So before i start this post, two points:

1.  Posts are still going to come slowly and not very often due to other concerns.  When I make posts, I’ll attempt to link them as fanposts to other team sites (Amazin Avenue and Lighthouse Hockey).  So for what little audience I might have,  I’m sorry and check those sites for updates.  They’re good sites.

2.  I’m going to post some Islander stuff over the next 3 months, as I’m trying to learn advanced hockey statistics.  A lot of my posts will come from the work of Gabe at behindthenet.com and behindthenet.ca.   These posts will involve me being less knowledgable about the tools I’m using, so forgive me for any mistakes.

Niese’s pitches:

The same legend applies to these graphs as the one in this post with one exception:  Change-ups are represented by the yellow dots.  Cutters are the Green squares, Blue Pluses are two-seam fastballs, Red Xes are four seam fastballs, and Light blue circles are curveballs.

So what’s new?

First, this time, Niese threw almost as many cutters as four-seam fastballs.  Niese threw 32 cutters, 38 Four-seam Fastballs, 7 two-seam Fastballs, as well as 5 change-ups and 17 curve balls.

Second….this time Niese faced a decent number of lefty and righty batters, whereas in Houston, Niese faced only one lefty batter (Michael Bourn).  This time around, Niese threw 43 pitches to lefties and 56 to righties.  What’s interesting is that Nies threw 14 Cutters to these lefty batters (alongside 22 four-seam fastballs), indicating that Niese sees the pitch as a general-use pitch rather than a righty-only weapon.  Niese had mentioned in interviews that he developed the pitch to help him attack right-handed batters.  But he’s clearly using the pitch as a weapon against all batters.

By contrast, Niese is using his two-seam fastball against only right-handed batters but he still uses the pitch only a few times a game.

Third, the game vs the Rockies shows what we suspected about his cutter, it doesn’t actually move significantly in on righties(/away from lefties) According to the citifield PitchFX cameras, the pitch moved 1 inch in on lefties.  That said, the cutter’s usefulness depends not on its own absolute movement, but its movement compared to other fastballs.  In this start, Niese’s four-seam fastball moved 4.7 inches more in on lefties than the cutter and Niese’s two-seam fastball moved 8.6 inches more in on lefties than the cutter.  These differences are essentially identical to the results from Houston.

So why’d this start wind up so poorly?  Well first, Niese’s pitches resulted in balls more often in this game (particularly the cutter, which was really effective against Houston).  Second, Niese’s locations were sometimes dangerously off.  The pitch that basically sent him packing, a cutter that resulted in a Home Run by Clint Barmes, was not where Niese wants his cutter.  Niese wants his cutter on the inside of the plate against righty batters, but this pitch was on the outside-middle part of the plate and up…..which allowed Barmes to smack it out of the seats.

Remember, movement can only do so much…..control of one’s pitches is still huge.  And that’s something Niese needs to be careful of.

]]> http://smartmetstalk.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/nieses-july-30th-start/feed/ 2 loran16 NieseStart4MovementOfPitches http://smartmetstalk.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/nieses-release-point/ http://smartmetstalk.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/nieses-release-point/#comments Sun, 02 Aug 2009 03:44:00 +0000 Josh Smolow http://smartmetstalk.wordpress.com/?p=24 Continue reading →]]> Recently two places have noticed the weird fact about Niese’s curveball:  It’s release point appears to be different from the release point on his other pitches.

See Amazin Avenue or FireJerryManuel.

I wrote a small bit on this at the end of my first PitchFX article on Niese, HERE:

To quote myself:

This graph shows the release points of Jon Niese, and you can see two clusters of pitches. Immediately a potential problem for Niese becomes evident, his upper left release point is the area from which he throws his curveball (the blue dots) and nothing else. Niese’s fastballs and changeups come from the other release point. In essence, Niese is releasing his curveball from a 12 o’clock release point (straight up) while he’s releasing his fastballs and changeups at a 1 o’clock release point (lower and more to the right). This pattern is the same for each of Niese’s starts last year and his start against the Pirates this year.

