Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Jay-f/x 2007: Fastballs

Skip to the first heading below if you wish to skip my introductory rambling.

I should have said in my first post that my analysis is not meant to be completely serious. I'm serious all day at my "day job"; this is just for fun. My goal is for you to read this and think "huh, that's kinda neat."

Mike Fast correctly stated that the Kalk interpretations of the Pitch-f/x data are not definitive, as we already saw with Litsch, Doc, and others. That's fine; I previously stated that I have no issues with Kalk's classifications, simply because I don't have the time, initiative, or ability to crunch the numbers myself. There is much to be gained from deep analysis of a particular pitcher's pitches (to create a tongue-twister there) but I'm more interested in the team as a whole, so I'm generally not going to look too closely at anyone during this little series. I also wish I remembered more R tricks from last year's stat course, but such is life.

Get to the fastballs, already

Very well. Here's a closer look at each pitcher's main fastball. The word "main" should be self-evident for most pitchers, based on the frequency plot shown in the last post, but there are a few I need to think about for a moment. Based on the assumption that a pitcher's main pitch is the one he throws a) most of the time and/or b) when he's behind in the count, I'll consider Halladay's sinker, Janssen's cutter, Marcum's regular fastball, and Litsch's...well, I won't include Litsch. Sorry, I know that's hand-wavey, but here's the data table.

Fastball characteristics for Toronto Blue Jays pitchers (break in inches, speed in mph)
Pitcher H. Break V. Break Speed






Accardo (FB) −7.4 10.2 94.9






Burnett (FB) −5.1 9.7 96.0






Downs (FB) 12.0 5.2 89.7






Frasor (FB) −3.6 13.0 94.3






Halladay (SNK) −8.5 5.3 91.6






Janssen (CUT) 1.9 5.9 89.8






Marcum (FB) −5.0 12.8 88.7






McGowan (FB) −5.7 11.1 95.7






Ohka (FB) −5.6 9.7 86.6






Tallet (FB) 10.9 10.1 91.4






Towers (FB) −3.9 10.8 87.5








And here's the graph, with the same scale that Kalk used in his horizontal/vertical break graphs.

The points aren't labelled, but the two lefties (Downs and Tallet) are on the right. Janssen's all by himself in the middle. We know Halladay's sinker can induce groundballs, and its appearance at the bottom-left of the RHP cluster is no surprise.

Other characteristics that caught my eye:
  • Accardo throws really fast. Or not. This is one of those inaccuracies I was talking about -- the fastball speeds at Rogers Centre can be kind of high. Average speed of 94.9? I don't know so much.
  • Break-wise, Accardo's fastball is very similar to McGowan and Burnett.
  • Speaking of Peaches and AJ, as you might expect from watching them pitch, they're the two pitchers with the most similar fastballs, break-wise, on the Jays.
  • Towers' is also quite similar in this way. And that's about the only similarity between him and them.
  • Ohka's fastball: 86.6 mph (averaged over 226 pitches, though). Most of his pitches were between 78 and 88, which isn't surprising in the least.

Now I'll consider all fastballs (cutters, sinkers, the works) and do a sanity check on the 0-0 pitch characteristics. (At this point, we'll say goodbye to Ohka.)

Frequency of first-pitch fastballs of all types for Toronto Blue Jays pitchers
Pitcher % 0-0 % All diff




Accardo 81 72 10




Burnett 73 63 10




Tallet 69 61 8




Downs 60 53 7




Marcum 62 57 5




Halladay 82 77 5




McGowan 64 59 5




Towers 62 59 3




Janssen 72 68 3




Litsch 30 27 3




Frasor 67 70 −3




Further reading


If you're still curious about Litsch, you can read this post or this one, both by Jonathan Hale. You can also check out Mike Fast's catalog of articles from around the web, organized by pitcher, for more information on Halladay, Burnett, McGowan, or others.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Jay-f/x 2007: Introduction

I'll be using Josh Kalk's Pitch-f/x data summaries, available for most pitchers at http://baseball.bornbybits.com/plots/players.html. The set of pitchers studied includes all the "important" pitchers, where important is defined by me, plus Tomo Ohka. Pitch classifications are normally left at the Kalk defaults with two exceptions:

  • Roy Halladay's slider was renamed as a curve. Almost everyone considers this pitch a curveball.
  • A.J. Burnett's sinker was changed to a plain fastball. He often works "fastball up, curveball down" so I don't think those are sinkers.
I have no issues with Kalk's classification methods, not by any means, but I felt I should make those changes.

How reliable is the data?

I can't find it now, but there was an article discussing how the pitch speed at Rogers Centre was artificially high. Also, we don't have every single pitch for all of these pitchers. Baseball-Reference.com records the number of pitches thrown by each pitcher in 2007 and the Kalk data provides a count. I've summarized these numbers below:


Kalk B-Ref % recorded
Marcum 1826 2543 72%
McGowan 1842 2702 68%
Janssen 691 1065 65%
Litsch 1126 1771 64%
Halladay 2097 3326 63%
Burnett 1551 2649 59%
Frasor 596 1034 58%
Towers 956 1667 57%
Tallet 619 1084 57%
Downs 505 912 55%
Accardo 587 1081 54%





TOTAL 12396 19834 62%

Marcum and McGowan are the best-covered pitchers, though we have the equivalent of two more analysed starts for Halladay. The five starters are represented well, and only one third of Janssen's pitches are missing. So if you want, you can pretty much ignore anything I say for Frasor through Accardo.

Other general warnings about the accuracy of the Pitch-f/x system as a whole apply.

What do they throw?

Glad you asked.

Pitch type and frequency (%) for Toronto Blue Jays pitchers
Pitcher Fastball Cutter Sinker Slider Change Curve
Accardo 72

6 22
Burnett 63


9 28
Downs 53

11 9 27
Frasor 70

25 6
Halladay 32 45

23
Janssen 33 36
18
14
Litsch 10 17
61 12
Marcum 31 26
14 21 8
McGowan 59

19 10 12
Ohka 46

54

Tallet 45 16
26 13
Towers 51 8
35 6

Or, graphically (click for larger version):

(You'll note that Ohka wasn't included in the pitcher coverage table. I actually added him near the end of my analysis, just so we could have a good laugh. He doesn't even have 500 pitches recorded by Kalk.)

This seems like a decent introduction for now. Consider those tables for a while and let me know what you'd like to see next (or do it yourself!)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Welcome CIS Basketball and Number Theory Fans

Devotees of the above pleasures, as well as lovers of Jeopardy!, the Kitchener Panthers, Mackenzie King, spewn apple chewings, overheard-girl conversations and Jason Frasor, will all be pleased to hear that Roberto will be joining me in this space.

Obligatory Blue Jays Content : Shelley Duncan is a girl's name.

Rolen

Ladies and gentlemen, we have added risk. So a good move in the abstract, but I seriously question whether there is enough upside risk here to make the move worthwhile. Still, I'm assuming the Jays medical staff knows more than me.

If Rolen is 90%, he's probably going to be a better player than Glaus this year. The Jays' defense is looking increasingly awesome.

I'll be posting a "Gone But Not Forgotten" for Troy Glaus soon.