Friar Watch

Based on an earlier graph I speculated that Trevor Hoffman might be pitching from the far edge of the rubber. While at the game last night I confirmed that he stands on the third base side when pitching to lefties and the first base side when pitching to righties. This graph shows his release point over three appearances last week:

Grey dots show his release and placement to lefties, orange is righties.

Kind of a small sample, especially with only three lefties, but we can definitely see some patterns here.

First it’s obvious he moves around on the rubber. I believe most pitchers stay in the middle. It looks like he wants to maximize his chances of hitting the outside corner, which you can see by the strike zone placement.

Second, some of his pitches are shown with negative horizontal placement, I assume this means they were in the dirt. I didn’t break it down by pitch type but all of those are change ups and most of them are swinging strikes. No surprise to anyone who’s watched Trevor over the years.