Blackburn’s Fastball Doesn’t Miss Many Bats
The Twins won two of three versus Detroit over the weekend to keep their play off hope alive and with four more games against Detroit next week they ‘control their own destiny’ as they say. Last night they picked up half a game by beating the White Sox. Nick Blackburn pitched a relatively non-Blackburnian game striking out six, a total he has reached or exceeded only four times previously in over thirty starts.
Blackburn strikes out only 4.18 batters per 9 innings, second lowest among all qualifying starting pitchers (John Lannan strikes out the fewest). He is one of only four qualifying starting pitchers to strike out fewer than a batter every other inning. But he is very good at limiting walks and thus second to only Joel Pineiro in lowest K+BB per 9 innings. So he is one of the most extreme pitch to contact pitchers. Here are his pitches.
The big reason for all the contact is that he throws his cutter and two-seam fastball 82% of the time. The contact rate on fastballs (two-seam, four-seam, cutter or splitter) is generally much higher than on changeups, curveballs or sliders. So right there you should expect much more contact.
But beyond that Blackburn’s two-seam fastball (which he throws 60% of the time) is particularly mad at missing bats. It has a whiff rate (misses per swings) of only 6%. The average fast ball is at 14%. It is probably one of the easiest pitches to hit in the game. Even Pineiro’s two-seam fastball has a higher whiff rate at 9%. Piniero gets fewer strikeouts in spite of his two-seam fastball having a higher whiff rate because he throws it even more often than Blackburn throws his and Blackburn makes up for it with his cutter which has a fairly good whiff rate of 20%. The problem is that Blackburn’s two-seam fastball is only ok at getting ground balls, 49% per ball in play, compared to the good groundball two-seamers which get upwards of 60% GB per BIP.
Blackburn is one of those interesting players existing at the extremes. He allows nearly the highest rate of contact possible by a pitcher who still holds a job in the major leagues.
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The Twinkies have four games against the Tigers next week, not three.
Twins, not Twinkies, thanks.
Opps, forgot to flip the calendar to October and just saw the three in September. Thanks I changed it in the article.
I’m curious about the correlation between missing bats entirely and inducing poor contact on batted balls. One would assume that they are related, but just how closely are these two things related?
This year, there is basically no correlation between WHIFF rate and GB%, -.108.
It seems to me Blackburn should be using his changeup more often. I don’t watch the Twins, so I don’t know how effective it is in terms of delivery/arm speed relative to his fastball, but just looking at their movement and speed it seems like it could be a good pitch for him. Good speed differential and similar movement (with less rise, which is good). Do any Twins fans (or others that have seen Blackburn a few times) have any thoughts on this? Not only could his changeup potentially be effective, but that may increase the effectiveness of his fastball.
On a side note, where can I find breakdowns for things like swing%, strike%, contact% and whatever else for individual pitches?
His curveball and Changeup are pretty decent, but he definately gets cutter and two seem happy. It is especially maddening to watch him pitch when the opposing team has him timed. It seems that when he gets hit he just keeps pumping fastballs and cutters into the zone, which usually spirals into big innings.
The data backs that up, he is throwing ALOT more FB this year at the expense of every other pitch. Low 90s with blah movement is not going to get you whiffs when you throw it >60% of the time.
Seems like something caused him to change his approach, compared to the previous 2 years.