Sinkers

As many of you know I've been writing about the PITCHf/x data captured by the new Gameday system the last several weeks in my Schrodinger's Bat column over on Baseball Prospectus. In answering a question for a colleague I ran a query to take a look at which pitchers have the most sink on their sinking fastball and so I'll share the results here.

There is certainly some difficulty in separating sinking fastballs from four-seamers (in some research on Chad Gaudin I found I couldn't reasonably classify some 5% of his fastballs) since the data is continuous and doesn't come nicely labeled. So as a first approximation I thought I'd take a look at all pitches thrown between 87 and 93 miles per hour and that had the appropriate horizontal break for a fastball in order to weed out any sliders. This is similar to what John Walsh did in an excellent article at THT and builds on the work that Joe P. Sheehan did over at Baseball Analysts. The result is the following table of the top 30 pitchers (pitchers who throw from the side excepted since their vertical movement is actually negative in many cases as John discussed).

Name               Throws  Pitches   AvgVel    Vert   Horiz  MaxVel
Felix Hernandez    R             69    89.7     2.2    -3.5    92.9
Kameron Loe        R            529    89.6     3.7    -7.7    93.0
Derek Lowe         R            575    90.2     3.8   -10.7    93.0
Roy Halladay       R            481    90.7     3.8    -7.5    93.0
Brandon Webb       R            111    89.7     3.9    -9.4    92.9
Julian Tavarez     R            296    90.6     3.9   -10.2    92.9
Aaron Cook         R             82    91.0     4.2    -7.2    93.0
Tim Hudson         R            465    90.8     4.5    -6.8    93.0
Jamey Wright       R             72    89.5     4.7    -8.0    93.0
Jeff Weaver        R            202    89.1     5.5   -10.8    92.8
Scott Downs        L            128    89.3     5.6    11.0    92.2
Jose Contreras     R            321    90.2     6.0    -7.7    93.0
Sergio Mitre       R            107    90.0     6.0    -9.2    92.6
Chad Paronto       R            142    90.0     6.1    -5.8    92.8
Jimmy Speigner     R             61    89.5     6.3    -6.0    92.6
Brad Thompson      R             56    90.0     6.5   -10.2    92.0
Miguel Batista     R            319    91.1     6.5    -6.7    93.0
Paul Maholm        L             50    88.5     6.6     6.5    90.6
Zach Duke          L             55    88.9     6.7    10.0    91.4
Gil Meche          R             60    91.2     6.8    -4.9    93.0
J.J. Putz          R             53    89.7     7.0    -6.2    93.0
Oscar Villarreal   R             93    90.0     7.0    -6.8    92.9
Chad Gaudin        R            437    90.6     7.1    -6.8    93.0
Carlos Zambrano    R            113    90.6     7.1    -5.8    93.0
Sean White         R            175    91.1     7.2    -8.2    92.9
Eric O'Flaherty    L            120    90.2     7.2     6.3    92.8
Jesse Litsch       R             62    89.1     7.2    -5.1    92.8
Kip Wells          R             82    90.6     7.3    -7.1    93.0
Vicente Padilla    R            397    90.9     7.4    -6.9    93.0
Robert Janssen     R            102    90.8     7.4    -3.3    93.0

You'll notice that the vertical movement column is still positive for all these pitchers. That's the case because the value is calculated relative to the movement of a theoretical reference pitch that is spinless but thrown in the same way as the pitch in question.

So then to get a feel for what these vertical measurements mean, we can compare them to some pitchers who do not throw a sinking fastball but who do throw their fastballs in the same velocity range. For example, Brad Penny has thrown 230 pitches in this velocity range with an average vertical movement of 12.1 inches. Brandon McCarthy has thrown 264 with a value of 12.1, Randy Wolf has thrown 456 at 11.1, and John Garland has 585 at 10.7. What this indicates is that a four-seamer thrown in the same range drops 10 to 12 inches less than the theoretical reference pitch and so our sinkerballers throw pitches that sink 6 to 9 inches more than that. This seems realistic and of course the list of pitchers near the top (Hernandez, Lowe, Halladay, Webb, Cook) are all the usual suspects.

It's also interesting to note which pitchers have more tail on their sinkers (a negative horizontal movement indicates tailing into a right-handed hitter). Derek Lowe, with his combination of sink and movement, makes it very difficult on opposing hitters.