A Little More On Fastball Swinging Strikes
by Jeff Sullivan on Mar 3, 2009 9:26 PM PST
in Seattle Mariners Stats
- There were 168 starters last year who threw at least 500 fastballs (that got picked up by PITCHf/x). Ranked in descending order of swinging strike rate, Jonathan Sanchez ranks 5th (9.1%), Matt Cain ranks 12th (8.5%), Randy Johnson ranks 13th (8.3%), and Tim Lincecum ranks 18th (7.4%). Even Barry Zito was above the median. Between that rotation and a Lewis/Rowand/Winn outfield, San Francisco is not going to allow runs.
- Among the names at the bottom of the list (Dallas Braden, Livan Hernandez, Kyle Lohse, Jeremy Bonderman, and Garrett Olson), Bonderman's name is by far the most interesting. His trick shoulder has taken a lot of life out of his fastball and left him as a one-pitch pitcher. Under contract for $25m over the next two years, the Tigers badly need him to bounce back, lest he become another expensive pile of Willis.
- J.P. Howell threw 722 fastballs and missed only 24 bats. He also posted a 2.22 ERA and 9+ K/9 over 89.1 innings despite being a soft-tossing lefty facing predominantly right-handed batters. Having him and Chad Bradford in the same bullpen gives the Rays a unique bit of flavor. Pairing them with Grant Balfour is funny to me.
- Felix posted the same swinging strike rate on his fastball as Tom Gorzelanny.
- Craig Hansen and Bobby Jenks: blazing fastballs, tons of contact. Remember, kids: velocity isn't everything.
- I can't imagine what it feels like to be one of the 20 starters last year who missed fewer bats with their fastballs than Jamie Moyer.
):<
JI - March 3, 2009
41 million dollars!!!
vivaelpujols - March 3, 2009
lalalalalaIcan'thearyoulalalalalala
JI - March 3, 2009
Tom Gorzelanny? Yikes!
.Taylor - March 3, 2009
I though Garrett Olson's strength was his fastball?
I remember reading his movement on his fastball was fantastic, and that the problem lied in locating his curve and change.
Ezzra - March 3, 2009
He has a reasonable slider and change, but his fastball is an issue
Jeff Sullivan - March 3, 2009
Moyer has a fastball?
I thought he sported a change-up and a super change-up.
The ageless wonder indeed.
Wilder. - March 3, 2009
I wouldn't call it a fastball.
Fin - March 3, 2009
It's faster than I can throw.
msb - March 4, 2009
He sure knows how to establish the change up
I wish Washburn knew how to use his fastball like Moyer
Kermit. - March 4, 2009
I wish Washburn pitched for Philly like Moyer
oneseasoncom - March 5, 2009
Think they'd trade straight up?
joof - March 7, 2009
Oh man
That reminds me of the good old days with Ken Griffey Junior Baseball for N64 where pitchers could throw 46 mph super changes that moved all the way across the strike zone. And then you could have pitchers who threw super fast for 103 mph.
Mbad - March 4, 2009
Slowball.
appleshampoo - March 4, 2009
And
I saw him get a few strikeouts with that slowball in Chicago last year. Amazing thing watching hitters flail at it. I guess a few of them might have been the cutter, but still, it’s coming in at 82 MPH!
appleshampoo - March 4, 2009
But when the hitter is expecting a change at 68 mph
82 gets to you a lot quicker than you’d like.
I love watching Moyer pitch. He spots that change on the corner so well that hitters take it, and then when he finally does throw a hittable strike the batter hasn’t taken enough swings to have the timing down (assuming he ever could, given the seemingly random speeds of Moyer’s pitches).
Llewdor - March 4, 2009
I love watching Moyer pitch in theory but in practice it is God awful
Jeff Sullivan - March 4, 2009
I love watching Moyer pitch in practice, because in theory it's basically impossible.
He is the bumble bee of MLB.
marc w - March 4, 2009
Bemble bees can theoretically fly now
Have you now heard?
Graham MacAree - March 4, 2009
Do you need a nap?
marc w - March 4, 2009
Always
Graham MacAree - March 4, 2009
I had heard that.
They basically use suction. Their wings are like a vacuum pump. It’s pretty cool.
Llewdor - March 5, 2009
It is sad
that Dontrelle Willis has basically become synonymous for shit.
vivaelpujols - March 3, 2009
I think its funny.
Since, hey, we were right.
Matthew - March 3, 2009
Agreed
JI - March 3, 2009
I can't believe he sucks this badly
I mean, you can’t entirely luck your way to 22 wins can you?
seattlebruin - March 3, 2009
At one point he wasn't bad
Then he lost his velocity and control over time
OlSalty - March 3, 2009
Willis is a poster boy for overworked young arms
Pitchers that young shouldn’t throw that much. Don’t think about Felix. Do not think about Felix.
philosofool - March 4, 2009
You mean it would have been a bad idea to trade Adam Jones for Dontrelle Willis?
joof - March 4, 2009
But he's changed his delivery!
There’s a note on Rotowire:
Teej - March 4, 2009
Sounds like the second coming of Carlos Silva
except a lefty
vivaelpujols - March 4, 2009
Except for the fact that Silva is 1,000x better.
Aaron Campeau - March 4, 2009
Well yeah
But that isn’t saying much about Silva
vivaelpujols - March 5, 2009
Dallas Braden's SBN pic is great
seattlebruin - March 3, 2009
Aardvark.
