February 22, 2012
Now Available for 2012 THT Essentials: Now Available The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012, an annual "must buy" for all baseball fans, is now shipping. Read this article to learn more about it.
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A.J.‘s curve: missing bats, missing the zone (1)
None nastier than Kimbrel (5) Dissecting a mystery pitch (8) Yes, we actually classified every pitch (9) Cliff Lee and the four-seam fastball (8) 
Lucas Apostoleris
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Hello. Ball-tracking technology—PITCHf/x and its offspring—has changed the way we look at the game of baseball. This is a place for our writers to share pitcher profiles and thumbnails, topical information about games, trades and anything else we can think of that ball-tracking technology helps us understand or enjoy.Tuesday, February 21, 2012A.J.‘s curve: missing bats, missing the zoneby Lucas ApostolerisAfter much anticipation, the trade that sent A.J. Burnett from the Yankees to the Pirates was finally completed on Sunday. Burnett had a tumultuous three seasons in the Bronx, with a 4.79 ERA and 4.5 walks/hit batters per nine over 584 regular-season innings. His signature pitch is an 83 mph spike-curveball with exceptional movement. (Harry Pavlidis mentioned it here a few weeks ago—it’s not quite as nasty as Craig Kimbrel’s). Because he does a consistent job of keeping it below the strike zone, hitters don’t make much contact with the pitch when they swing at it, but it’s taken for a ball if when they don’t. The two tables below are for whiffs per swing and balls per pitch, minimum 2,500 pitches thrown dating back to 2007. Rank Pitcher Pitch # Whiff% 1 A.J. Burnett Curveball 4575 43.9% 2 Cole Hamels Changeup 4158 43.8% 3 Rich Harden Changeup 3053 43.4% 4 Francisco Liriano Slider 2632 43.4% 5 Tim Lincecum Changeup 2946 42.9% Rank Pitcher Pitch # Ball% 1 Randy Wolf Curveball 2562 44.2% 2 Gio Gonazlez Curveball 2663 43.2% 3 A.J. Burnett Curveball 4575 43.1% 4 Justin Verlander Curveball 3244 42.3% 5 Kevin Millwood Fastball 2718 41.2% Pitch labels are THT's. Friday, February 10, 2012None nastier than Kimbrelby Harry PavlidisCraig Kimbrel throws a nasty breaking ball. He grips it like a spike slider (maybe) and the ball moves like a curveball (sort of). It's a relatively short curveball, but one moving upwards of 87 mph when it leaves Kimbrel's hand. The combination of speed and drop are unparalleled in the major leagues today.  Checkout the discussion and a picture of the grip in the forum at Brooks Baseball. The label is not as important as the key characteristics—speed and drop—when looking for comparisons to Kimbrel's offering. The first comparison is flame-thrower Henry Rodriguez. Click for more... Friday, February 03, 2012Yes, we actually classified every pitchby Dan BrooksLong term PITCHf/x data has always been difficult to find online. There are several existing sources available: Fangraphs has some of it, but not everything you might want (I’m sure they will tomorrow, just for that). Texas Leaguer has had a fantastic tool up for quite some time now, but still, there are places it lacks functionality. Josh Kalk used to have a wonderful website, but he moved on to the Rays. BrooksBaseball has never really had seasonal data per se, despite having data that spans each season. We think that, generally, there are several reasons the data has been difficult to find in a long-term format. First, there is the technical limitation: The PITCHf/x dataset is large—millions of pitches. This means that dynamic solutions—most PitchFX systems are dynamic—must have very good caching systems, well written databases, and powerful hosting solutions. But beyond raw computing, which we can solve using some combination of duct tape and Moore’s law, there are really two critical issues that are unfortunately intertwined. The first of these issues is a data quality limitation. The PITCHf/x data is beautiful and we have nothing but exemplary things to say about the people who both collect it and make it free to access. I hope I do not overstep my bounds when I say that Cory and his team at MLBAM and Greg and his team at Sportvision have probably contributed more to baseball research simply through the availability of this data than all but the most accomplished Sabermetricians. That said, there are simply issues with the data, most of which are due to park-specific camera quirks that make individual games more grokkable than complete months or seasons (see Chris Carpenter’s data in the World Series, both in Texas and in St. Louis, for an example). The second of these issues relates to pitch classification. This has become progressively less and less of an issue as the brilliant minds at BAM have worked to improve their classification algorithms, which have gone from mediocre to damn good in a very short amount of time. Yet still, if you’re going to average across a set of data to say something about a set of labels, the quality of what you report depends heavily on your data labels. These last two issues are related in the following way: Chris Carpenter’s data includes park specific errors in both St. Louis and Texas, so, it is classified by the automatic algorithm differently in St. Louis and Texas despite being internally consistent. Therefore, quality issues propagate