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Wednesday, August 10, 2011
What does Josh Tomlin throw?
In this Tomlin interview, he says:
If I throw 100 pitches in a game, I’ll throw about 10 or 11 curveballs, four or five changeups, 30 or 40 cutters and the rest two- and four-seam fastballs.
What does Gameday and BIS say? I don’t know, but let’s find out together.
Curveballs are the easiest to distinguish, so hopefully, all three are in agreement. Tomlin (or rather his memory, or possibly what his pitching coach is counting for him) says 10 or 11, BIS says 15 this year, and Gameday says 16. Hmmm.. that’s quite odd. Does Tomlin not know what he’s throwing? Or is everyone else confused?
There’s also a bit of disagreement between BIS and Gameday. Why would there be any? You could start your clustering just on velocity, and you’ll get the majority of curveballs. And then if you want to distinguish between “fast” curveballs and “slow” changeups, you look at vertical movement. The tougher one I suppose is to distinguish between a “fast” curveball that doesn’t drop too much and a “slow” slider that has extra drop. Indeed, Gameday has no sliders recorded, while BIS has 3 recorded per 100. Tomlin himself says he doesn’t throw any sliders. So my guess is that BIS has taken some Gameday-curveballs and marked them as sliders.
How about changeups? Tomlin says 4 or 5, BIS says 11, while Gameday says 10.5. Again, does Tomlin not know what he’s throwing, or are his slow fastballs and sinkers simply being picked up as changeups? That is, maybe Tomlin intends to throw a slow sinker, but it looks alot more like a changeup.
He said 30 or 40 cutters. BIS says 28 and Gameday says 30.
Finally, that leaves about 50 fastballs / sinkers. BIS has 43 (without distinguishing between the two), while Gameday has 34 4-seamers, and 9 2-seamers (total of 43).
So, it looks like he has quite a bit of slow fastballs (according to Tomlin) that are being picked up as changeups (according to Gameday).
My guess is that Tomlin is throwing it the way he says he’s throwing it, but the actual result may be closer to how Gameday clusters the pitches.
All to say that there’s not always a very clear line, and there’s enough uncertainty in pitch classification that both sides (Tomlin and Gameday) can be justifiably accurate.
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