This is the pitch f/x data from Medlen's major league debut against the Rockies where we got shutout at the Ted 9-0.  Wow, I actually forgot how terrible that game was.  

Medlen pitched well the first three innings and then completely imploded in the 4th:

I had most of this data on my computer back in December.  Never got around to publishing it till now.

I think for the pitch f/x data I might have filtered out the 4th inning since he was all over the place.  Interestingly enough, Kris Medlen's 2 seam had more velocity on this day than his 4 seam, but small samples of course.  His fastball has good vertical movement and below average horizontal movement.  I think I filtered out the 4th inning from this data.

You might want to skip down a bit to the pretty flight path graphs if this stuff below doesn't make sense.

I like the movement on this 2 seam and it's especially good when you compare it to his fastball.  It's weird how Medlen's fastball favors vertical movement more than a standard fastball while his other pitches tend to favor horizontal movements.  For most pitchers, you tend to see them favor one or the other based on their arm angle.  I'd like to see how Medlen grips his pitches.

This graph below is similar to the above table.  Basically, imagine you are the catcher and a ball is thrown at you with no spin and no outside effects like wind/air.  That ball would land dead center at (0,0).  At (-3.64, 10.59), the vertical of 10.59 inches on the fastball means it moves 10.59 inches higher than you'd expect from no spin pitch and the -3.59 inches means it's moving to your left (the catcher's left).  This is due to the grip and the resulting spin.  Picture yourself as the catcher and it should make some intuitive sense.  I believe a typical 4 seam fastball is around -5 horizontal and 9 vertical.  Guys with fastballs that are straight as an arrow will be something like -3.5  horizontal, 6 vertical.  Craig Hansen is the first guy who comes to mind for me.

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Flight Paths for Mr Hanson's first big league start.  He only threw one changeup so take that data with a grain of salt compared to the rest.  Thanks to Harry Pavlidis for the template.

Here is the first base view.  If you notice, Tommy Throws the fastball and slider down while throwing the curveball straight forward. Click the images for bigger versions.

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He starts the slider a little more outside than the fastball and curve so it ends up crossing at about the same point as the fastball.

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Here you can see the different release points and the massive hump of the curveball.  It looks like he's purposely changing the release points of these pitches and it's probably tipping them.  I wonder if he always does this or if it's just first start jitters.

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Enjoy the pretty graphs.

Here’s a look at some of the more obscure numbers produced by our Braves.  These numbers do not include today’s Braves/Mets game unless otherwise stated.

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We'll focus on Mr. Kawakami and show what Mr. Moylan looks like when he's back in form.

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This post from Beyond the Boxscore just taught me how to get pitch f/x data from Brooks Baseball.  The data tells you all kind of crazy things like the pitch location, release points, the velocity, and the pitch spin.  I played around with the data from Jurrjens's start on Wednesday and here's some graphs.

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I've been using estimates for his value, but now that I'm done with finals, let's pull out the calculator and crunch some numbers.  I've been saying the original offer was "way overpaying," but I'll try to quantify what he's worth.  I'm doing this post on the spot so maybe I'll surprise myself.

First, let's assume Peavy will give you a 3.38 FIP over 200 innings.  Marcel's projection system puts him at a 3.38 FIP and Bill James says 3.42.  For those of you who don't know, FIP is fielding independent pitching.  It's on the ERA scale and is based off his BB rate, K rate, and HR rate, so by saying Peavy is a 3.38 FIP pitcher, we’re predicting him to have a 3.38 ERA.

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So I was glancing at some Pitch F/X a bit ago (I love that stuff) and stumbled upon the fact that John Smoltz and Javier Vazquez throw the same 4 pitches.  Obviously Vazquez isn't as good as Smoltz, but let's take a look at what each pitcher throws.  I'll be comparing Vazquez in 2008 to Smoltz in 2007.  I'll do one for Jurrjens eventually.

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For your Sunday reading pleasure or save it for the workweek.  That one I put together on Jo-Jo was pretty sloppy, so I tried to make this one better.  It's certainly a hell of a lot longer.  Probably about twice as long as I anticipated so you should grab a snack if you're gonna do this in one sitting.  I have fun putting these together while learning a lot more than I'd ever expect.  I'll do a less bloated one for Jair in a week or two.

As suggested, the primary focus will be on Charlie, but we'll also take a look at potential offseason pitching targets as well.  Pitch f/x doesn't really have any accurate comparisons for Charlie so this works out.  (Note: Afterwards, I found a couple good ones and it's in Charlie's section at the end.)  Here's Charlie's pitch f/x.  If you notice, he has an extra clump of pitches listed as his changeup.  Those are most likely sliders and I tried to separate the data between the change and slider.  We'll take a detailed look at all 5 of his pitches.

Here's the potential offseason targets:

Free Agents: Dempster, Lowe, Garland, and Burnett (if he opts out)

Trade Targets: Harang (don't think anyone wants him) and Halladay (mostly for kicks)

I was thinking about putting Sabatthia and Sheets as well, but we aren't really targeting them.  Here's a summary: Sabatthia throws a ~ 95 MPH fastball with a little above average movement and a hard (81  MPH) slurvy curveball (kinda like K-Rod).  Has a changeup too.  Sheets is about ~93.5 MPH fastball with more movement and a power curve (80 MPH) with more drop and less horizontal than CC's.  Supposedly has a short hump and drops late, which this pitch f/x doesn't show.  Sheets also throws what I think is a 2 seam, but is listed as splitter.  I was going to cut out Harang too, but I wanted to see why he was sucking this year.  Anyway, on to the meat of the post.

