Pitch f/x: Randy Johnson

I really wish that Pitch f/x had been around in the late 90's and early 2000's so we could look at what Johnson did back when he was absolutely dominant, but it has only been around since 2005. Still, it is interesting to take a brief look at his pitch selection since he turned 40 years old.

The first thing that I noticed is that there is a clear delineation between the first two years, when Johnson was with the Yankees, and the second two years since he re-joined the Diamondbacks. With the Yankees he was very consistent: 56% fastballs both years, similar slider numbers and asmall percentage shift from a curveball to a splitter between the first and second season.

Then, when he moved to Arizona and the National League, the number of fastballs dropped to 51.5% (which he has maintained over both seasons) and the number of splitters jumped from 6.7% to 11.7%.

The second thing that jumps right out at you is the decrease in velocity. Even through last season he was still averaging 92.3mph on his fastball, but this season it has dropped to 90.8mph.

So the shift is clear: as Johnson has gotten older and his fastball has lost a tick or two he has had to become more of a crafty veteran, throwing more splitters. Where he used to overpower hitters, now he has to decieve them.

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Daily Links - 8/14/08

This blog post by Will Carroll is the second reference I've heard to CC Sabbathia winning the NL Cy Young in the past couple of days. He has certainly been amazing since getting picked up by the Brewers, but something doesn't seem quite right about it. I can't really put my finger on it, because the award goes to the best pitcher in the league that season, and if Sabbathia only requires 60% of the season to prove that, then why not? But it seems a bit fortuitous that Sabbathia's sub-par start to the season gets to be disregarded because the best part of his season came after the trade.

The famous Fetch, from Major League Jerk, writes about the rough start for Team USA in Beijing. I didn't see the game, but I agree with Fetch: when I looked at the box score and saw that John Gall had led off for the US, I did a double-take. What was that all about?

The results are in on the poll presented last week on the Hardball Times regarding ethics and baseball.

Here is a first hand account of the crazy game played at Fenway on Tuesday night.

This is a quick look at closers vs. set up men in terms of which are used in more important situations. The standard pattern of 'closer' usage in baseball has been one of my pet peeves for a while now. Interestingly, the Cardinals have used rookie closer Chris Perez in a save situation in the eighth inning twice this week and allowed him to finish the game.

Pitch f/x: Dan Haren

Dan Haren was traded by Oakland to Arizona this past offseason as part of the rebuilding effort of Oakland and the push by Arizona to solidify their chances in the National League West. His addition gave them a strong 1-2 punch at the front of their rotation with Brandon Webb, allowing Randy Johnson to slot as their #3 starter.

The conventional thinking was that Haren would thrive in the National League, which is traditionally more of a small ball league. However, there were some in the media that looked at the pitching-friendly environment in Oakland and the hitter-friendly environment of Arizona and believed that the difference in leagues would be evened out, or even overcome, by the ballpark differences and that Haren would pitch worse in the NL than he did in the AL.

Well, Haren has, in fact, been signficantly better for Arizona than he was with Oakland last year. His ERA so far is 2.56 compared to 3.07 last year for Oakland. That difference grows to more than a run when you compare his FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, defined here): this year he's at 2.75, while last year he was at 3.70. He has improved his strikeout rate, his walk rate, his homerun rate and his WHIP this season.

The interesting thing is that the difference does not seem to be due to haren changing leagues. Baseball Reference has a great tool that neutralizes statistics to allow them to be compared across leagues and seasons (their explanation of how it works is here). According to Haren's neutralized statistics, his ERA is still more than half a run better this season.

So why is Haren better? Haren turns 28 years old this September, so the improvement could just be the natural progression of his talent; he is just entering his prime and he is learning how to pitch to major league hitters and how best to utilize his talents. By looking at his Pitch f/x stats we can see exactly what he is doing differently that may account for his improvement.

The first thing to note is that the changes in Haren's pitch selection have been gradual over the last few years. His first year as a starter with Oakland (and coincidentally, the first year that Pitch f/x data was available) was 2005 and he threw 59.2% fastballs. That number has gone down every year since then, to the point where this year he is throwing 50.3% fastballs.

Also, in 2005 Haren was throwing a small percentage of curveballs and changeups. He has gradually worked those out of his repertoire. In 2007 he increased the number of splitters that he threw from 19.5% in 2006 to 22.9%, but those have also decreased this year, down to 20%. So with the decrease in fastballs and splitters and the elimination of curves and changeups, what is he throwing more of?

