The Curse of... oh, let's say, Clay Bellinger:








RSS 2.0 Atom

*ADVERTISEMENT*

*ADVERTISEMENT*

*ADVERTISEMENT*

*ADVERTISEMENT*


Fox Sports- Rosenthal: Yanks’ Mussina to retire after first 20-win season
(45 Comments - 11/20/2008 2:44:11 am)

NY Post: BERNIE: I’M NOT DONE YET
(48 Comments - 11/19/2008 7:12:05 pm)

Newsday: Yankees gunning for Derek Lowe, A.J. Burnett, sources say
(136 Comments - 11/19/2008 3:09:46 pm)

If the 2009 Season Started On November 16, 2008
(109 Comments - 11/18/2008 2:26:32 pm)

Newsday-O’Brien:  Source: Yankees offer CC Sabathia lucrative deal
(111 Comments - 11/18/2008 10:13:45 am)

Breaking Down the Nick Swisher Trade
(85 Comments - 11/15/2008 10:30:24 am)

ESPN: Sources: Yankees acquire Swisher, send Marquez to White Sox
(109 Comments - 11/14/2008 9:09:43 am)

Is Damaso Marte Worth his New Contract?
(38 Comments - 11/13/2008 5:37:55 pm)

Impacto Deportivo: Exclusiva; Dámaso Marte firma por 12 millones de dólares con los Yanquis
(48 Comments - 11/13/2008 10:19:22 am)

Newsday: Despite economy, Yanks will be big spenders
(19 Comments - 11/12/2008 12:58:50 pm)



Player

Current Projected
Brian Bruney
11 G
15 G
12 IP
16 IP
Dan Giese
11 G
15 G
21.7 IP
29 IP
Damaso Marte
5 G
7 G
4.7 IP
6 IP
Edwar Ramirez
37 G
49 G
40.7 IP
54 IP
Mariano Rivera
44 G
58 G
48.3 IP
64 IP
David Robertson
14 G
19 G
16.3 IP
22 IP
Jose Veras
38 G
50 G
38.7 IP
51 IP
Total
274 G
364 G
328.3 IP
435 IP

Look what people have to say about Larry Mahnken's commentary!

"Larry, can you be any more of a Yankee apologist?.... Just look past your Yankee myopia and try some objectivity."
- Bernal Diaz

"Mr. Mahnken is enlightened."
- cordially, as always,
rm

"Wow, Larry. You've produced 25% of the comments on this thread and said nothing meaningful. That's impressive, even for you."
- Anonymous

"After reading all your postings and daily weblog...I believe you have truly become the Phil Pepe of this generation. Now this is not necessarily a good thing."
- Repoz

"you blog sucks, it reeds as it was written by the queer son of mike lupica and roids clemens. i could write a better column by letting a monkey fuk a typewriter. i dont need no 181 million dollar team to write a blog fukkk the spankeees"
- yan

"i think his followers have a different sexual preference than most men"
- bob

"Boring and predictable."
- No Guru No Method

"Are you the biggest idiot ever?"
- Randal

"I'm not qualified to write for online media, let alone mainstream media."
- Larry Mahnken



This site is best viewed with a monitor.

Disclaimer: If you think this is the official website of the New York Yankees, you're an idiot. Go away.


Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Pitch F/X and Joba Chamberlain

In 2007, MLB decided to enhance their Gameday application. As a numbers junkie (aka statdork), the best thing that's come out of that in my opinion is the rolling out of detailed pitch by pitch data. Data for 2007 is incomplete as it's been rolled out slowly across MLB, but it now appears to be available in most of the stadiums and should be everywhere for 2008.

Pitch F/X is the name of the system that MLBAM is using to track the detailed pitch information. They record things like starting velocity, ending velocity, release point, break, and all other kinds of stuff. Having the data available is great, but figuring out how to get it and make use of it looked like a royal pain in the ass.

Thankfully, someone else did all the work for me as far as figuring that out. Over at the blog Fast Balls, Mike Fast detailed how to build a pitch by pitch database. I used Fast's instructions and have been downloading and loading the data for the past week or so. This is great stuff and I thank Fast for making his database building instructions open source.

There's a ton of data in here that I don't fully understand yet, and as I mentioned before it's pretty incomplete because the system has taken a while to roll out across MLB, but I think some data is better than none.

I am hoping to make use of this data in some of my posts in 2008, especially when it comes to Joba Chamberlain, Phil Hughes, and Ian Kennedy. Today I'd like to look at Joba specifically.

We all saw how Joba burst onto the scene with his high 90s fastball and nasty slider, throwing 24 innings of 1192 ERA+. He does have a curve and changeup, but neither was used very much as a reliever. For Joba, Pitch F/X had detailed pitch information for 225 of his 334 pitches.

The first and easiest thing to look at would be the breakdown of his pitches thrown.

Fastballs: 139
Sliders: 79
Changeups: 7

Next, here are the high, low and average velocities for those three pitches.

Fastball
High: 101
Min: 92.9
Avg: 97.3

Slider
High: 90.4
Min: 82.5
Avg: 86.6

Changeup/Curve (I can't tell which is which from the data)
High: 84.5
Min: 79.4
Avg: 77.2

Lastly, here's a look at what the end result has been for the pitches we have data for.

Pitch Type Result #
Fastball Ball 45
Ball In Dirt 1
Called Strike 30
Foul 26
Foul (Runner Going) 0
In play, no out 6
In play, out(s) 19
In play, run(s) 2
Swinging Strike 10
Swinging Strike (Blocked) 0
Pitch Type Result #
Slider Ball 27
Ball In Dirt 2
Called Strike 9
Foul 7
Foul (Runner Going) 1
In play, no out 0
In play, out(s) 5
In play, run(s) 0
Swinging Strike 24
Swinging Strike (Blocked) 4
Pitch Type Result #
Changeup/Curve Ball 4
Ball In Dirt 0
Called Strike 2
Foul 0
Foul (Runner Going) 0
In play, no out 0
In play, out(s) 1
In play, run(s) 0
Swinging Strike 0
Swinging Strike (Blocked) 0


I'm not sure how accurate this data is yet, or how consistent it is from park to park. I'd imagine that this year's data will be fine-tuned a bit based on last year. I love the potential for new information that this technology will give us though.

Thanks again to Mike Fast for his open-source instructions on parsing this data, it was a huge help.

Update: Thanks to mmiller for pointing out this link to Josh Kalk's work. Thanks to Kalk for his work and data as well.
--Posted at 8:21 am by SG / 39 Comments | - (1293)



Page 1 of 1 pages: