Congratulations to Zack Greinke not only for his Cy Young season, but his historically great season. For us here at FanGraphs, it is especially nice for a stat-loving guy to win.

Greinke throws four- and two-seam fastballs, a change, a curve and a slider. A couple days ago, Harry Pavlidis checked out his curve, and here I am going to look at his slider.

It is nothing short of amazing. On a total runs saved level, it was second only to Brett Anderson’s slider, which I profiled earlier. But Anderson throws his more often, so on a per slider basis, Greinke’s was even better.

Anderson’s slider was successful because it induced a ton of grounders (66%) and weak contact (slugging on contact of .435), but it got a below average number of whiffs (25% compared to 29% average for sliders in 2009). Greinke’s slider succeeded in the exact opposite manner. It gave up an above average slugging on contact (.502 compared to an average of .485), but gets tons and tons of whiffs (almost 45% of swings against his slider did not make contact). In fact no starter’s slider got more whiffs and only a handful of relievers’ sliders did.

+--------------------+-------+
|          Slider Whiff Rate |
+--------------------+-------+
| Mike Wuertz        | 0.503 |
| Brad Lidge         | 0.467 |
| Luke Gregerson     | 0.455 |
| Zack Greinke       | 0.447 |
| Jorge de la Rosa   | 0.430 |
+--------------------+-------+

Wuertz, of course, has an amazing slider, Lidge does, too, even in a down year, and Gregerson is surpinsingly unhittalbe. Then there is Greinke, the first starting pitcher on the list. He was the best pitcher of this year and one of the top performers of the past decade, and a huge part of it was his unhittable slider.

Joel Pineiro is a guy who got a lot of press this season because of his drastic shift from an ok pitch-to-contact, slight ground ball pitcher to an amazing tiny-BB-rate, extreme ground ball pitcher. Now that Pineiro is a free agent, it is incumbent on teams examine the roots of this change as they evaluate him.

First, looking at his BB rate, here is his career history.

He has always been above average at limiting walks but, last year, entered the “good” range and, this year, dropped even farther to 1.14 BB/9, the lowest rate for a starting pitcher. He also had the lowest walk per batter faced, 3.2%.

At first blush the per-pitch data does not back up this extraordinary control. His Zone% is just 52.5%, which is good, but is the lowest rate of his career and only 14th best in the majors. How can this good, but not great, Zone% lead to the best walk rate in the majors?

The answer lies in his 87.7% contact rate, the highest of his career and third highest in the majors. Since he rarely misses bats, his at-bats just don’t go long enough for him to walk many batters. This is sort of the opposite of what I noticed with Scutaro and Castillo, who take strikes in hopes of extending the at-bat long enough to get a walk. Pineiro’s pitches are so hittable that at-bats rarely last long enough to reach four balls even if they aren’t in the zone at the same rate Cliff Lee or Johan Santana. On the other hand, this hittableness resulted in his 4.42 K/9 rate, third worst in the game.

So Pinerio is an extreme pitch-to-contact pitcher, but if you are going to give up a ton of balls in play, you want to do it the way he does. He led the league by a fair margin in ground balls per ball in play, which results in more double plays and fewer extra base hits. That was the second big change for Pineiro. Red is LDs, blue FBs and green GBs.

Over the past couple years, 2006 to 2008, he had a ground ball rate of 48% — good, not extraordinary — but in 2009 it jumped over 60%. Obviously this was the result of his development of and increased use of a sinker or two-seam fastball. Here are his pitch use break downs in 2007 through 2009 (the years we have the pitchf/x data, which I used to classify his pitches).

+--------------------+------+------+------+
|                    | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
+--------------------+------+------+------+
| Four-Seam Fastball | 0.54 | 0.36 | 0.11 |
| Two-Seam Fastball  | 0.03 | 0.23 | 0.59 |
| Slider             | 0.16 | 0.20 | 0.12 |
| Curve              | 0.16 | 0.09 | 0.09 |
| Changeup           | 0.11 | 0.12 | 0.09 |
+--------------------+------+------+------+

That two-seam fastball he is using so much more often has a 68% ground ball rate and a 91% contact rate. Thus it is the big reason he is so hittable, which plays a role in the decrease in walks, and the big reason he got so many ground balls this year.

As I wrote before, Pineiro will regress in 2010 and very likely not perform as well. This season was about the best you can expect from a pitcher who strikes out less than one batter every two innings. But assuming he keeps throwing that sinker so often, he will limit walks, get tons ground balls and be a solid pitcher.

