Labwork Continued or What $126M Buys You

Published by on March 20, 2009 | 1 Response

All PFX data is from 2008. Unlike in the Randy Johnson FX post, I cleaned up some of the pitch-types for Zito this time around. The first plot is the familiar movement plot that you’ll often see with PFX data. The second plot is movement based on velocity. It’s very crude — I broke everything into 5mph chunks — but kinda interesting. By PFX in 2008, Zito’s hardest thrown fastball was clocked at 89.4mph. His average fastball was clocked at just a hair past 85mph.

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(FC stands for a cut-fastball. The MLBAM algorithm stinks at identifying cut-fastballs, so you can basically ignore the small group of cutters that PFX thinks Zito threw last season. They mostly look to be sliders. I didn’t remove them because I’m lazy.)

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obsessivegiantscompu
obsessivegiantscompu

Great work as usual. I assume that the data has a time element too. Thus, could you do a plot of velocity, say for Apr-Jun vs. Jul-Sep? That's about when Zito made a breakthrough in terms of striking out more batters (he actually looked better in last start of June too, but it seemed cleaner to do 3 mos vs. 3 mos). The assumption was that he started to get his fastball velocity up in the second half of the season. And the key to his success in the majors is his ability to get his fastball velocity high enough to separate against his awesome curveball. So it would be interesting to see if his velocity did go up later in the season vs. earlier. Not sure how best to present the data to show this, though.