Saturday, June 07, 2008
How fast do they work?
Posted by Mike FastHave you ever wondered whether pitchers that work quickly actually get better defensive support behind them? I don't know the answer to that question yet, but I did find out that the PITCHf/x data this year contains a time stamp of when each pitch was tracked. So I thought, what better to do than find out which pitchers are fast workers and which ones toil slowly?
Here are the top ten and bottom ten in average time between pitches for pitchers with at least 100 pitches so far in 2008.
Pitcher Seconds Mark Buehrle 17.2 Glendon Rusch 17.2 Joe Blanton 17.6 Jason Bergmann 17.7 Jon Lieber 17.8 R.A. Dickey 17.9 Ben Sheets 18.4 Esteban Loaiza 18.4 Derek Lowe 18.6 Dallas Braden 18.7 --- --- Jason Isringhausen 27.4 Hideki Okajima 27.5 Denny Bautista 27.6 J.J. Putz 27.9 Jose Valverde 28.0 Josh Banks 28.1 Jonathan Papelbon 28.4 Joel Peralta 29.0 Rafael Perez 29.1 Rafael Betancourt 32.0
I excluded the first pitch of each at bat as well as any cases where there was over one minute between pitches to the same batter.
Mike Fast is a Royals fan who enjoys investigating baseball questions using data of many sorts. He is a member of Complete Game Consulting. He welcomes comments via e-mail.