THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I hope everybody is reading this article and is just too overwhelmed to comment.  I think it is one of the best Pitch f/x articles that I have read.  It sounds like he may just be elaborating on something that Mike Fast discovered, but, if so, I missed Mike’s original article.  In any case, this is an exceptional article with wonderful graphs illustrating an important original idea that wouldn’t have been discovered without Pitch f/x.

Peter, I agree that it’s an excellent article.

As far as I know, I was the first one to surmise that a batter’s pitch recognition depended on his view from the batter’s box rather than the (heretofore standard) catcher’s view of the pitch trajectory.  I published some batters’ box views in my article on Danny Ray Herrera at the Hardball Times (June 16).  It’s quite amazing how different the same pitch can look from one batter’s box to the other.

I, in turn, was building on work by Josh Kalk in looking at pitch recognition as a function of average pitch trajectories by pitch type.

Where Dan has gone with this is a very clever insight--that the platoon differential may be explained by this phenomenon of pitch recognition.

I should clarify that the idea that platoon differential may be explained by better pitch recognition due to differing views of the pitch trajectories was first raised by John Walsh in the 2008 Hardball Times Annual.

What I did was to look at the actual trajectories.  Dan has combined both concepts.  And for all I know, someone else may have done each of these things before each of us.

In a complete admission of ignorance, while I had read some of Walsh’s stuff in other articles that said the slider and fastball were primarily responsible for the platoon split, and I read in The Book (and knew from observation) that most of your heavy platoon relievers were sidearm and 3/4 delivery guys which typically throw fastball/slider, I actually had no idea that John had speculated on this particular issue.

In that sense, it’s sort of nice that this all worked out as smoothly as it did, and that the observations fit so well with what others have seen. I’m still going to look at a bunch of other pitchers as well as look at changes and curves now that it’s been brought to my attention.

I want to thank Dan for a very well written and easy to understand article.

As a former three-quarters pitcher featuring a cut fastball, I also had a very large platoon split against me. vs rhb, low babip, high bb, avg so vs lhp high babip, low bb, low so. vs rhb I threw cutters low and away, but vs lhb tended to leave the ball over the middle of the plate