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October 04, 2009

What should we call Rivera’s other fastball?

Mariano Rivera is famous for his cut fastball. So famous, in fact, that it's a common misconception that he only throws one pitch. Of course, from PITCHf/x data, as well as some newspaper reports, we know he throws another type of fastball. I've often seen it referred to as a sinker or two-seam fastball, but its spin deflection certainly looks like a classic four-seamer.

In a discussion about Dave Allen's post about Mariano Rivera that took place at the Book blog, I had the occasion to look for images of Rivera's two fastball grips. I thought I'd share them here for yuk-yuks with the other two of you in the world who care about what to properly name Rivera's "other" fastball.

First, here's his cutter grip, with index fingertip and middle fingertip on the seam. As far as I can tell this is close to a typical cutter grip--a four-seam grip with the ball set a little off center in his hand. (There's a better picture here, but I don't have permission to post the image.)

Rivera throws a cut fastball against the White Sox, July 16, 2006. (Icon/SMI)

Now, here's the other fastball, the one I tend to call a four-seamer because of how it moves. It's the one others call a two-seamer, though I'm not sure why. If you look at how many seams he's holding, should we call it a one-seamer?

Mariano Rivera throws his other fastball against the Rangers, August 7, 2008. (Icon/SMI)

Posted by: Mike Fast

September 26, 2009

Ichiro strike three

Ichiro Suzuki was ejected in the fifth inning of today's game against the Toronto Blue Jays after demonstratively arguing a called strike three. In addition to comments to the umpire, Suzuki drew a line on the ground with his bat to show Brian Runge where he thought the pitch had gone.



I grabbed some still shots of the pitch crossing the plate, but with camera angles, it's impossible to tell whether a pitch so close to the edge of the plate was a strike or not. So what did the PITCHf/x tracking system say?



The path of the baseball as tracked by PITCHf/x is shown by the red lines. (The baseball is 2.9 inches in diameter.) PITCHf/x has been shown to be accurate within half an inch, so the gray lines outside the red lines indicate the possible location of the baseball given the margin of error inherent in PITCHf/x measurements near home plate.

It's close enough that Ichiro Suzuki probably shouldn't have taken the pitch. The umpire's going to call that pitch a strike to a left-handed batter at least half the time. The cost of a strike in that situation was the second out of the inning with a runner on third base, costing the Mariners something like 0.6 runs on average. The gain from taking a ball, moving the count from 0-2 to 1-2, is miniscule by comparison, something like 0.025 runs on average.

In this case, he was bailed out by a wild pitch that scored Adam Moore from third during the next at bat, but it wasn't a good bet on Ichiro's part, nor did he have a particularly good case with the ump.

Posted by: Mike Fast

July 24, 2009

What did Mark Buehrle throw?

During the season, Mark Buehrle used his change-up about 15-20% of the time. In yesterday's perfect game, it was his go-to pitch, particularly against right-handed batters, who saw 40 change-ups out of 90 pitches. He notched 15 outs with the change, seven with the four-seam fastball, and five with the cut fastball.

In the last three innings, he went even more heavily to the change-up, throwing 24 changes compared to 18 pitches of all other types combined. This while he was ramping his fastball speed from the mid-eighties to the upper eighties, touching 90 mph with his final pitch.

After the jump is a chart showing the speed of all his pitches, with the pitch type and result of the at bat indicated.
Click for more...

Posted by: Mike Fast

June 09, 2009

Which batters hit the hardest balls in April?

With the release of Sportvision's HITf/x data for April 2009, we can look at who hit the ball the hardest in April. Since batted ball speed does not decrease much even when the batter hits the ball off center, it is more instructive to look at batted ball speed in the horizontal plane. In other words, hitting the ball very hard straight up is likely to turn into an out, while hitting the ball very hard straight toward the outfield is likely to turn into a hit. In fact, we find that batting average is maximized at an elevation of 11 degrees, so we'll look at the average batted ball speed for batters in that plane. We should also remove bunt attempts since they purposefully attempt a low batted ball speed.

Here are the results for the 303 batters with 20 or more non-bunt batted balls recorded by HITf/x. Average batted ball speed for a non-pitcher was 75.1 mph. When pitchers were batting, their average batted ball speed was 66.1 mph.
Click for more...

Posted by: Mike Fast

May 02, 2009

Strasburg live!

I had the splendid opportunity to watch San Diego State pitching pheenom Stephen Strasburg pitch last night. He was in my hometown of Santa Clara, starting against the Broncos. The weather was threatening; it had rained for much of the day, and the early innings were played under a slight drizzle, but the game was played in its entirety.
Click for more...

Posted by: Steve Treder


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