THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Can’t you do some analysis of pitcher’s fastball by how far it’s off their average? Let’s say you have a pitcher named Strasburg. His average fastball is 96 MPH. his range of fastballs might be between 93-101. Compare the results of his slower fastballs to faster fastballs, you can even adjust for location and movement.

You can definitely do that.  You’d control for the location, movement, count, and sequencing of pitches (at the very least the previous pitch’s characteristics).

Notably, if your fastball speed is below 90mph, then the only way to be a MLB pitcher is to be able to do something else well (location, movement, other pitches, etc).

Or throw with your left hand. I bet most of those guys below 90 mph are southpaws. If he simply split up the numbers for each handedness there probably would be a more consistent trend line.

Tom - There is definitely some bias and I should have accounted for that.  I was just wondering what the numbers actually were after hearing that some announcer mention that Texeria can’t hit faster fastball so I created at least a baseline data set.

#3 Good idea.  I may end up with a lack of samples at the extreme ends of the data, but I will look at the 4 pitcher-hitter handedness combinations later.