Slica - March 4, 2009
Cerebus?
johnbai - March 4, 2009
He's the white Mike Cameron
kentroyals5 - March 4, 2009
Bat missing pitchers vs. bat missing pitches
Okay, I know that the relationship between being a pitcher who misses bats and a pitcher who gets a lot of strike outs is well established. However, has the relationship between being a pitch that misses bats as opposed to simply getting strikes been shown to indicate anything about a pitch.
It would seem to me that the best measure to put on pitches is simply strike/ball/contact-fair/contact-foul. I’m not sure why it would matter for a pitch whether it’s a swinging strike or a called strike.
philosofool - March 4, 2009
I just looked at the post on morrow's fastball
and from the list of guys that miss lots of bats with their fastball, it looks like the relationship between bat missing heaters and good pitchers is strongly suggested by some data.
Still, I think the use of Pitchf/x has a long way to go before we understand the relationship between pitches and pitchers. Good thing people are working on it.
philosofool - March 4, 2009
Because I believe swinging strikes are a better measure of pitch effectiveness
Swinging strikes require the direct participation of two parties, whereas called strikes require the direct participation of one. Obviously a lot of pitches are called strikes because they fool the batter (I imagine a lot of pitchers have repeatable CU StC%‘s), but there’s noise in there that isn’t there for swinging strikes.
Jeff Sullivan - March 4, 2009
Yeah I'm a little uncomfortable just ignoring called strikes because they appear to not be useful
Seems to me there should be a lot of skill in getting called strikes.
Guys who don’t throw in the strike zone often should have lower called strike %.
Guys who can locate breaking balls should get tons of called strikes.
Guys who lack quality pitches should have less called strikes.
I just have a hard time saying that these are all insignificant.
My theory on the correlation between swinging strikes and strikeouts:
To get a strikeout you need to get not just one but three strikes. With two strikes the batter buckles down and doesn’t let hittable pitches past him. The only pitches that do get past him are swinging strikes because nobody wants to strikeout with the bat on their shoulder. The only time I can see this routinely breaking down is with a 3-2 count when a pitcher throws a well placed breaking ball that falls in for an unexpected strike. For a pitcher to get a strikeout he needs to do two things that are related. First, he needs to get two strikes on the batter. For these pitches, a called strike and a swinging strike are probably equally valuable. For the third strike, the pitcher probably needs a swinging strike to be credited with a strikeout. If a pitcher can not locate his pitches enough or fool the batter then he will probably not accumulate enough called strikes to get close to a strikeout. The only way this pitcher will be able to last in the majors is to get a lot of swinging strikes.
I guess I just feel like there has to be useful info in the called strikes info. Maybe its noisy but that doesn’t really mean we should just ignore it. I haven’t fully thought about this to myself yet but there must be some way to constructively use it.
Edgar for Pres - March 5, 2009
This is very eloquent
and matches how I feel about called strikes. Well said.
appleshampoo - March 5, 2009
You're almost certainly right
I was about to start a bunch of speculation about how the correlation of StS% and K% correlates because there’s more dispersion in the StS% and blah blah blah. Then I figured better than speculate, test the hypothesis.
Hypothesis Total strike percentage is more important to K rate than StS.
Test method: Determine correlation coeffcients between K/100pitches and total strike rate and K/100P and StS for all pitchers with at least 500 pitches as starters in 2008. (This method was chosen because that’s the data I had really handy in an excel file.)
Result: the correlation between strike outs and swinging strikes is .84 and between strike outs and total strikes is .79. However, the correlation between looking strikes and strike outs is only .1. This strongly suggests that if I were to sit down and do a proper two variable regression on K/100P with StL% and StS% the coefficient for StS% would be the big one, suggesting that the ability to get a swinging strike is much more of a performance indicator. Additionally, the correlation between St% and StS% is .68 while it’s just .57 between St% and StL%. The hypotheis is false
philosofool - March 5, 2009
One thing I always wonder about all the correlation studies people do for saber stuff
We almost always look at individual peripheral stats by themselves in a linear fashion. That means that I look at an equation that is Strikeouts = a*(swinging strikes) + b*(called strikes). This assumes that a strikeout can be had by just getting a shear number of strikes on a batter (in this case 3 strikes). That seems pretty logical until you think about the individual matchups you see. A pitcher can overpower bad hitters and get three swinging strikes but often strikeouts are dependent on fooling a batter to not swing at a pitch in the zone (curvy things) or throwing well located pitches that are called strikes in addition to swinging strikes to “finish him off”.
If a hitter can defend against called strikes for the 3rd strike by taking a different approach where he becomes more aggressive and sacrifices power for contact we would expect the pitcher to need to throw a really good pitch to get it by him to rack up a strikeout. Earlier in the count it is probably easier to get called strikes than swinging strikes because the hitter will only swing at pitches they think they can hit and appear to be in the zone. I might argue it might be worth looking at K% = a*(StS)+b*(StL)+ c*(StS)*(StL) because a good pitcher should need to be able to get both called and swinging strikes to get lots of strikeouts.
I don’t know if it would show any better results but I think all too often we try to model baseball as simply counting up numbers and multiplying them by a weight to get a value. There is no specific reason we always should ignore higher order terms in stats. For example FIP~ a*K + b*BB + c*HR. If a picher gives up 1 BB per game the run value of that walk will be much different than if the pitcher gives up 9 BB per game. Since we use a linear relationship all of that is lost. Although it might not be perfect a relationship, FIP ~ a*K + b*BB + c*HR + d*BB^2 might actually model it slightly more correctly. The major problem with adding more parameters is that you can model anything given enough adjustable parameters. For most things we can probably ignore the higher order terms (science does this all the time) but they do contain information and as we strive for more accuracy I think at some point we will need to take a closer look at them.
Edgar for Pres - March 5, 2009
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