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 night, and none with his fastball. But what he did was induce a ton of weak contact. This was probably one of the biggest factors in keeping his pitch count so low.
For today’s purposes I defined set 89MPH as the differentiator between Bonderman’s fastball and his other pitches. Now one of the big questions around Jeremy Bonderman is his use of the change-up. Enhanced GameDay tracks information related to pitch trajectory. I’m still working on the interpretation, but I plotted the values provided and differentiated based on velocity.
Without even understanding the representative scales, it’s pretty easy to see what was a slider and what was a fastball. Assuming the change-up trajectory is similar to the fastball’s, it appears that Bonderman only through 2 of them last night.
Next we’ll take a look at where he was working.
Surprisingly only a little more than half of Bonderman’s pitches (52%) were in the strike zone. But he was getting ahead forcing some swings at the slider down and away.
As for Halladay, I won’t hit the same level of detail. The table below is Halladay’s pitch results for last night. It’s nteresting to note that Tigers hitters only swung and missed twice last night.
But he was able to get away with not missing bats because of his absolute phobia of the top half of the strike zone. The Tigers were making contact last night, but only with the pitches that Halladay wanted them to.
Both pitchers achieved nearly identical results, but did so with different arsenals. It was a joy to watch, even with an unfortunate ending for the Tigers.
Related: A different look at Joel Zumaya’s Save
Comments
12 responses to “A different look at the Bonderman-Halladay Duel”
Billfer is turning into an XML nerd…and it’s AWESOME. 🙂
Great analysis, man.
I’m loving these charts, Bill.
There were so many interesting aspects to that game on both sides, but to me, maybe the most impressive is that neither Halladay or Bonderman walked a batter. That is astounding.
Awesome charts again! Any release point data coming?
Glad you guys are liking it. Probably no release point data in the near future. While I’ve expedited getting the data into a usable format, it still takes me some time to produce the charts and analysis. Plus the tigers won’t be in an enhaced ballpark for awhile.
sweet work, Billfer. I guess I’m jumping into this late; where are you getting all this detailed data?
[…] rebecca: sweet work, Billfer. I guess I’m jumping into this late; where are… […]
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[…] On April 14, he published “A Different Look at the Bonderman-Halladay Duel”, an article about Jeremy Bonderman’s April 13th start. […]
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