SB Nation User Blog: Desert Ranger

Derek Holland's First Start in pitch f/x

Desert Ranger — Sat, 23 May 2009 17:25:31 -0000

The Dutch Revolution has begun.

A simple look at how Holland faced up against the righty-heavy Astros lineup in his major league debut.

Yesterday's first major league start for Holland went very well other than one mistake to Lance Berkman, who makes a living destroying mistakes as we saw. Right around 75 pitches, almost all of them fastballs and almost all of them to right handed hitters. His only lefty faced was Michael Bourn 3 times, who grounded out in 5 pitches, singled on 3 pitches, and singled on 2 pitches. That last one was the bunt single towards Jones though, and the other was deflected.

I went ahead and ignored the 3 Bourn at bats since it's such a small sample size and instead focused on the righties. He only threw 15 offspeed pitches to righties, a mixture of changes and sliders. 2 of those 15 were hits, one a single by Matsui, the other...well, I'll get to that later.

So, that leaves the fastball to right handers. To begin with, here's a plot of Holland's fastball velocity by event, i.e. the farther right on the graph, the more pitches he's thrown.

via i39.tinypic.com

He's average fastball velocity was 93.4mph, which is very good, and he peaked just below 96. Also very good, there are no signs of fatigue on that plot, his velocity didn't decrease over time.

Next is a very simple of fastball movement to right handers.

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A varying degree of movement away from righties and a pretty steady amount of backspin. Not much to notice here. How about fastball location?

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This plot shows that Holland really wasn't working down and away to righties as much as everyone thinks he was. If anything it appears he was working up and in for the most part. But how does this graph look when the result of the pitch is factored in:

via i39.tinypic.com

You'll notice right away that only one fastball was put in play as a hit, Carlos Lee's single in the 2nd. I made that point, the purple triangle, a bit larger as a point of emphasis. All four of Holland's swinging strikes (orange circles) were in the upper portion of the strike zone, or out of it. He wasn't screwed any fastballs called balls and even got a little help from the umpire or Astros hitters for stuff outside the zone. All in all, his fastball had good life, velocity and movement wise, and he apparently hit all the right spots. I'd like to see pitches a little further down in the zone, but when you're facing the Astros fairly anemic lineup you can get away it.

Unless you make a mistake pitch to Lance Berkman.

Holland threw 12 pitches to Berkman over 3 ABs, 4 sliders and 8 fastballs. The first 2 pitch at bat, a pop out to Kinsler, was 2 fastballs. The second at bat, a 5 pitch strikeout, was 3 fastballs 2 sliders. The 3rd at bat, a 5 pitch 3-run homerun, was 3 fastballs and 2 sliders again. Here's what those at bats looked like to Berkman.

via i39.tinypic.com

The four sliders I've made much larger than the fastballs. He got very lucky with the red slider in the 2nd at-bat, as it was pretty much in the wheelhouse. The 2nd slider, which Berkman struck out on, was a thing of beauty, down and in. The 1st slider of the homerun at bat was acceptable, an 0-1 pitch in the dirt. That 4th one though, was just... hanging. It was the first slider but about 7 inches higher and Berkman did not miss.

That's ok though. One mistake pitch to a great hitter will hurt you, but if that's your only problem as a 22 year old rookie who throws absolute gas left-handed, I think we are all more than ok with that. Great first start by Dutch and I honestly can't wait to see the next one.

If there's anything else you'd like to see graphed, let me know.

Matt Harrison's Turnaround

Desert Ranger — Sat, 09 May 2009 18:45:51 -0000

Adam asks and I answer: A look at Matt Harrison's season through pitch f/x, his first 3.5 starts vs his last 2.5 good starts.

Warning: lots of figures.

So I think we are all fairly curious what has gotten into Matt Harrison lately. His first 3.5 starts, not so great; his last 2.5 starts, pretty darn good. I was just going to do a look at yesterdays (5-8-09) start, but since Adam asked for a broader look, I'll present that data first.

Using pitch f/x I was able to get the data from all of Harrison's games so far and sort it out by pitch type.

First, I'll show you pitch selection by start.

via i42.tinypic.com

First, please note that start "4" is the first 2 innings of the Baltimore game and start "5" is the last 5 innings where he seemingly turned it around (yes, the graph axis title is wrong). I already looked at that start in another fanpost and couldn't get too much out of it, so for analysis purposes I just want to focus on the first 3 and the last 2. Right away you can see that his last start against Chicago was a lot of fastballs. Harrison had a great fastball yesterday, as I'll show you in a bit. The 2nd thing to notice is that he hasn't thrown his cut fastball in his last 2 starts. Changeup count was a bit high in his first start against Chicago, but then it dropped off for yesterday. He completely changed his pitch selection from a pretty normal fastball/changeup mix the first time against Chicago to just blowing it by them the 2nd time.

Slider count has been fairly regular through all his outings. Curveball count has decreased a little.

Next I'll show a graph of average pitch velocity. This one can be a little tough to read so I included the table of pitch velocities beneath it.

via i41.tinypic.com

Four seam fastball velocity has gone up pretty steadily over throughout the season, with the average at 93.2mph for his last start. That helps a ton, especially when your offspeed stuff is all below 85 like it was yesterday. His slider velocity was also at its highest point yesterday. Curve and changeup velocity have stayed fairly consistent, and two seam fastball velocity has dropped some.

