Quick plot post this morning before I run off to a meeting. Release points for Matt Cain and Geno Espineli from last nights loss against the Padres.
Cain’s release point looks pretty good. The pitches are grouped pretty closely together. Sometimes if a pitcher changes his arm angle to throw a breaking ball, hitters will be able to tell by the release point. Cain appears to throw pretty much all of his pitches from the same slot. He releases his changeup slightly higher than his other pitches.
Geno’s plot is pretty funky, just like his motion. He’s throwing the ball almost 3 feet further out on the horizontal plane than Matt Cain is. His motion includes a drop down to the side and then he slings the ball across his body. You can really tell how far he gets outside with his release point. You’ll notice that his release point for the changeup is slightly higher than his fastball. It could be something that hitters are picking up on. The highest grouping, the orange dots, are from his intentional pass.
What do people think about Matt? Dead arm? He’s been ineffective in his recent starts.
I suspect this might have something to do with it.
Too many late night Meg Ryan movie marathons.
Delorean I agree.
Its noteworthy how many pitch leaders in ‘07 went on the DL this season. I am not saying its hard evidance but it should make a guy pause for a bit. I hope the start shutting him down now.
@Delorean
Dead arm, maybe fatigue. I’ve never liked the way Bochy has handled him. Hopefully the Giants play it smart, but that’s like asking Sarah Palin to believe in dinosaurs.
@Nat
Welcome! And you know as well as I do that Matt loves The Notebook, not Meg Ryan!
@Dave
I’ve seen some counterpoints to the “3,500″ pitches theory, I’m not sure I buy it, yet, but Cain has had a large workload this season and the Giants haven’t impressed me much with their handling of Caincecum this year.
Chris:
I view the exact number of pitches thrown ( 3500 in this case) a bit of a Red Herring. I think the training a body goes through has a lot to do with it can handle. I do put a fair amount of weight on the age of the player because the effects the amount of training, the kind of training a body has had, and how developed physically that arm is.
Tell we see the same names in say the top 20 have back to back to back solid or better years I think I place more trust were the arms rank compared to their peers as opposed to number of over all pitches.
Over all i am depressed with Bochy hanlding of the young arms this year. We are not post season bound any time soon. It will be a long march to get there so don’t wear ourselves out in the first couple days trying to get there a head of schedule.
[...] release point is an oblong grouping. You’ll notice that it’s different than Matt Cain’s more circular grouping that we plotted a couple of days ago. I mentioned earlier that I thought Lincecum might have been [...]