Baseball Reference Blog

User jshecket made a comment on yesterday's post about homering on a 3-0 pitch, so I thought I'd look into that a little bit.

Indeed, Chase Utley hit 2 homers on 3-0 pitches, both in the same game off the same pitcher. That was in June of this year, and are the only 3-0 homers the Phillies hit this year.

To find these homers, currently we're limited to use the PI Team Game Event Finder, so you can search only team-by-team.

Searching back on the Phillies' history, here are the number of 3-0 homers they have hit each year (years not listed mean there were zero such homers in that year):

2007: 2
2005: 2 (Thome, Howard)
2003: 2 (Thome 2)
1997: 1 (Estalella
1995: 2 (L Webster, Whiten)
1994: 1 (Kruk)
1993: 2 (Kruk, Incaviglia)

There is no data on count prior to 1989 (at least in the B-R Play Index currently), so that's as far back as this list goes.

We don't really have enough data to investigate this, but if I had to guess, I would venture that 3-0 homers were VERY rare prior to the 1980s.  If you are at least 30 years old, you can remember the time in the 1980s when any batter swinging on a 3-0 pitch was almost unheard of. It was the "ol' automatic." Then, some managers started allowing their more disciplined hitters to look for a particular pitch on 3-0 and take a hack if they got it. These days, it seems that most batters swing freely at 3-0 pitches unless a walk is particularly valuable in that situation.

Related posts:

Homering on the first pitch of a post-season game

Homering in the Ruth Era

Three players homering twice in the same game

Hit By Pitch vs Home Runs

Ryan Howard: 26 Home Runs in Career, pitch count of 1 – Baseball-Reference PI