from Amazon
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Mixing speeds
You can mix pitch breaks (direction: straight, north/south, east/west, NE/SW, etc; and amount), you can mix pitch locations (in, out, up, down), and you can mix pitch speeds. But as Dave shows, some pitchers mix pitch speeds better than others.
It is possible that he is giving up mixing pitch speeds with much better mixing of location and break, though it’s hard to believe a young starter can get a handle on that. I suppose this is what two-pitch relievers do. One-pitch relievers like Mariano obviously rely one only two of these three timing parameters.
Anyway, nice and simple graph. I like these kind of time-progression charts that Dan Brooks also does. I’d like to think that each team should have one guy on staff who is entirely dedicated to doing nothing but analyzing this data, for the direct benefit of the pitcher.