Earlier in the day, RJ took a look at David Wright’s drop in power. Although a number of Mets lost power in 2009 (most likely as a result of the move to Citi Field), Wright saw the biggest decline. In addition, Wright showed little difference between his home and away ISO, suggesting that the drop was not entirely the result of playing at Citi.

Wright’s drop in power intrigued me as well. In addition to this power drop, another striking trend was that his strikeout rate, which had averaged 19% previous to 2009, jumped to 26%. The fact that he still took a healthy number of walks and hit for his absurd .400 BABIP kept his overall performance with the bat quite good (.368), though down for his career average of .391. Here I am going to look at that increase in strikeouts and drop in power on a per-pitch basis with the pitchf/x data.

His increase in strikeouts was driven completely by his performance against RHPs. Below is his strike out rate by pitcher handedness (green is average, red RHP and blue LHP).

I am sure there are many interesting things to examine here. As a first step, I found that his contact rate against RHPs dropped from 82% in 2008 and 2007 (when I have the per-pitch data from pitchf/x) to 79% in 2009. This is one of those seemingly small changes, which magnified over the entire season, has a large effect. Just as I looked at the contact rate by location for Scutaro last week, I do that for Wright here, breaking it up by year.

Previously, Wright had a large sweet spot mid-height and middle-in, where he made contact over 95% of the time. This region has shrunk drastically and moved further down and in. Previously, he made contact with pitches over 87% of the time throughout maybe half of the zone, down and away. Again this zone shifted even further down and away and got smaller. Overall, it seems like he is making poorer contact on pitches in the middle of and away half of the zone, as well as pitches higher in the zone.

His power was down against both RHPs and LHPs. Again here there are many ways one could look at this, but one of the more striking patterns I found was how his ISO varied with horizontal pitch location.

Wright’s power peaks middle-in, like most hitters. In 2009, it was down throughout the strike zone, but particularly on pitches in the middle and outside of the plate. Put together, in 2009 Wright lost the most power and contact on pitches from middle-in to the outside edge of the plate.

As RJ noted, most likely Wright will rebound next year. The question is how much of this was drop in true talent and how much just flukey bad luck.

One of the more intriguing free agents, to me, is Marco Scutaro. After years of solidly below-average production, he was traded to the Jays and in 2008 had a good year last year (WAR 2.7) and then busted out this year with a WAR of 4.5 (making him one of the top 35 position players).

The big change came at the plate. Prior to this year, he had always been a below-average offensive player (negative wRAA every year), but this year he posted a wOBA of .354 over 680 PAs to provide 14 runs above average at the plate. Doing that while playing average defense at short will result in huge value, as seen by his 4.5 WAR.

The increase in offensive value came, largely, from an increased walk rate, 13.6%, a career high for him and in the top 25 of all of baseball. He coupled that with a low strikeout rate; he was one of the few players in the game to have more walks than strikeouts. This led to a jump in his OBP, and thus offensive value.

A big drop in his swing rate and increase in his contact rate caused to the increase in walks. He was the second best at not swinging at pitches out of the zone (12.3%), had the third lowest overall swing rate (34.5%, behind only Bobby Abreu and Luis Castillo), and he tied Castillo for the highest contact percentage (93.3%). His offensive game is very similar to Castillo’s, which I described in this post.

Here is what it looks like to swing at almost nothing. I mapped out his swing probability by pitch location and then drew the contour line where it switches from greater than 50% to less than 50%. So he is more likely than not to swing at pitches inside the contour line, and less likely than not to swing at those outside. I broke it up based on the number of strikes and, for the zero-strike case, also plotted the 25% contour. I plotted Scutaro’s contours and the average for all right handed batters.

When there are zero strikes Scutaro’s 50% contour is non-existent. On average he takes a pitch even if it is right down the middle when he has no strikes. Generally, he swings at fewer pitches out of the zone, but he is also taking lots of pitches in the zone compared to average. By swinging, Scutaro has a chance to end the at-bat; instead, he will take pitches in hopes of continuing the at-bat and getting enough balls to earn a walk. He will take some strikes, but that is ok, because once he gets two strikes, his contact skills are so good he will rarely strike out swinging.

Here are the same graphs as above but for contact rate, and the contours are for the 90% contact rate. So on pitches inside the contour Scutaro has a greater than 90% contact rate.

Scutaro’s are, not surprisingly, much larger than average, and they get bigger as the number of strikes increases. So he is able to swing defensively at two strikes and rarely miss a pitch. This means he can take pitches freely up to that point, hope they are balls to get a walk, but even if they are strikes, he will be ok.

