Masterson as a ground ball guy is very lucky he didn’t have to play in front of Julio Lugo Nick Green and Mike Lowell all season last year.

But I have to like that he’ll beat last years numbers. Especially with the HUGELY improved boston defense — add that, a little better luck, and continued improvement from a guy who is just in his 3rd year in MLB, and yeah, I think I’ll add him to my team’s watchlist.

Had 8.3K/9 last year, crazy-high BABIP at .321, potential improvement in strand rate (69%), 1.7 GB/FB ratio, 15% LD rate, 4.04 FIP/4.05 xFIP, above average OSwing% with below average OContact%, and below average ZContact%.

Am I missing something, or is that a pretty good profile for a breakout?

Funny you should say that, I recently wrote on a phillies blog

“Moyer can prove that unless your name is Satchel Paige those should be knuckleballs your throwing at 50 years of age”

I agree but I guess you can’t teach and old dogs new pitches.

Just 1 more year of switching the channel every half inning when there’s 1 out, men on 2nd and 3rd and it’s 3-2 count…it either that or develop carpel tunnel syndrome from all the hand wringing.

A couple of thoughts.

It’s interesting that the guys on both these lists, with the exception of Lincecum, Rivera, and Sabathia, did not enjoy very much success last year. Are these are marginal players (or guys on the downhill side of their careers), who are trying something different to compete? It’d be interesting to see, through PitchFX history, if the delta in fastball % can be mapped to a career arc. And the three exceptions are interesting, as you can easily speculate very different reasons for each of them (CC? Always had a lead, so he attacked. Lince? Young guy, learning how to pitch rather than throw. Mo? No ideas…)

And secondly, I would really like to see some “foundation” work. I’d be happy to help out with some of the analysis, but I’d really like to establish things like radar gun consistency (between ballparks), a pitcher’s velocity variance, etc. Some base level analysis would be really cool in an effort to truly solidify future work done based on these data (it might be useful to have a “radar gun calibration” factor like we have park effects). Again, I don’t know what you could tease out of the existing data..

Again, though, this is awesome. And I just found the RSS feed for comments, so I’m more easily able to follow threads. One feature request, though: can you add a “email comments” feature, so I can receive comments in my inbox? I notice you’re using wordpress — the plugin I recommend for this feature is available at http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/subscribe-to-comments/

Thank you!