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Saturday, February 04, 2012
Complete PITCHf/x classification
Great stuff available at BrooksBaseball.
It’s interesting to me when we classify things as “Fastball”, when obviously a Moyer fastball and a Strasburg fastball moves differently. First, there’s the difference in speed (16mph difference), which means that gravity has more time to impact a Moyer fastball (you can see this in the charts a bit further down). The end result is that a Moyer fastball sinks more than a Strasburg sinker.
But, then there’s also those pitchers that throw alot of fastball AND sinkers, and so, they will try to differentiate them enough so they can get value from the two pitches. For example, Strasburg doesn’t throw a sinker alot, but when he does, the movement is a couple of inches different from his fastball. It’s also two mph slower. Moyer on the other hand throws his sinker and fastball at the same speed, but it has significantly different movement on the pitches: 7 inches on the horizontal and 5 inches on the vertical.
And it’s not just Moyer. CC also throws fastballs and sinkers, and the speed difference is only 1 mph, the horizontal is 6 inches and the vertical is 3. Felix throws his sinker and fastball at the same speed, with 7 inches of difference on the horizontal and 3 on the vertical.
Verlander is like Strasburg, in that he rarely throws a sinker, and he gets 3 inches on the horizontal, and 4 on the vertical, at the same speed (so, a bit more movement differentiation than Strasburg, but not as much as CC/Felix). And maybe the reason is that his fastball already gets so much movement to begin with. Verlander’s fastball on the horizontal moves as much as Felix’s sinker on the horizontal. So, he really doesn’t have much room to maneuver there. One might think that Verlander can improve his repertoire by following a Felix/CC model of limiting movement on the fastball, to differentiate it more to the sinker. But, it’s hard to argue with the success of Verlander/Strasburg to think that they can actually pitch better.
Anyway, all to say that since a Verlander/Strasburg fastball really lies half-way between a Felix/CC fastball/sinker, that it’s not really helpful to simply classify their pitches as “fastball”. It’s really a Verlander-fastball and a CC-sinker and a CC-fastball.
I think it’s perfectly fine that when you treat the pitcher as his own universe, that we stick with the standard classifications. But, when we combine pitchers, it’s may be more helpful to distinguish them based on their movement and speed, rather than how they clustered for a particular pitcher.
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