As I noted, Scutaro’s approach is very simliar to Castillo’s. The difference is that Scutaro hit only 37% of his balls in play on the ground compared to 59% for Castillo. So when Scutaro puts the ball in play, he actually has some chance at extra base hits (ISO of .127 compared to Castillo’s .043). Scutaro has Castillo’s excellent plate discipline and contact skills, coupled with at least a modicum of power, making him a solidly above average hitter.

Scutaro is due for some serious regression to his offensive level, as is anyone who posts 2400 PAs at wOBA of .311 and then 680 at .354. But I think that, because the change is supported by the per-pitch level data, which is not immune from regression itself, we can temper that regression somewhat.

Scutaro can play average defense at second or slightly below average at short, is 34 coming off far and away a career year at the plate, and is a type A free agent. It will be interesting to see what kind of deal he gets.

Tim Wakefield renegotiated his perpetual team option deal and instead will have a guaranteed two-year 5 million dollar contact, which he signed on Monday. Wakefield will turn 44 in the middle of next year and has 189 wins. The deal gives him a solid shot at 200 wins for his career. Additionally, 175 of those wins have come with the Sox, so he also has a chance at becoming the franchise leader in wins. Right now, Roger Clemens and Cy Young are tied with 192 wins.

I think it is a treat for all baseball fans that we can continue to watch Wakefield pitch, and pitchf/x analysts seem to love looking at the knuckle ball. Wakefield throws his knuckler about 85% of the time, and mixes in a fastball 10% of the time and a curve 5% of the time.

As you can see. his curve and fastball move in a similar manner to most. The fastball “rises” about ten inches and moves in to RHBs, while the curve drops ten inches and tails away from RHBs. His fastball averages 72 mph. making it far and away the slowest fastball in the game. I showed in a previous article that he uses it sort of like an anti-changeup. It is about 8 mph faster than his knuckleball, and its success is tied to its speed difference from the preceding knuckleball.

His curveball averages 59 mph, making it the game’s slowest pitch.

But the important thing here is the knuckleball, which has no consistent movement. It does not have a neatly defined area in spin deflection space like his curve or his fastball or almost all other pitches do. That is the key to its success; the batter doesn’t know how the pitch is going to move (neither does the catcher for that matter). John Walsh showed that the success of each pitch is tied to how much it moves. Those with little spin deflection (little movement) are hit often and hit hard. While those at the edge with more movement are whiffed at more and, when hit, for poorer contact.

Josh Kalk followed that up by showing that Wakefield’s knuckleballs have a greater “spread” in their movement than those of other pitchers who have recently tried the knuckbleball, like Josh Banks, Charlie Zink and Charlie Haeger, which is why Wakefield is the most successful.

I am a huge fan of the knuckleball, generally, and Wakefield, specifically. I hope that he can pick up those eighteen wins, so he will have over 200 and Red Sox franchise record.

I was poking around the pitch type leader boards and noticed an interesting fact: Trevor Hoffman had the best fastball of all qualified relievers in 2009. His 85mph pitch beat out the likes of Phil Hughes’s and David Aardsma’s, which were almost 10 mph faster.

When he re-signed with the Brewers I noted that he has, over the course of his career, been able to maintain a HR/FB well below the 10% expected value. Playing in Petco for a big part of his career no doubt helped, but beyond that it seems like Hoffman has the ability to depress his HR/FB, which runs counter to some of the prevailing ideas about a pitcher’s ability to control his balls in play.

These two facts, the fact that he had the best fastball of 2009 and his historic ability to depress, inspired me to look at Hoffman’s pitchf/x numbers in a little more depth. Let me say that this analysis just scratches the surface of what makes Hoffman so great. His changeup is devastating and I am sure plays a big role in his HR prevention and probably makes his fastball better. In addition, his fastball has a lot of “rise,” which plays a big role in his high IFF%. But I am going to focus on HR prevention with his fastball, and specifically HR prevention against LHBs.

A lot of attributes determine if a pitch is going to be hit for a HR, but one of the most important is its location. Obviously the height of the pitch plays a big role, but here I am going to look at the horizontal location of the pitch. Here is how HR/FB varies for LHBs against all pitchers (not just Hoffman).

So pitches middle-in are hit for HRs the most often. Now let’s look at where Hoffman locates his fastball. Gold is Hoffman and gray the average four-seam fastball to a LHB.

Hoffman’s distribution is much narrower than average. He has been very good at locating his pitch in the same horizontal area with little spread. This should not be surprising: the fastball is just 85 mph, so for him to be successful, he needs that pinpoint command. And he puts the pitch about as far away as he can and still be in the strike zone. That is where LHBs have the least power.