Does this matter? I don’t know exactly, as the two release points are closer together than some that others pitchers have (see Hernandez, Orlando). If players could notice this difference in release points, or look for the higher release point, they could know whenever a curveball is coming. Naturally this would be disastrous for a pitcher who uses it as effectively as Niese does. This clearly bears further watching to see if hitters are noticing this issue as teams’ scouting reports on Niese get more detailed.

Needless to say, this same phenomenon still exists.  In the link to Fire Jerry Manuel above, i have an argument with the proprietor of that blog over how bad this is for Niese and what should be done about it.  I figure it’s best i put a summary of my comments in that post here.

First, this difference is not necessarily easy for batters to pick up.  Niese’s fastball gets to the plate in roughly 4 tenths of a second.  Niese’s curveball gets to the plate in roughly 5 tenths of a second.  Batters have 2 tenths of a second to decide whether or not to swing on the fastball if they’re going to make good contact.

When baseball people talk about tipping a pitch, they usually talk about the pre-pitch motions of a pitcher.  Recently the mets broadcasters referenced one pitcher tipping a pitch by how open he had his glove when he got the signal.  In these cases, the batter knows two or more seconds before the pitch comes what pitch it’s going to be and can easily make use of that information when they have to decide whether or not to swing.

In this case, the pitcher is tipping the pitch at the LAST possible moment…when he releases the pitch.  So IF the batter notices the tip, he only has the same .2 seconds he normally has to decide whether or not to swing to process this information.  That’s kind of difficult for a batter to process (the batter also needs to process where the pitch appears to be, how fast it looks, where it’s going to go, etc.).

Second, there’s little evidence that this is affecting things.  Niese’s curveball has been above average against both righties and lefties and his big problem has been his four-seam fastball, where lefties are reaping a huge advantage.  Against lefties, when throwing the fastball, Niese has ALLOWED 2.31 more runs than the average pitch.  Against righties, the pitch has prevented 1.04 runs more than average.  That’s a HUGE differential.  Now it’s early to truly rely on run values to evaluate a pitch, but what this information doesn’t show us is that the release point is affecting Niese’s curveball’s results.

Now could it affect Niese’s fastball?  Perhaps batters know when the curve isn’t coming so they’re reaping hte benefits by attacking his fastball?  Seems unlikely.  One of the reasons cited for why lefties have trouble with lefty pitchers is that same sided hitters have less time to see a pitch as it comes out of a pitcher’s hands.  So it stands to reason that lefties should have a HARDER time picking up on Niese’s tipping of his curveball, but that’s not what the results say.

Finally, there’s nothing really that can be done.  Niese’s curveball is his most established pitch and is not something he can afford to worry about.  He’s gone through the met minor-league system with this release point, and no one in the minor league system tried to get him to change it.  Maybe they didn’t notice, maybe they did but decided it wasn’t much of an issue.  If it’s the former, then it seems unlikely that it’s much of a problem since scouts and batters didn’t use it in the minors.  It it’s the latter (my bet), then they missed their chance then.  It’s one thing to fix a release point if your pitches aren’t working from a current release point (See Oliver Perez), but it’s another where it’s a key to the whole pitch*.  At this point, Niese’s release point is likely to be the same for his whole career, and he’s just got to live with that and use the pitch as well as he can.

Hopefully this won’t be a hinderance.  Time will tell.

I weep occasionally at the fact that Brian Bannister was traded to the Royals.

Not because Bannister is particularly great (though he’d probably crack our starting rotation this year), but because he makes an effort to understand baseball statistics and he tries to use this knowledge to improve his performance.

Recently, on a Kansas City Radio Program, Bannister said something that was fascinating to me.  There’s no transcript of this conversation, but a bit can be found online…here. I’ll be referencing and citing Bannister’s comments in this post, but I think people would like to hear them for themselves.  It’s not necessary to understand the rest of this post though.