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Jo-Jo's pitch f/x.

This post ended up 3 times longer than I thought it would and I learned a lot more about Jo-Jo's comparisons than I ever thought I would.  If you want to focus on Jo-Jo, I go more into depth on him in the end.

Jo-Jo throws a fastball, curve, slider, change, and splitter.  I'll go into depth in a bit.

Now if you scroll down to the bottom of Jo-Jo's pitch f/x page, you'll see a thing called Uniqueness.  Basically, Jo-Jo's pitches, movement, and velocity are pretty similar to these pitchers.  Check out his Top 5 comps: Nolasco, Gallardo, Garland, Parra, Buerhle.  Not too bad.  Couple league average pitchers and then some #3 or #2 starters in there.  When you go down some more you see Davies and Ridgway, which isn't particularly great.  But the top 5 is a nice group to be in.

Let's compare Jo-Jo to the young pitchers, Nolasco, Gallardo, and Parra.

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Pretty cool blog that I stumbled accross sometime ago: from small ball to the long ball.  It has pitch f/x data and batter data for this season and the last.  The batter data is easier to understand and I'm going to explain the pitch f/x below, and if it's too confusing, take a break and have some fun with the batter data.

Check out Campillo's data.

I'll try to explain the movement for those of you unfamiliar pitch f/x. 

First, when you look at a graph, imagine the view the catch or umpire has.  It's right behind the plate so a negative x is moving in on righties and positive x is moving away from righties.  Negative z is down and positive z is up.

Let's look at the fastball:

MPH: 86.44

Movement in x: -4.22

Movement in z: 11.23

This is the pitch relative to a pitch thrown without spin, so because of the spin, the fastball lands higher and more inside to righties than a pitch without spin.  This probably won't mean much to you if you've never seen it before so here's some links to average major league stuff:

Fastball, Sinker, Cutter

Curve, Change, Slider

The average major league fastball is 91.84 MPH with a -5.456 Horizontal Movement and 9.783 Vertical movement.  So Campillo's fastball is horribly slow, but it has a bit more rise and has less movement in on righties and away form lefties.

Well what gives him his effectiveness then? Take a look at his offspeed stuff.

Here's the Rev's stuff:

This is league average:

Type       Speed (mph)  Hor. movement (in.)  Vert. movement (in.)
Curve          77.3           4.7               -4.4
Slider         83.3           2.3                2.5
Change         82.5          -6.5                5.8

Curve is about 6.4 MPH slower than average with 2.7 inches more drop and moves about 2.4 more inside to righties.  Slider is 2MPH slower with about an inch and a half more inside with about 2.3 inches more drop.  His Change is 7 MPH slower and moves about 3 inches higher and 3 inches more inside on righties.

So basically his fastball has more "rise," his curve has more drop, the slider is pretty much league average, and his changeup cuts pretty hard inside on righties.

Check out the speed difference between his fastball/curve and fastball/change.  About 15 MPH in difference for the curve and 11 for the change, which are both better than league average.

The uniqueness of Campillo's changeup is one reason he's so effective.  The difference recorded in vertical movement for the change and fastball aren't a lot for basically every pitcher.  Campillo's is league average, but we all know the difference between a good change and fastball isn't just 3 inches.  A good changeup needs good speed difference from the fastball, and which makes the pitch take a longer time to get to the plate, allowing gravity to drop it off the table.

Pitch f/x's vertical movement is simply comparing Campillo's 86 MPH FB to a 86 MPH pitch thrown with no spin and his 75 MPH change compared to a 75 MPH pitch with no spin.  The drop caused by the 11 MPH difference isn't accounted for in pitch f/x.

So the speed difference between Campillo's fastball/change gives the change more time drop.  Add this in with the 3 inches that it cuts in on righties compared to the league average change and you can see that this is a devastating pitch.  I think Chipper called it the Invisiball or something like that.

To sum it up, Campillo has crappy raw velocity, but the difference in velocity between his pitches is good and his change and curve have pretty ridiculous movement.  Throw in the pinpoint control and now you know he's the real deal.

Hopefully you have a basic understanding of pitch fx right now.  Click around and take a look.  One quick warning though.  Some of the pitch classifications are wrong, but most are correct.  Rich Harden, for example, is a 2 pitch pitcher.  Those sliders it lists are his changeup.  Papelbon is listed with a change, but I believe he throws a splitter.  Charlie Morton has 2 different blots of changeups, but the one on the right side is probably sliders.  Anyway, just click around a bit.  Compare Chucky James to Johan Santana.  Check out the drop on Zito's curve.  Joakim Soria has a lot of nice pitches too.  It's fun stuff.

Here's the batter data again.

Just check out the number of swinging strikes Francoeur has on pitches out of the strike zone (red traingles) compared to someone with plate discipline, like Blanco.  Yes, that's a lot of swinging strikes on fastballs a foot above the strike zone for Frenchy.  Heck, look at the "In Play Out" for pitches a foot under the strike zone too.  Gees Frenchy is all over the place.  And another random tidbit: Chipper is batting .447 and slugging .771 against sliders.

Originally I just planned on writing a short thing about the data, but it blossomed into this wall of text.  Pitch f/x is fun.  Try it!