Comments on: Relative Velocities

By: MrLomez

MrLomez — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:30:47 +0000

A corollary to this phenomenon is when a fire-balling reliever will come in to spell a soft-tosser, and the announcers will speculate how hard it must be for the batters to adjust. Like maybe David Aardsma relieves Wakefield, or in my neck of the woods this was a common refrain when Robby Nenn (gob bless him) would take over after Kirk Reuter or Mark Gardner or someone would go 8 strong.

Is there any way to look at large velocity differences between consecutive pitchers to see if a similar effect occurs? Like is David Aardsma in fact more effective when he relieves Tim Wakefield? I’m not totally sure how you would go about this.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:24:57 +0000

I can tell you that despite Marcum’s lack of velocity difference between the change/fastball, his change up just drops out of nowhere. He keeps the same arm angle/speed so it looks like his fastball, but it drops at the last second and also goes down and to the right. So for a lefty it’ll start off in the middle of the plate, and then drop down very quickly to the right.

So not only is it a little bit slower than the fastball, but when the hitters about to swing on it, it’s a lot lower (and farther away/inside depending on whether it’s a lefty/right) than where they expect it to be and they just swing over it.

What also helps Marcum a bit is he throws everything – Fastball, cutter, curve, slider, change up etc. – so the hitter has to be prepared to hit any one of those pitchers. So another thing to look at might be how many pitches they throw, in addition to the % of change ups thrown.

By: Eric Seidman

Eric Seidman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:12:14 +0000

Sky, sounds like a John Walsh article, maybe his runs/100 metric. From an intuitive standpoint I would expect movement and location relative to the preceding pitch, or even context of the sequence to add to the devastating nature.

By: Sky

Sky — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:05:53 +0000

I vaguely remember an article over the off-season about a similar topic. It might have been by Joe P. Sheehan or Mike Fast or Josh Kalk or Pizza Cutter or (more likely) someone I can’t think of. Anyway, most of the article broke down individual pitches (by specific pitchers) using PITCHf/x and pbp data, and presented their linear weights. For example, every time Johan Santana through a change-up, it resulted in an average net change of -.03 runs or something like that. Then the author picked out the most effective changeups. Surprisingly, they weren’t on the list of the slowest relative to that pitcher’s fastball. The were about 8-10 MPH slower and all had similar movement. Very interesting stuff. Sorry I don’t have a link.

By: Tom Au

Tom Au — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:44:59 +0000

Maybe sequencing and location are very important, even with fastballs, and speed doesn’t matter all that much. In that case, baseball “intelligence” and maturity may go at a premium.

By: Eric Seidman

Eric Seidman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:01:42 +0000

Exactly, though at the major league level I would tend to think the pitchers are better at masking the pitch moreso than each level of competition prior. So when we’re talking about say a group of 10 pitchers all very adept at masking their changeup, its usage in sequencing and location becomes very important as well.

Ultimately, all of these aspects are likely ahead of the relative speed dropoff, which is why I honestly don’t expect to find any strong correlation between it and success.

By: David Appelman

David Appelman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:57:16 +0000

I’d like to throw out there that deception at least appears to be a big part of a changeup’s success. This was talked about ad nauseam a couple years ago for Santana and how when he throws his changeup it actually looks like he’s throwing a fastball and not (of course) some other pitch.

This is quite similar to serving in tennis. Pete Sampras did not have the fastest serve (thought it was pretty fast), but his serve was so deceptive since his toss was always the same, the motions he went through were always the same, yet you couldn’t tell where it was going or what type of spin he was going to put on the ball.

Difference in changeup vs fastball speed becomes fairly meaningless if you know a changeup is coming and my guess would be the best changeup is a properly disguised changeup.

By: Eric Seidman

Eric Seidman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:42:07 +0000

That could be due to a number of things. Perhaps the movement on his changeup is ridiculous compared to his fastball so it’s not a slower version of the heater but rather a trickier pitch to deduce. Or it could be how he uses it. If I recall correctly, Marcum is one of only 3-4 pitchers to throw 5 different pitches at least 10% of the time.

By: melted

melted — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:34:10 +0000

What’s interesting is that Marcum is widely regarded as having a filthy changeup (as evidenced in his results thus far this year), and yet his dropoff is one of the worst.

By: Eric Seidman

Eric Seidman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:20:30 +0000

Scappy, the difficult thing is that all pitches are somewhat tied together, and I’ve had this problem before in determining how to investigate which types of certain pitches are the most effective.

The results are going to be different if he throws 5 straight changeups as opposed to FA, FA, CH, FA, CH, strictly from what the batter is seeing. Consider the car examples, driving towards the person. You’ll have a MUCH tougher time gauging the speed if you see FA, FA, CH, FA, CH, then five straight changeups.

There are also different kinds of changeups. Perhaps Matt Cain is able to succeed because his changeup has significant movement compared to his fastball which overcomes the relatively small velocity dropoff.

I agree that relative velocity is probably not the best way to determine the best changeups, however it is likely one of the key components.