Well, there aren't too many pitch types left. The answer is sliders and cutters. He has always relied on his slider, throwing it as often as his splitter in 2006 and 2007, but so far this year it has gone up to 23.9%. His cutter was a rare pitch in previous seasons, never even reaching 2%, but this year he has thrown it almost 6%.

I would suggest that this change indicates that Haren is figuring out what works best for him and is paring away all of the other unnecessary pitches. By removing curves and changeups from his arsenal, he can focus on the pitches that work well for him. I also wonder if being around two other dominant pitchers with limited arsenals has worn off on him. Brandon Webb throws about 75% fastballs and Randy Johnson is primarily a fastball/slider guy (with a few splitters mixed in). Regardless of the reasons, Haren continues to improve as a pitcher and is certainly everything the Diamondbacks hoped for when they traded for him this past offseason.

Matt Holliday Update

A few weeks ago I posted about the Colorado Rockies and Pitch f/x. The conclusion of that post was that Rockies pitchers react to pitching at altitude differently than visiting team pitchers. In essence, visiting team pitchers throw fewer breaking balls and more fastballs, while Rockies pitchers throw fewer breaking balls, but more changeups.

That differetial was exemplified in Matt Holliday's pitch f/x data showing that last season over 70% of the pitches he faced were fastballs, compared to a league average of just over 60%. Holliday's differential is the biggest on the Rockies, but all of their hitters (besides Yorvit Torrealba) had higher than average rates.

This season there has been a lot of talk about the Rockies considering a trade of Holliday while his value is high and before he hits free agency. The problem that is often mentioned is Holliday's home/away splits, which are drastic. This puts Holliday's value in question - it likely means that he is far more valuable to Colorado than he is to anyone else.

As usual, the explanation for Hollidays splits is that the ball carries farther at altitude making it easier to hit there. While this is certainly a measure of the reason for his splits, I again turn to his pitch f/x numbers and point out that, once again, Holliday is seeing far more fastballs than the rest of the league. This season he is seeing fastballs, sinkers and splitters at a rate of 68.13%, while the rest of the league averages 59.75%.

I would not be willing to give up a package of prospects worthy of an MVP candidate for Holliday. Away from Coors Field, where he won't see quite so many fastballs, he is a solid, but unspectacular player.

Pitch f/x and Colorado

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the percentages of pitch types thrown by the top pitchers in baseball. I was going to do a similar post about the pitch types seen by the top hitters when I got sidetracked by a portion of the research that I was doing.

I was combining the types of fastballs that the hitters had seen (normal fastball, sinker, and cutter) to get a sense of which hitters had seen the most off-speed pitches when I found that Matt Holliday's numbers stuck out like a sore thumb. 70.62% of all pitches that Holliday saw last year were fastballs, sinkers or cutters. I was comparing the top 20 homerun hitters last year and the next five highest results were:

2) Ken Griffey, Jr. - 63.9%
3) Ryan Braun - 63.69%
4) Adam Dunn - 62.16%
5) Lance Berkman - 62.09%
6) Carlos Lee - 62.01%

Aside from Holliday's 70.62%, the rest of the top 20 were fairly evenly distributed between 50.23% (Ryan Howard) and those listed above. So I wondered if this anomaly extended to other hitters for the Rockies - here are the percentages for the top eight Rockies hitters by at bats in 2007:

1) Matt Holliday - 70.62%
2) Troy Tulowitzki - 63.23%
3) Garrett Atkins - 64.37%
4) Todd Helton - 65.48%
5) Brad Hawpe - 65.16%
6) Kaz Matsui - 65.93%
7) Yorvit Torrealba - 59.68%
8) Wily Tavarez - 68.47%

Except for Torrealba and Tulowitzki, all eight are higher than any of the top 20 homerun hitters from last year. I then looked up the league average, and the percentage was 60.85. It is clear, then, that the Rockies are seeing a significantly larger amount of fastballs than the rest of the league.

