If you’re new here and like what you see, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Need more info on what subscribing entails? Here’s a primer. Thanks for visiting!From time to time this year (as time permits), I’ll delve in to MLB.com’s pitch f/x data to analyze a starters outing. [...]

An article at the Wall Street Journal delved into Jeremy Bonderman’s first inning struggles. Former pitching coach Bob Cluck wondered whether or not Bonderman’s struggles are attributable to umpires needing an inning to adjust to the movement on Bonderman’s pitches.
The stats seem to support this theory. The last seven times Mr. Bonderman faced [...]

Jim Leyland has come out on several occasions and said that Jeremy Bonderman is one of the keys to any success the Tigers might enjoy in 2008. Bonderman’s second half swoon, which I attribute largely to his elbow pain that he finally fessed up to, clouded what was starting out to be a phenomenal season. An ERA of 8.50 over his last 9 starts, combined with the arm troubles meant that Bonderman finished with the highest ERA and lowest innings total since his rookie season. Like with Dontrelle Willis, we’ll delve into the pitch f/x data and see what we can find out about the veteran 25 year old pitcher.

On Friday Lynn Henning wrote a detailed look at Dontrelle Willis with a heavy emphasis on scouting. I found the article fascinating from the stand point of getting a better understanding of Willis’s repertoire as well as the thought processes that went along with approving the deal for the lefty. He was after all coming off a pretty rough year. I also viewed it as a chance to dust off that pitch f/x database I’ve had sitting dormant and explore whether or not the reports meshed with what the system had reported.

Rob Neyer called for further investigation of the point. Neyer stated:

Two, while I’m intrigued by the notion that Trammell’s solid defensive credentials — he won four Gold Gloves, and Bill James has him as a Grade B-minus shortstop over his entire career — are partly the result of the high grass in the Tiger Stadium infield, I’d sure like to see somebody do some actual work on this one. Yes, sinkerballer Walt Terrell’s home/road splits were massive when he pitched for the Tigers, particularly from 1985 through ‘87. But did other sinkerball pitchers fare particularly well in Tiger Stadium during Trammell’s career? Were Trammell’s fielding stats significantly better at home than on the road? If the grass was long and did lead to more plays for Trammell, did it cost him anything as a hitter?

Inspired by Neyer I decided to at least take a very crude look at what effect the grass had on ground ball hit rates. This isn’t exactly answering Neyer’s question or refuting Sheehan’s claim, but at least it is another data point. My methodology was to look at all groundballs hit, and see at what rate they produced baserunners. I then converted those rates to park factors.

There are a few items that didn’t fit into the other posts about the outfield park factors that I wanted to wrap up.
First I wanted to acknowledge some other work that was done. Chone calculated outfield park factors in the fall of 2006. I either missed this or completely forgot having [...]

Earlier in the week, I questioned the widely held belief of whether with an outfield like Comerica Park’s the Tigers should have 2 centerfielder-types to man the large left and center fields. Using park factors and looking at the rate at which balls in the air drop in for hits, we saw that fewer [...]

“How big is it?”
You need 3 center fielders to cover all the ground out there
Okay, as a joke it’s awful, but it is a common statement amongst Tigers fans. At the very least the belief is that multiple center fielder type players are required to man left and center fields. When you look [...]

Dan Fox at Baseball Prospectus recently did a post where he used the enhanced gameday (aka pitch/fx) data to categorize hitters by eye. He broke hitters down into the following groups and subsequently created some pretty slick graphs.

Square: This is the new metric, defined as the percentage of pitches in the strike zone swung [...]

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but Todd Jones and Mike Rabelo don’t really go together. If Jones is peanut butter, Rabelo is asparagus and if you look back at the game logs you see that Mike Rabelo has caught half of games where Jones has allowed runs. Luckily it [...]

On Sunday, June 24th Andrew Miller took center stage on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball and promptly pitched 6 shut out innings. Miller only allowed 4 hits and 2 walks and was never really threatened. Was this a dominant performance by a young stud pitcher, or just another day at the office for the [...]

Taking advantage of the enhanced gameday data once again, I’ll take a look at Jeremy Bonderman’s and Roy Halladay’s awesome performances last night.
We’ll start with Jeremy Bonderman. The table below shows the mix of pitches and results for Bonderman:

It was a little surprising to see that Jeremy Bonderman didn’t miss that many bats last [...]