THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, August 06, 2010

Felix throws 91mph curveball?

I’m looking at the July 31 game, specifically in the 6th inning against Cuddyer.  There are three PITCHf/x sites I’m looking at, and presumably they are going with the MLBAM classification.

First up is Timothy Fisher’s site, pitches 78 and 79.  It seems clear to me that 4 of those pitches could not be curveballs.

Here’s TexasLeaguers, and can we guess the speed of those 4 “curveballs”:

Here is what his changeups look like:

Here’s Brooksbaseball.

My question: what attributes did those 4 90-91 mph pitches have that would make them be considered to be curveballs and not changeups?  MLBAM does show the confidence levels in their classification, and for those 4 pitches, they are the lowest among the curveballs, from .73 to .86 confidence.  All the other curveballs have confidence of .90 to .91. 

Anyway, I did NOT see those pitches.  If someone wants to go to the tape, and show us that Felix did in fact throw 4 curveballs at 90-91 mph, I think that would be pretty jaw dropping.

Otherwise, I would say that any pitch that is outside a 5 mph range (for that pitcher) would have to have a low confidence level, regardless of the remaining attributes to that pitch, no?