I then turned to the Rockies pitchers, to see if they were throwing a larger percentage of fastballs than the league average. Here is the top five Rockies pitchers, as ranked by innings pitched in 2007:

1) Jeff Francis - 57.49%
2) Aaron Cook - 52.38%
3) Josh Fogg - 61.99%
4) Jason Hirsch - 56.85%
5) Taylor Buchholz - 60.87%

Only Josh Fogg threw more than the league average and he barely threw 1% more than the average. Interestingly, though, except for Taylor Buchholz (who only throws fastballs and sliders), the Rockies pitchers did not throw more breaking balls. Jeff Francis, Josh Fogg and Jason Hirsch relied on the changeup, while Aaron Cook threw the splitter as his primary second offering. The league average for changeups is 12.84% and Francis, Fogg and Hirsch threw 28.54%, 25.28% and 22.6% respectively (Aaron Cook threw 22.71% splitters compared with a 2.18% league average).

The conclusion we can draw from this is that the commonly-held belief that breaking pitches are less effective at altitude, whether it is scientifically accurate or not, has taken hold in major league baseball. The Rockies response to that belief, however, is different from that of the rest of the league. The Rockies pitchers do not throw more fastballs in response, they throw more changeups. I can't say whether this response is calculated or not. Perhaps the Rockies came to this conclusion and acquired and developed pitchers with good changeups or perhaps the Rockies stumbled into this response.

The real question is whether the strategy works, and by the numbers it certainly appears to. There was a lot of publicity about how the humidor in Colorado was keeping the scoring down and while that may be true, that should be true for the home team as well as the visiting team. This difference in strategic reactions to the belief that breaking pitches are ineffective at altitude should show up in the home and away splits for the offense and pitching of the Rockies.

At home last year the Rockies scored 478 runs, or about 25% more than they scored on the road. The Rockies gave up 396 runs at home last year, which is only 9% more than they gave up on the road last year. It is unsurprising that the Rockies pitchers would cope with the park effects of their home park better than their opposition, even without a different strategy, but it hardly seems reasonable that "home cooking" could account for a 16% difference.

There has been a lot of research into park factors and the development of park-neutral statistics. What those numbers don't take into account, however, is that some of those factors are impacted by the way teams construct their rosters and design strategies to make the unique aspects of their parks work in their favor. In Colorado's case, it certainly appears that they are addressing the aspects of Coors Field in better ways than their opposition, which gives them an advantage.

ERA Leaders and Pitch Types

Using Josh Kalk's Pitch f/x database, I created the following chart of the top 20 leaders in ERA (ERA is certainly not the perfect metric to use to list the top 20 pitchers for a year, but it serves my purposes for this exercise) for 2007:

More than half (12) threw four different kinds of pitches, seven threw three different kinds of pitches, and only Oliver Perez stuck with two pitches. Fourteen of the pitchers threw at least three pitches 10% or more of the time each (Escobar actually threw four pitches more than 10% of the time each). Danny Haren was the only pitcher on the list that threw three different pitches more than 20% each.

Anyway, the point is that variety seems to be a hallmark of success. But we all knew that anyway - guys that only have two pitches usually end up in the bullpen. One thing that I find interesting is that the slider is the breaking ball of choice, instead of the curveball. Eight of the pitchers threw a slider more than 15% of the time, while only five threw curveballs at least 15% of the time. Also, eight threw the curveball less than 5% of the time, while seven threw the slider less than 5% of the time (however, two of those, Haren and Hudson, both throw a cutter, which is listed under 'other' but could be considered a form of a slider). This preference for the slider makes sense from the standpoint that they are easier to control, but it is surprising from the standpoint that the slider might be the most damaging pitch to a pitcher's arm.

Less surprising is the reliance on the changeup. Oliver Perez is the only pitcher that didn't throw any changeups and only four threw less than 5%, while nine threw more than 15%. This makes sense in that the changeup is the pitch that pairs up best with the fastball (which is the overwhelming favorite pitch to throw) and is the easiest on a pitcher's arm.

Pitch f/x

I don't have any analysis to add to this link just yet, but I just want to point out how cool it is. There is so much that can be gleaned from the information there. Just as a quick example of cool information I found within that database, did you know that the average velocity of a fastball leaving Joel Zumaya's hand last year was 97.85 mph? I haven't looked at every single pitcher in the database, but I suspect that is the highest number in the league. What could be even more interesting is the batter cards, which tell you what kinds of pitches were thrown to each batter so you can say things like "Alex Rodriguez saw more sliders than any other hitter in baseball." [Note: I have no idea if that is true or not.]