I couldn't believe that Maine was able to rack up 9 strikeouts the other day while throwing almost purely fastballs. 95% of his pitches were fastballs - talk about pitch selection. And moreover, they were mediocre fastballs velocity-wise, averaging 87 mph. How could he be getting any batters out, especially since there was no need to even guess what pitch was coming next?

We can tell that while he might have been a bit lucky, his fastball did have a whiff rate over 12% yesterday. For reference, RHPs' fastballs usually have a 6% whiff rate and in his previous starts, he had a 5% whiff rate on his fastball. So maybe he wasn't that lucky. However, looking at the movement on his fastball in this game could the key:

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We're all aware of Bernazard's crazy opposite field hitting strategy, but to what extent did the plan affect individual batters? James already linked to a great piece at the Hardball Times, but I thought a closer look might be interesting.

First, let's use Jason Bay as a baseline, assuming Bernazard couldn't affect him in Boston. The black line is 2008 and red line is 2009. The higher the line, the more "likely" a ball was hit at that angle. -45 is the left foul line, 0 is straight up the middle, and 45 degrees is the right foul line. Since Bay is a right-handed hitter, pulling a pitch would be hitting closer to -45 degrees. You can see that the angle on his balls in play didn't change much from 2008 to 2009 and that he's a pull hitter, as we know.

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(bumped from fanposts. --eric)

For a class project I looked at Pitch f/x data and I wanted to share some Mets-related results with AA. Basically, I tried to determine a batter's personal strike zone, or the area where they would be more likely than not to swing at a pitch. To this end, I looked at the location of every pitch thrown to them, and used a statistical technique to find the boundaries of their zone. (For more detail, see the end of this post.)

Now for fun graphs! These are from the catcher's point of view.

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(bumped from fanposts. --eric)

I've read a few comments suggesting that Francoeur's power makes up for his OBP, especially on a team like the current Mets, who can get on base but suffer from an inability to score once on. The idea is that a low OBP / high SLG player is more valuable on this team than yet another high OBP / low SLG player.

Could this be true? I'll start with a extreme over-simplication of the Mets' situation. Let's assume we have two players, whom I'll call L. Castilla and J. Francore. Castilla is a singles hitter, but gets on base, while Francore never takes a walk, but can really hit the ball.

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(bumped from the fanposts. --eric)

Much ink has been spilled over David Wright's BABIP this season, but yesterday I read an interesting comment on Fangraphs about how line drive % plus .120 was not a good estimator of BABIP, linking to a study done at the Hardball Times.

The basic results of that study are that xBABIP is a much better estimator that ldBABIP (LD% + .120). In fact, the R-Squared on xBABIP was 0.25, but 0.04(!) on ldBABIP. qxBABIP, the quick and dirty version of xBABIP is also a much better estimator than ldBABIP. Since the study was conducted in January, the folks at the HBT have further tuned and made available a spreadsheet to calculate a simple xBABIP.

Curious about how David Wright's real BABIP stacks up against his simple xBABIP I plugged in the numbers courtesy of Fangraphs:

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