How fast do they work?

Have 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.


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