Here's a look at his pitch movement for yesterday.

via i40.tinypic.com

His four seamer is showing a pretty broad range of movement, all of it going away from righties but to varying degrees. The graph shows a pitch as FS, a split fastball, which is either something completely new or is his two seamer. It has pretty much the same movement and velocity as the two seamer so that's what I classified it is, but I suppose their is the possibility he's dropped it for a splitter.

You can see that the slider as very little vertical movement difference, but quite a bit of horizontal difference. With it's increased velocity, this is a pretty useful pitch. He only threw five and only one was in play, but it was the double play grounder to end the 6th inning.

Here's his four seam fastball location and result from yesterday.

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Harrison was definitely pounding away with his fastball to the righty-heavy lineup yesterday, and even got a few generous calls which make up for the few bad ones in the zone. The point that sticks out to me is that only 3 pitches that were put in play were up in the zone. Harrison did a great job of working down in the zone.

This, on the other hand, is the four seam location and result for his start against KC on the 17th of April

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Lots of stuff in the middle of the zone and most of it is high. That is not where you want to be with an 89.6mph fastball like he had that day.

So that's all I've got for right now. AJM, I know you said you wanted to look at specific pitch locations aside from just fastball, before and after, but I think that may need to be trimmed down. The sheer number of data points make the graph extremely hard to read. I'm also planning on looking at what pitches he's giving up hits on what he's getting outs on to see if there's a trend. I'll get that up when I can.

Millwood's first 4 starts, 08 vs 09

Desert Ranger — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:40:01 -0000

Before tonights 2 homeruns against the Mariners, Millwood has been pretty much what we need him to be this year. I wanted to do a quick analysis to see what the simple effects of the offseason program that he said he did, after Nolan Ryan's big push for stronger (ie, more durable pitchers), actually were.

Just one simple graph for now, comparing the first four starts of this year versus last year, with average fastball velocity plotted as well as pitches per start.

via i41.tinypic.com

No change in average fastball velocity at all, but a large increase in pitches per start. It's also been consistent. I tried to include the first 5 starts, but gameday didn't get pitch types for his last start at Oakland, so I've got nothing there other than he threw 121 pitches. He didn't throw that many in a start all last year.

And while it's easy to point out that increased effectiveness means longer starts and more pitches, this shows that he's got at least the same fastball he did last year. I think this also helps show that he's a little more durable this year than years past. Here's hoping it continues.

Matt Harrison's Last Start in Pitch f/x

Desert Ranger — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:39:31 -0000

A look at Matt Harrison's monday start using pitch f/x

First and foremost, this is my first post on the board though I've been reading for a while, so I'd just like to say hello. I was very happy to see there are people out there who care about the Rangers as much as I do.

Now then, since that's over, I was going over all the info from Matt Harrison's last start, Monday against the Orioles. His first 2 innings were rough, to be generous (50 pitches), and after that he seemed to settle down (63 pitches over 5 innings). I read everything everyone suggested as to why he settled down and I thought I'd take a look at the Gameday data to see what it suggested.

The first suggestion, put forth by both Harrison and Mike Maddux, was that he was rushing and leaving pitches up in the zone as a consequence of picking up his tempo. After the second inning, he slowed down and pitches started to go down in the zone.

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Now from this graph it doesn't appear that he did any better after the 2nd inning of keeping the ball lower in the zone, but at the same time maybe he got a few bad hits off balls that were left high in the zone early. I haven't looked into that yet but will if you guys want it.

A few people were asking about pitch velocity as the game went on, so I looked into that as well. I plotted only four seam fastball velocity for the time being.

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This shows that he kept an average fastball velocity of about 89mph (edit: actually 92mph), but he did absolutely bring it a few times, maxing out at 96. It also shows us that he was able to bring his velocity back up late in the game, even after 100 pitches.

Next, I did a simple graph of pitch selection by inning. I'm a little questioning of some of their classifications; they have Harrison throwing a four seam (FF), two seam (FT), cut fastball (FC) (only 3 of these, I think they are actually changeups), changeups (CH), curves (CU), and sliders (SL).

via i42.tinypic.com

He never got crazy throwing off speed pitches, even in the middle innings when his fastball lost a little life. He obviously threw more fastballs in innings where he was having trouble, but he also threw more pitches in general. What sticks out to me is that he threw more 2 seam fastballs in the longer innings as well. This bears investigation.

Here's the graph of his pitch movement. Sorry for the trouble with some of the colors, excel doesn't give you great options.

via i44.tinypic.com

Curves are off on their own, sliders and what Gameday calls "cut fastballs" are grouped together, and then there's that shotgunned area towards the upper right. Those are 4 seam fastballs, 2 seam fastballs, and changeups... and they all move the exact same way. Average 4 seam velocity is 92.0mph, average 2 seam is 84.9, and average change is 83.1. If we assume that those 2 seamers are actually changeups and gameday just can't tell the difference, then the average "changeup" is 84.5mph. Either way, it just looked like a slow fastball with no movement difference.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it looks to me like once he stopped relying on his secondary pitch (2 seam, change, whatever it was), he was able to improve. I'm probably just reading too much into it though.

Sorry for the long first post, and if you read this far, thanks. If you want any more graphs from this game let me know, I'd be happy to help. Pitch f/x is more exciting than my actual job.