THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Sigh, why’d the mets have to trade him for Burgos?  The dude is bright and while he may not have the best talent, he seems to know that he has to maximize his talents as much as possible and tries to use every possible technique to do so.

He’s gonna be an awesome pitching coach one day.

Fangraphs is calling his cutter a fastball, then?

@Cut it, probably....pitch classification is kind of hard for things like BIS or PitchFX to accomplish automatically. 

BIS probably sees a pitch at fastball speed, very common, and thinks fastball since thats what he normally throws.

You’ll notice on the pitchfx bit, that his most common pitch is either the cutter or slider....both of which are actually cutters, but the Gameday algorithm can’t figure out what exactly any non four-seam fastballs are so it doesnt classify them properly (It thinks two-seam fastballs are change ups half the time, and thinks cutters are often sliders).

I can’t say the guy is the smartest player/pitcher in baseball, but I would be willing to bet that he is clearly, by far, not even close, the most knowledgeable about sabermetrics.  Not even close, unless there is some closet player/sabermetrician.  Would love to see this guy in the booth when he retires.  Preferably with Joe Morgan or Sutcliffe or Harrelson…

"I can’t say the guy is the smartest player/pitcher in baseball, but I would be willing to bet that he is clearly, by far, not even close, the most knowledgeable about sabermetrics.”

We’re beginning to think he should be running the Royals.

This is amazing:

I know how the numbers work. I know how OBP works. I know all the numbers that will never be printed in the newspaper. They’re slowly working their way on to major league scoreboards. But, how the game really works. It’s not what you see out there, and it’s not about short term emotions in games. It’s numbers behind numbers… it’s how the game works.

I’ve sold out to those numbers, and I’ve finally found a way, and by throwing that cutter 60 times a game to get the hitters to consistently hit the top half of the ball, and its the difference between being a 5.70 ERA guy and a 3.70 ERA guy.

The fact that he has been able to improve his controllable skills this year by utilizing the numbers, is a great success story.

That was an incredible interview.

Thanks for that!

Thanks for the link, man that it is good stuff. I’m scrapping what I had planned for THT tomorrow and going Banny instead. I think I’m in love. Is that wrong?

Me too Harry.

That was a great interview.  Poz must still be gleaming with joy.

The next thing for Banny to do is exploit the inaccuracies of the pitch/FX classification system and use that to improve his pitches.  What is classified as a FB and CH are showing a positive impact for him.  If he can figure out what he is doing slightly differently to get the pitch classified as a FB (as opposed to a SL or CT which both have a negative value) he could take another impressive step forward.

http://www.fangraphs.com/pitchfx.aspx?playerid=5718&position=P

If you just go to his overview you can see the spike in number of “sliders” he throws.  This must be the change he was talking about.

I couldnt be mistaken but those “sliders” should actually be cutters.  He said he throws 60% cutters.  If u add those sliders to the cutters, it gives you 60%

Is the full text of the interview available somewhere?