May 12, 2008
Rich Barbieri John Barten Sal Baxamusa John Beamer Brian Borawski John Brattain Craig Brown Matthew Carruth Derek Carty Alex Eisenberg Mike Fast David Gassko
Lisa Gray
Brandon Isleib Chris Jaffe Josh Kalk Chris Neault Dave Studeman Steve Treder Bryan Tsao Tuck! John Walsh Geoff Young And here's the full roster.
Or you can search by:
StubHub is where fans buy and sell Yankees Tickets, Red Sox Tickets, White Sox Tickets, Mets Tickets and all other baseball tickets. If you are looking for World Series Tickets, ALCS Tickets or NLCS Tickets, you can find them at StubHub! More hot selling tickets include: Cubs Tickets, Astros Tickets, Dodgers Tickets, Angels Tickets and Detroit Tigers Tickets. Onlineseats is the best stop for Red Sox Tickets, Chicago White Sox Tickets, World Series Tickets, Dodgers Tickets, Minnesota Twins Tickets, St Louis Cardinals tickets, Chicago Cubs Tickets and Detroit Tigers Tickets Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets. Let the TicketSpecialists help you locate Boston Red Sox Tickets, Cubs Tickets, New York Yankees and Mets Tickets, Texas Rangers Tickets, Angels Tickets, Orioles Tickets and many Other Baseball Tickets 
All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a
Creative Commons
License.
|
Anatomy of a player: Jake Peavyby Josh KalkMarch 25, 2008 Jake Peavy is one of the best pitchers in the game. He basically did everything you can ask of a starting pitcher last year. He threw more than 200 innings, he struck out more than one batter per inning, he kept his walk rate incredibly low, and he kept his ERA well below three, checking in at 2.54. All that added up to a Cy Young for the young right hander. Carlos Gomez broke down Peavy's mechanics last year and explained how the pitcher could be so good with not the best mechanics. Here we will take a look at Peavy's PITCHf/x statistics and see what light those can shed on Peavy's success last year. Peavy's repertoire contains a mid-90s fastball, a slider, a change-up, and an occasional curve. You might think that Peavy is mostly a two-pitch pitcher, throwing his fastball 58 percent of the time and his slider 35 percent, but as we will see later, that is a bit misleading. Here is a view of these pitches' movement compared to a pitch thrown without spin.  Let's break down these pitches one by one, starting with his fastball. As Carlos showed, Peavy's arm angle is not very over-the-top. This causes his fastball to tail in toward right-handed batters, making it very difficult to track. In fact, his fastball moves almost as much in as it rises, which is very unusual for a pitcher. Tack on the fact he throws the pitch 94 mph and you have a great base to work with. Peavy's slider, though, is one of the most interesting pitches to look at. The movement here makes it look like this is just one pitch, but I am pretty sure Peavy throws two different sliders, a hard slider and a slider that is more of a slurve. You can really see this when you look at the movement compared to the speed of the pitch.   Here you can see the separation between the two sliders. The hard slider is thrown about 87 mph with much less horizontal movement. The slurve is thrown at about 83 mph with a huge horizontal movement. Unfortunately, my classification algorithm isn't sensitive enough to distinguish between the two. I plan to work during the season on a way to not only say a pitch is a slider, but what kind of slider it is. I'd love to hear from Padres fans on whether this difference is distinguishable watching the games. How the two sliders affect batters is unknown, but I'd imagine it would be a very hard thing to pick up. In any case, Peavy loves to use his sliders with two strikes and he gets a ton of strikeouts with them. Peavy's change is somewhat a work in progress. Peavy's horizontal movement is very close to his fastball, but his vertical movement is more than five inches less. He does get almost a 10 mph difference in speeds, which is very solid. Reports say he is working on his change-up during spring training this year, so it will be interesting to see if he stays with the pitch or if he goes back to just throwing it about 5 percent of the time. Peavy's curve looks a lot like his slurve, but he throws it in the mid-70s instead of the low 80s. Again because of his arm angle, Peavy produces more horizontal movement than vertical movement with his curve, which may be why he is reluctant to use the pitch. When he does use his curve, it almost always is against left-handed batters. Again, this is very likely due to the large horizontal movement of the pitch. I also want to spend a few minutes on Peavy's release point. I haven't developed all the tools necessary to really do this justice, but Peavy's release point is just too interesting to ignore.  You can see some pitches that weren't properly tracked, but the clump of sliders that is nearly sidearm is real. So if you are a batter and you see him drop down, expect a slider. Peavy seems to release his breaking pitches at a lower angle than his fastball. This is especially true with his change, which he releases very low. If he is going to use this pitch more, it will be interesting to see if batter can pick up on this different release point. The other thing to take note of is that Peavy has a very wide release point for a pitcher. Carlos spent a great deal of time discussing this in his article. I don't have much to add except that this, too, must be hard for batters. If a pitcher has very repeatable mechanics, picking up the ball has to be easier. When the release point can change by more than a foot, finding the ball must be hard, to say nothing of determining if it is a fastball or slider. The fact that Peavy can have such a wide release point and still have pinpoint command is remarkable. If Peavy were walking a bunch of batters you might think about trying to fix that, but why try to fix something that clearly isn't broken? Josh Kalk is a physics and math geek who can also be found blogging at http://www.baseball.bornbybits.com/blog/blog.html. He enjoys good conversations about baseball and can be reached at . Do you have a general question or comment for one of THT's writers? Send it in to our weekly mailbag We also welcome unsolicited op-ed pieces of approximately 500 words for consideration. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity and consistency of style. Please include your whole name and location to be considered. If you have a comment about this specific article, please email the writer. Next Article: Five Questions: San Francisco Giants>> <<Previous Article: Measuring defense for players back to 1956 (Part 2) |
