THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

What does it mean when someone like Rodney has an average curveball with 6” of rise?  I know it’s relative to an un-spun ball, but still… he’s got to be backspinning the ball, right?

Referring to the ordering in the link of my name here.  Just not clear, I guess, on what defines a curveball, if it’s being backspun and rising.  I can understand why Ziegler is up there, but the rest seem to have reasonable deliveries.

What does it mean when someone like Rodney has an average curveball with 6” of rise?

In actuality, Rodney has thrown a fastball, sinker, changeup, and slider.  He does not throw a curveball.

He threw a hard slider on August 5, 2008, that MLBAM’s neural net algorithm labeled as a curveball for reasons unclear to me.  That pitch had 6 inches of positive vertical movement due to spin + drag.

That one pitch moved Rodney to the top of the leaderboard.  I would guess that most of the other pitchers are at the top of that leaderboard for similar reasons.

Well, in that case, we obviously need to “blank out” any low occurrences.  It obviously is a bit more difficult because the page shows the numbers across all pitch types.

Just taking a guess out loud.  The top pitcher throws almost 4000 pitches per season in 250 IP.  5% of that is 200 pitches.

So, in order to make it to the leaderboard, maybe impose 1 pitch (of that type) per inning?

For example, the reader chooses the minimum threshold of 50 innings, then you need at least 50 pitches of that type to be on the leaderboard.  If someone has 100 fastballs, 70 changeups, and 30 curveballs, then blank out the 30 curveballs from the leaderboard.

Will that work well-enough?