through various parts of the system. So, you really want a very qualified human to do the tagging. But, good luck convincing THT's Harry Pavlidis or Lucas Apostoleris to tag three and a half million pitches, because that would be insane. What’s that you say? They’ve actually done that?! Click for more... Tuesday, January 31, 2012Dissecting a mystery pitchby Alan NathanOn April 29, 2011, during the top of the fifth inning of a Toronto at New York game, Yankee pitcher Freddy Garcia threw a split-fingered fastball to the Jay's Juan Rivera. A video of the pitch was captured by YES-MO, the high-speed video camera from the Yankees television broadcast, with sufficient resolution to allow both the spin rate and the rotation axis of the ball to be determined with reasonable precision. Before reading on, you should take a look at the video, paying attention to the following details:
Click for more... Friday, January 27, 2012Price’s backdoor cutterby Lucas ApostolerisDavid Price’s pitching repertoire has gone through quite a transformation over his big league career, as Mike Fast explained after the 2010 season. In 2011, Price made a further change to his repertoire by adding a cut fastball to the mix. In 2008, when Price first reached the majors, he threw a hard slider. Since then, however, he’s essentially replaced it with a cutter that is about three miles per hour faster than the ’08 slider. Price says that he first used the cutter in a game on April 18 against the White Sox. Looking at his location with both the slider and cutter on the following graph, you can see that he’s taken a different approach in strikeout situations with his new pitch (the black bars represent the edges of an approximate 24-inch strike zone).  The slider was used to induce batters to chase pitches out of the zone, while Price adopted the cutter as a pitch that he can backdoor on right-handed hitters. To further illustrate this, here are his two-strike cutter locations to right-handed batters only.  Price has typically been relying on fastballs in the mid-90s to pick up swinging strikes. It’ll be interesting to see if he continues to develop his cutter as a finesse pitch to offset his power arsenal. Cliff Lee and the four-seam fastballby Harry PavlidisCliff Lee can be described as a surgeon. Hitters may feel more like he's performing a vivisection, but that's just a matter of perspective. Lee's impressive collection of scalpels includes a cutter, curve, sinker, change-up and slider. But it's his fifth pitch, a four-seam fastball, which is our focal point for the moment. Specifically, where he throws it and when. And to whom. So three focal points. Stop counting. Click for more... Wednesday, January 25, 2012The anticipated return of Wainwright’s curveballby Harry PavlidisIt's been a crazy offseason in St. Louis. Along with some new faces—or old ones in new roles—the Cardinals fans will be reacquainted with the second dome on their two-headed ace. New elbow not withstanding, it stands to reason that the youthful Adam Wainwright will return as 1a, not 1b, over the slowly, but gracefully, aging Chris Carpenter. And it's not just some team's ace coming back, not just a Cy Young candidate, but one of the best curveballs in baseball. He'll rejoin a rotation that has some pretty snazzy curveballs, if not as effective. Click for more... Monday, January 23, 2012Putnam f/xby Lucas ApostolerisFor the second time this offseason, Kevin Slowey has been traded. This time, he’s going from the Rockies to the Indians. The return for Colorado is 24-year-old reliever Zach Putnam, who had a cup of coffee with the Indians in September. You know what that means? It means that we have 114 pitches worth of PITCHf/x for Putnam’s debut. Before we get into that, though, let’s get a few things out of the way:
For his stint with the Indians (7.1 innings, 10 hits, five runs, no walks, two hit batsmen, nine strikeouts), I could identify three clear pitches from Putnam. About half the time against righties and two-thirds of the time against lefties, Putnam relied on a 91 mph fastball. They appear to be predominately four-seamers, though there are likely some two-seamers or maybe even cutters in there as well. A picture of his four-seam grip can be seen here. His out-pitch against both lefties (33 percent) and righties (30 percent) was a splitter that looks early on to be a very good offering. On average, it was about six mph off of his fastball with nine extra inches of downward action; it got a swing-and-miss on 48 percent of swings against it. You can see his splitter grip here. Putnam also threw a handful of low-80s sliders that didn’t have a whole lot of depth and were left up (only three of Putnam’s 17 sliders were below the bottom of the strike zone*, while half of his 36 splitters were). This looks like his slider grip. *In this context, I am using a fixed vertical strike zone of 1.75 feet above ground to 3.4 feet above ground. Pitch results are in the table below. # LHB RHB Ball Called Whiff Foul In Play Fastball 61 29 32 21 10 3 14 13 Splitter 36 15 21 8 3 12 7 6 Slider 17 1 16 7 5 1 0 4 Putnam will be on the Rockies' 40-man roster, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him get a serious look for a bullpen spot out of spring training. His splitter is particularly intriguing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
