THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews

Buy The Book from Amazon


SABR101 required reading if you enter this site. Check out the Sabermetric Wiki. And interesting baseball books.
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Filter posts by...

 

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Another pitch f/x article

By , 03:29 AM

The more folks that are researching the pitch f/x data, the merrier.  As we never tire of saying, it is a virtual treasure trove of information, if not the holy grail of pitcher evaluation, as well as pitcher and batter “scouting.”

Here is a tidbit from the (short) article and analysis:

Glavine is a nibbler on the mound. Early in the at-bat he is going to aim for the very edge of the corner of the plate. If the batter swings, he probably isn’t swinging at a very good pitch. If the batter takes the pitch, Glavine still might get the call from the umpire.

That said, this strategy causes Glavine to fall behind many batters. This spells doom for most pitchers who promptly throw a fastball down the middle, which gets hammered. Glavine doesn’t give in. On 2-0, 2-1 and 3-1 counts Glavine threw 76 changes while PITCHf/x was tracking. During those same counts, Glavine threw only 69 fastballs! He may throw you something that gets more of the plate, but with such a high percentage of changeups, batters who sit dead red are playing right into Glavine’s hands. Compare those numbers with those of Santana, who threw 73 fastballs and 13 changeups on those hitter’s counts.

Bold and emphasis mine.

If Galvine is throwing more than 50% changeups in those counts, something which surely the advance scouts know and tell their hitters (if not, it would be a crime), why would anyone be sitting dead read?!

Read More

(2) Comments • 2007/11/25 • SabermetricsBall_Tracking
Page 1 of 1 pages

Latest...

COMMENTS

May 21 07:42
Cory speaks!

May 21 07:40
Lincecum the catcher

May 21 07:35
Is the Shift actually working?

May 21 04:48
Extra, extra, read all about it: MLB has inter-conference play this weekend!

May 21 02:57
Are bullpen sessions predictive?

May 20 21:02
Poll: I would have suspended Lawrie/Alomar for ___ part of the season

May 20 20:59
How do you incentivize a power hitter to bunt?

May 20 14:22
Combining Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) with “What Number Am I Thinking Of”

May 20 11:51
When to buy Facebook?

May 19 23:47
Sponsoring MLB jerseys

THREADS

November 20, 2007
Another pitch f/x article