I usually just display the 2-foot strike zone that John Walsh described, but in this graph I add the dotted line for the specific strike zone to LHBs. The zone is called differently to LHBs, with the outside and inside edge shifted away. That makes Hoffman’s pitch locations even better. He pitches more to the extreme outside where umpires often call pitches 14 or so inches from the center of the plate strikes against LHBs.

As I said, there is a lot going on and this just scratches the surface, but Hoffman’s ability to locate his fastball very well on the outside quarter of the plate to LHBs, I think, plays a huge role in his abnormally low HR/FB rate.

Congratulations to the 2009 World Series Champion New York Yankees. They were clearly the best team in the league during the regular season and dispatched the Twins, Angles and Phillies with minimal drama to take the World Series. In the process, many of Joe Girardi’s decisions have been questioned here and elsewhere, but one that has gotten near universal support (outside of Minnesota, Los Angeles and Philadelphia) was his heavy use of Mariano Rivera to get six outs an appearance and in non-save situations. Rivera’s performance justified that decision, as he gave up just one run on 10 hits over 16 innings.

It is easy to concoct a narrative of Rivera as Superman against whom there is no chance a run will be scored. MGL neatly dealt with this narrative.

For that matter, I don’t buy into the Rivera post-season mystique either.  He is a great reliever, regular or post-season.  That is why he has had such phenomenal success in the post-season – because he is a great pitcher!  However, there is no such thing as “magic” for any player.  There is nothing a player can do about the “Lady Luck” regardless of how good they are.  Mariano does not throw every pitch exactly where he wants to and he does not strike every batter out.  Sooner or later he is going to implode as any pitcher can on any given day, even when he has his best “stuff” (he seems to have the same stuff every outing).  One bad pitch, one bad call by an umpire, one batted ball that does not get caught or falls into the right spot, one batter that happens up square up a pitch, etc.

I like this viewpoint. Rivera is a great pitcher, so we should not be surprised when he has an amazing run of 16 innings. But that does not mean that he can will himself to pitch 16 one-run innings whenever he chooses. So in this post, when I look back at his amazing performance, I don’t want it to sound like I think this was inevitable and there was no way he could have given up any runs. Rather, I am just looking back and seeing how it happened.

Using the same method I used in the Lee post, I am going to look at those innings for a pitch location point of view. Pitches are color coded, those swung at full color and taken faded, strikes encircled, outs with triangles and hits exed. Full color pitches with no markings were fouled off.

As I have said before, the amazing thing about Rivera is how he can location his cutter on either edge and have few end up in the heart. Against LHBs he went all cutter and mostly pitched inside. The graph is a little busy, but you can see the few times he did go outside or hit the fat of the plate he got a good number of called strikes (faded for taken and encircled for strikes), so it looks like batters were looking inside. On those inside pitches he got tons of fouls and outs, but fewer swinging strikes than I would expect.

Again you see the bimodal distribution of pitches either along the inside edge or outside edge. Against RHBs he mixes in his fastball. Batters swung at it more often than his cutter and made contact at a good rate, but they were fouls or outs. With the cutter he got lots of whiffs up-and-in, called strikes down-and-in, and got more swings and contact, again mostly outs or foul balls, away.

Anyway that you look at it, another sixteen incredible innings in the career of the best relief pitcher ever.

Tonight Pedro Martinez takes the mound again for the Phllies. Dave C noted before the series that Martinez is still a solid pitcher, but very prone to giving up the long ball. That is just what we saw in Game 2: he got 8 Ks to just 2 BB over 6 innings, but gave up two solo home runs. That is what we have seen with Pedro over the past couple years: very good at limiting walks, solid strikeouts, but horrid ground ball numbers leading to lots of HRs.

To look at this tendency of solid K/BB ratio and bad GB% I am going to take a look at a couple of his pitches. Here is the breakdown of what he throws to RHBs and LHBs.

+-----------+-------+-------+
|           |  vRHB |  vLHB |
+-----------+-------+-------+
| Four-Seam |  0.43 |  0.28 |
| Two-Seam  |  0.15 |  0.26 |
| Cutter    |  0.13 |  0.10 |
| Curve     |  0.16 |  0.12 |
| Changeup  |  0.13 |  0.24 |
+-----------+-------+-------+

Against RHBs he favors his four-seam fastball, which is an extreme flyball pitch, getting just 27% ground balls. Where he locates it in the zone is a big reason. Here is the height and horizontal locations for the pitch compared to the average four-seam.


It seems that in exchange for this height, which results in all those fly balls, he is able to hit the outside edge of the zone better than most pitchers and is able to keep the pitch out of the heart of the plate

Against LHBs he mixes in his two-seam fastball more often, and this pitch shows a very interesting pattern. Here I show the horizontal location of the two pitches to LHBs for Martinez and average. The four-seam is orange and two-seam blue and Pedro’s pitches are in the full color and average in the faded.. Since there are four different lines the graph is a little cluttered.

