You have some great pitchers like Kershaw and Bumgarner, but you also have some less than stellar pitchers like Cashner and Volquez.

However, while looking at this group of 66 pitchers, I noticed one thing that was entirely weird. Let’s look at Chris Sale:

The graph on the top is unremarkable except for the number of home runs he allowed to right-handers all season. It totaled to 19. However, the graph on the bottom is what we want to look at. Notice the absence of small black dots at the top. Chris Sale gave up no home runs to left-handed batters all year. Sale is known to have one of the funkiest, hardest to hit deliveries for left-handed batters. So, that he allowed no home runs shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but it’s still interesting. Going back to 2012, however, Sale’s still only given up one homerun to left handed hitters!

Overall, this study wasn’t that enlightening. Interesting, sure, but it doesn’t really reveal much about baseball that we didn’t already know. It simply shows that Greinke, who had an incredible year already, is great at doing one more thing, limiting opposite field homeruns.