Tuesday, January 19, 2010
TSBG Versus High and Low Fastballs
As suggested by Rich in the previous post, here's a look at how Brett Gardner's done against fastballs that I'm categorizing as high, middle or low.Here's what I did to determine whether a fastball was high or low.
Pitch FX defines the fields sz_top and sz_bot as the top and bottom of the strike zone for the specific batter. It's measured in feet, and for Gardner they were on average 3.19 and 1.4 respectively. So Gardner's strike zone is about 1.8 feet in Pitch FX. It also defines the fields px and pz as the location where the pitch crossed the front of the plate.
I don't really care about px here (inside or outside), so I'm focusing on pz. Any pitch defined as a fastball that had a pz higher than 2.7 feet is considered high. Any pitch that came in between 2.7 and 1.8 feet is defined as a middle of the zone fastball, and anything that came in lower than 1.8 feet is considered low. And here's how it split out.
| Type | # | max | min | avg | ball % | stkS% | foul% | stkC% | In play, out(s)% | In play, no out % | HBP % | wOBA |
| High Fastballs | 448 | 97.6 | 79.9 | 91.3 | 42.0% | 1.8% | 17.2% | 18.5% | 14.7% | 4.2% | 0.2% | .328 |
| Middle Fastballs | 485 | 96.9 | 78.7 | 90.8 | 13.2% | 1.9% | 15.9% | 46.0% | 13.8% | 5.6% | 0.0% | .320 |
| Low Fastballs | 185 | 96.9 | 79.5 | 91.0 | 66.5% | 2.2% | 2.7% | 16.8% | 8.1% | 2.7% | 0.0% | .341 |
| All Fastballs | 1118 | 97.6 | 78.7 | 91.1 | 33.5% | 1.9% | 14.2% | 30.1% | 13.2% | 4.6% | 0.1% | .327 |
#: number of times pitch was thrown as recorded in Pitch F/X
max: highest recorded starting velocity
min: lowest recorded starting velocity
avg: average recorded starting velocity
ball %: percentage of time pitch was taken for a ball
stkS%: percentage of time pitch was swung on and missed
foul%: percentage of time pitch was fouled off
stkC%: percentage of time pitch was taken for a called strike
In play, out(s)%: percentage of time pitch was hit into play for an out(s)
In play, no out%: percentage of time pitch was hit into play and not converted into an out
HBP%: percentage of time batter was hit by pitch
I don't see anything in this data that indicates Gardner has a problem with high fastballs versus any others.
Comments
Great work, SG. Thanks.
If it’s not too much effort, could you compute the League average (and maybe the Yankee average) for these stats from last year? Although I guess defining the zones would be problematic. Maybe if you only looked at pitch-fx strikes and split the strike zone of each player into thirds.
This quote is priceless:
“But I get a lot of kick out of sometimes, at the airport, a guy comes up to me, says, ‘Boy, you look just like Yogi Berra.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, a lot of people tell me that.’ ”
46% of middle fastballs are called strikes? And 87% of those are actually strikes. Well, it seems like that is what Brett has focused on when he says he needs to be more aggressive.
Question for SG: it seems like that the percentages for middle fastballs don’t add up to 100. What is the omitted category?
If it’s not too much effort, could you compute the League average (and maybe the Yankee average) for these stats from last year?
Hmm, querying against the whole database is going to take forever but I’ll see what I can do. May take a bit to actually go up.
Question for SG: it seems like that the percentages for middle fastballs don’t add up to 100. What is the omitted category
Looks like I didn’t have foul tips included with the foul offs since they are separated in Pitch F/X.
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