What Bannister basically was talking about is a technology I’m a big fan of: PitchFX.  For those who don’t know, PitchFX uses a system of cameras to track every pitch thrown in every game of the MLB season and has been doing so since 2007.  If you’ve ever used MLB’s gameday service to keep track of a game since 2007, you‘ve probably seen the system in action: it’s the system that allows for gameday to show the locations of each pitch and the paths the pitches traveled to get there.

The data the system compiles is free for anyone to access and other baseball fans and I have used the system to do statistical analysis of certain pitchers and to learn how effective certain pitches are in the first place.  Well, apparently Brian Bannister has done this sort of thing as well, and has used the system to help him better his own performance.

Met fans may remember Bannister as a guy who didn’t have particularly great stuff, who relied on movement and location to get by, and as a guy who couldn’t really strike many batters out.  Bannister knew statistics and understood several things about his stuff:  Its success couldn’t continue for much longer.  In the radio conversation above, he mentions that pitchers’ who have low K rates, give up plenty of Home Runs, and survive based on low BABIPs won’t be in the Major Leagues after a few more years.

And Bannister’s right, of course.  Last year, Bannister attempted to fix his stuff by throwing harder.  IF he could just get his strikeout rate up, he’d be able to achieve better results.  But lo and behold it didn’t work.

And then Bannister looked at PitchFX.  And he looked at some successful pitchers who didn’t have the greatest strike out rates.  The one that stood out to him was Brandon Webb.  On PitchFX, Webb’s skill is pretty obvious.  Webb’s fastball has the largest (or one of the top 2 largest) sink in the game today.  His change up is similar.  The end result is that Webb’s pitches result in a ton of ground balls, a ton of double plays, and virtually no home runs.

Bannister noticed he had a pitch he used occasionally that he could use to mimic Brandon Webb’s sinking fastball.  His Cutter (or cut fastball) had less rise (or “greater sink”) than his usual fastball in addition to the different horizontal movement.  Bannister had once thrown the pitch primarily as his main pitch, but had been convinced in the minors to switch his main pitch to his four-seam fastball.

Realizing this pitch would result in more ground balls and less home runs due to its vertical sink, he started to throw it once again as his primary offering.  He started to throw the cutter 50-60 times a game…and he only threw the four-seam fastball around 11 times again.  Similarly, Bannister learned his change up could mimic Webb’s sinking fastball/change up, and he started to employ that weapon as well.

The result: Bannister’s K/9 rate has not improved, but his ground ball rate has improved…allowing Bannister to survive the majors much better.  He’s not ever going to be the next Brandon Webb, but he’ll be a decent groundball pitcher using this strategy and should have much more success than doing what he did in 2008.

Bannister’s approach to improving himself is something pitchfx analysts have always wished they could do….we analysts see a pitcher’s stuff and wonder if he could use one type of pitch more or drop another type of pitch entirely.  Bannister has done that and improved himself.  What if we could act as another pitcher’s pitching coach and use our pitchfx knowledge to tweak that pitcher’s repertoire.

Over the next week I’ll write posts about improving a met pitcher’s stuff through looking at their pitchfx results.  I’m gonna start with Jon Niese (not because I’ve written the most about him, but because there’s a particularly important comparison of his stuff with say…Roy Halladay).

So Stay tuned.

I wrote a new article on Niese for metsminorleagueblog.com here:

http://www.metsminorleagueblog.com/2009/07/27/the-development-of-jon-niese-and-his-new-weapon-the-cutter/

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I’ve got more on this topic to come.

And well….lets just say his results have been disappointing.

Fmart has hit 176/242/275….Not good numbers.  He has a BB/K ratio of basically a little less than 3 strikeouts for every walk he takes, and only walks in 5.2% of his plate appearances.  His wOBA* has been an abysmal .241.

