Friar Watch

Dan Fox of Baseball Prospectus has a great analysis of Phil Hughes’ May 1st near no-hitter. Dan uses MLB Enhanced Gameday data to break down each at bat and the game overall.

Fox touches on one aspect of the data that I’ve found interesting: identifying pitches.

You’ll notice that the first pitch to Lofton is recorded at 78.4 mph, and was therefore an off-speed or breaking pitch. One of the goals in analyzing this data is to be able to detect whether the pitch was, in Hughes’ case, a curveball or a changeup. MLBAM has not developed the software to do that today, but since break angle and break length are captured in the data, it would be a matter of creating profiles of each pitcher’s repertoire and then developing an algorithm that would identify the pitches with some level of certainty given his pitch profiles. (When a pitch doesn’t match a profile, it could be flagged and examined, with the result that an existing pitch profile is updated or a new one entered into the repertoire database.)

This relates to something I noticed when looking at Justin Germano’s data. The data seemed to clearly show only two pitches: a mid 80’s fastball and a curveball. But after the game Bobby Cox said Germano had a good change up. Was Cox mistaking his fastball for a change up because it was so slow? Hard to say. I’ll be looking at Germano’s start in more detail this weekend and hope to find some answers.

The B Pro article is free today, not sure if it’s going to be moved to the subscription area. If you’re not a subscriber you should think about it, it’s only $4.95 a month.