Greg Maddux is off to a nice start in 2007 with a 3-2 record and 3.20 ERA in 50 2/3 innings having given up only 45 hits and 7 walks. It turns out that of his eight starts this season five have been recorded more or less completely by the Enhanced GameDay system. In all, that's 358 pitches, 164 to right-handers and 194 to left-handers. Just fiddling around with some of the data today here are some random observations.
Ball 102 28.5%Not Surprisingly he doesn't get many swinging strikes.
Called Strike 79 22.1%
In play, out(s) 61 17.0%
Foul 50 14.0%
Swinging Strike 24 6.7%
In play, no out 19 5.3%
In play, run(s) 6 1.7%
Foul Bunt 5 1.4%
Pitchout 4 1.1%
Foul (Runner Going) 3 0.8%
Ball In Dirt 2 0.6%
Swinging Strike (Blocked 2 0.6%
Missed Bunt 1 0.3%
358
Against lefties he clearly stays on the outer half and besides how few pitches he leaves in the middle of the plate, it would appear he gets a pretty good number of calls on balls that are actually outside the strike zone. Cory Schwartz was kind enough to answer a few questions on the system over at The Book blog recently and said that through testing they're confident that the tracking is within 2 inches with regards to a pitcher's release point and within 1" as the ball crosses the plate. Even with a 1" margin of error and remembering that the data points I'm using are much smaller than an actual baseball, that's still a fair number of pitches that Maddux seems to get the benefit of the doubt on.
Against righthanders he seems to catch more of the plate and interestingly doesn't seem to pitch as much down in the zone.
2 comments:
Excellent analysis. I'd be interested to see the same chart for other pitchers in these games. It's possible that the wide strike is more a function of the umpire than the pitcher.
I've been running similar charts at my site, Friarwatch, and I've found that it's fairly common for balls wide of the zone (according to Gameday) to be called strikes.
This is just a shot in the dark, but maybe Maddux's pitches move quite a bit to the right. That would explain the called strikes off the plate to the right and a lot of his pitches catching a lot of the plate instead of just the left edge.
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