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*wOBA, or Weighted On Base Average, is a statistic I will be using a lot in this blog.  Essentially, wOBA is like OPS.  The concept behind wOBA is a lot more complex, but in essence the statistic can be looked at as a combination of OBP and SLG.  The thing is that On base Percentage actually is a bit more important than slugging for a team to score runs…and yet OPS combines OBP with Slugging % on a 1 to 1 ratio.  So wOBA is one of a few other stats designed to correct for this inbalance (Baseball prospectus’ EQA is another). The whole thing’s a lot more complicated than that (it involves linear weights) and for a more thorough and correct definition (I’ve butchered what it is truely here) see:

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http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/the-joy-of-woba

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wOBA can be found for any player at fangraphs.com, a great site for baseball stats.  It’s essentially weighted to look like OBP…..so a wOBA of .345 is around average, a wOBA of 310 or lower is horrible, and a wOBA of 380 or greater is awesome and a sign of a great player.

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So back to FMart….as you can see above, his wOBA of .241 is epicly bad.  For reference, the worst player in the Majors this year with 200 At Bats or more has been Brian Giles, who’s got an wOBA of .251.  So yeah.

Still, you shouldn’t give up on Fmart for there are quite a few signs this is no where near his real talent level.  First, his BABIP (Batting Average for Balls put in Play, a measure of hitter’s/pitcher’s luck) is .197.  This is almost certainly caused by his poor line drive %, which is only 10.4%*.

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BABIP measures the amount of balls that a hitter put into play that turn into hits, EXCLUDING HOME RUNS.  Fly balls tend to turn into hits a tiny bit more often than ground balls (Deep fly balls that result in doubles and triples are the cause of this).  But it is LINE DRIVEs that result most often in balls falling in for hits….This is intuitive:

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Line Drives are balls hit harder (usually) than other types of batted balls.  Furthermore their trajectory keeps them in the air a short amount of time.  THUS, for a fielder to catch a line drive, the ball has to either be hit DIRECTLY at that player….or the fielder has to make an incredible play.

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Line Drive data is not available for the minors these days.  But BABIP is…and FMart’s BABIP in the minors was almost always (excluding 2006 in St Lucie) above 300 (Average or better).  So what’s happening here is that Fmart is swinging at pitches….and not hitting them solidly straight on: He’s either hitting them on the ground or higher up in the air.  His bat movement and the form of his swing, in essence, is poor….but he’s swung the bat well in the minors.  You may have heard Keith mention this on broadcast:  His swing looks wrong.

Why is this?  Well it’s impossible to know without actually, you know, talking with him and working on his swing in the cage (Paging Howard Johnson on Line 1, Howard Johnson Please Pick Up Line 1), but I’d guess its just the nerves of being in the big leagues here.  His other stats are more in line with his minor league results, such as his walk and strikeout rates….essentially he’s not getting particularly fooled by pitches any more than he did down there.  His walk rate is low for a major leaguer, but remember, the kid is not even 21 yet.  Walks are something that come to players as they grow (see Jose Reyes) and his current rate isn’t utterly abysmal (On Pace for above 20 walks a season, not great, but there’ve been worse players such as JEFF FRANCOEUR and his 3.4% rate this year)

Once again guys, the Kid is not even legal to drink here yet!  So give him some time. I don’t think he’ll necessarily be a superstar, but he should be a major player next year.

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FOR THOSE FURTHER INTERESTED:  I’m working on a piece for metsminorleagueblog.com on Fernando Martinez.  Two things have stopped me from really devoting time to getting it one:

1.  HitFX data which i want to use is not available for months other than April, when FMart was not with the team.

2.  My distractability and the Mets performance making me want to focus on other things.

I promise to get to work on this and to link the piece as soon as i finish it.

Here you’ll get my thoughts on the Mets, present and future, and a look at certain met players through the tools of pitchfx and hitfx.  I apologize for being brief  and a little unclear here, but i’m sure you’ll get a better idea of what I’ll be doing as this blog goes on.