With his four-seam fastball, just like we saw against RHBs, he is better than average at locating the pitch on the outside half of the plate and avoiding the inside half. But with his two-seam, it looks like most of the time he goes for the outside, but then some times the inside. This is an interesting bimodal distribution I have only seen before with Mariano Rivera. It looks like Martinez will at times go inside against LHBs with his two-seam fastball. This ability to keep a pitch out of the heart of the zone while hitting both edges of the plate with the same pitch type seems to me to be quite rare.

Last night’s Phillies win closed the book on Cliff Lee’s amazing playoff performance, unless he comes back on Thursday out of the pen on two days rest. A couple weeks ago, Marc looked at the prospects the Phillies gave up to get Lee, but after Lee’s dominating playoff performance these guys are afterthoughts for Phillies fans.

Lee has pitched in five games over three series and the Phillies have won each of those five games.

+-------+-----+----+----+----+----+----+
|       |  IP |  H |  R | HR | BB |  K |
+-------+-----+----+----+----+----+----+
|   NYA |   7 |  7 |  5 |  0 |  3 |  3 |
| @ NYA |   9 |  6 |  1 |  0 |  0 | 10 |
|   LAN |   8 |  3 |  0 |  0 |  0 | 10 |
| @ COL | 7.1 |  5 |  3 |  0 |  3 |  5 |
|   COL |   9 |  6 |  1 |  0 |  0 |  5 |
| Total |40.1 | 27 | 10 |  0 |  6 | 33 |
+-------+-----+----+----+----+----+----+

He pitched at least 7 innings in each game (and completed two of them). Overall, it works out to 40 innings of 1.56 ERA, 5 K/BB, 0 HR postseason baseball.

Dave C. noted after Lee’s first game against the Yankees that the Fox broadcast team was drooling over his curve, but his changeup was more impressive. Here I give a visual representation of this fact. I plotted the location of these two pitches over the course of the playoffs. As I often do, the full color dots represent pitches swung at and faded ones those taken. I encircle strikes (taken strikes are encircled faded dots, whiffs encircled full color), put triangles around balls in play that were outs, and Xs on top of hits. Solid color pitches with nothing around them were fouled off.

You can see that Lee is actually fairly comfortable mixing in his changeups to LHBs and got a nice number of called strikes on the outside edge of the plate. Overall, lefties only got one hit against his change and curve over the course of the playoffs.

Against RHBs his change is a huge part of his repertoire and he pounds it away and mostly up. Batters swung at it a lot, but didn’t have much luck mostly making outs or fouling it off. He got a fair number of called strikes on his change right down the middle of the plate.

The Phillies got just what they wanted in Lee with a mid-season trade. In the regular season he helped them keep their place comfortably atop the NL East, and now in the playoffs he has pitched in five of their wins (including their only two World Series wins), giving them 40 impressive, and bullpen-preserving, innings.

One interesting match-up in the upcoming World Series is all of the great left handed Phillies hitters against a Yankees’ rotation that features two solid left handed pitchers, CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte. The Phillies will face a lefty starter in at least half of the World Series games no matter if the Yankees go with a three or four man rotation or how many games the series goes.

The biggest issue for the Phillies is Ryan Howard, who is a very bad hitter against LHPs.

On the splits page, you can see that the biggest difference is in his ISO and K rate. On the other hand, in recent years, the difference in his walk rate against LHP and RHP has decreased. Looking at a pitch-by-pitch basis he takes more called strikes against LHPs than RHPs (13% of pitches versus 11% of pitches). His whiff rate increases from 28% against RHPs to 38% (Mark Reynolds territory) against LHPs. Here is how his whiff rate varies by horizontal pitch location:

Interestingly, he whiffs less on inside pitches from LHPs than RHPs. Next, let’s check out his slugging on balls in play:

Here you see a big difference. Against RHPs he maintains high power across most of the plate (it peaks in the middle of the plate, not surprisingly). But against LHPs his power is relegated to the middle-away, and it falls off sharply inside.

Putting the graphs together explains his overall weakness against LHPs. On inside pitches, he doesn’t whiff that often, but has little power. On the outer portion of the plate, he can hit for some power, but he whiffs at a huge rate.

If you project Howard as roughly a .450 wOBA hitter versus RHBs and roughly a .300 wOBA hitter against LHPs that works out to a 0.13 run difference per at-bat. That is over half a run every four at-bats, an enormous difference and significant cause for concern for the Phillies in the games they face Sabathia and Pettitte.