Roy Halladay Throwing Tons of Cutters
Yesterday Roy Halladay continued the excellent start to his 2011 season, striking out 14 batters — tied for a career best — and allowing a single run over 8.2 innings. Five starts into the season Halladay leads the league in WAR and is second in xFIP and FIP. Halladay, 33, is continuing a trend started in 2004 throwing more cutters and fewer two-seam fastballs. Early in the season he is throwing the most cutters (47%) and fewest two-seam fastballs (26%) of his career.
Halladay has always thrown his cutter more often to left-handed than right-handed batters, and it is no different this year as he has thrown it 58% of the time to left-handed batters. His command with the pitch has been other-worldly:
He has thrown 163 cutters, and nearly all of them in a rectangle about two feet high and three feet wide. That is just crazy. The tight vertical spread is particularly incredible.
So far in 2011 Halladay has struck out over a batter an inning, much higher than any full season of his career. A big part of that is surely small sample size fluctuations, but it could also be that he has traded traded two-seam fastballs (5% whiff rate for Halladay over his career) for cutters (10%). If he continues to throw so many cutters he could have a career high in strikeouts, though probably not a strikeout an inning. So far it hasn’t affected his ground-ball rate, but one would think it would go down, since his two-seamers have a ground-ball rate of 63% compared to just 46% for his cutters.
Halladay, even with years and years of dominance, continues to tweak his game. He added a cutter in 2004 and now throws it nearly every other pitch, and last year adjusted the grip on his changeup and has thrown it much more often in the past two years. These kind of adjustments keep the best pitcher of the past decade dominant into the beginning of this one.
Roy Halladay is awesome. I don’t think he could possibly get awesomer.
of course he can. he just did it again. i would have said the same earlier in his career, then he would tweak the change. so i say he can’t get better now! and then he does this. i am continually surprised by his continuous improvement. it’s really incredible to see a guy at the top of the game still have a drive to be even better.
Best pitcher in the game right now. He’s a Hall of Famer in his peak years. All you can do is just sit back and enjoy it.
He could. By playing for any team other than the Phillies.
zing!
Ah yes, if only Roy Halladay were in Yankee pinstripes, how awesome he would be.
CUTTERED
SO CUTTERED
That change up was devastating yesterday. Some times it’s merely very good, but when it’s at its best, it almost appears to hit a wall at 55 feet while simultaneously taking a hard right turn.
Previously, he has blamed his cutter for some forearm soreness earlier in his career (IIRC). He would throw it less than other pitches simply because it increased strain on his arm more than his other pitches. Maybe he is over that issue now, allowing him to throw it as much as he’d like.
Another story I like is where he learned his cutter: from Mariano Rivera himself, during Rivera’s annual All Star Game cutter clinic. I am glad Doc is the one to have caught onto it.
Is it the cutter that bothered his arm or the slider – which then caused him to switch to a cutter.
That link to “best pitcher of the past decade” is awesome. I didn’t know you could do that in the stats section, and such a simple thing proves your statement so easily!
Min innings to 700, sort by FIP and you see Tim Lincecum was the king after he was called up:
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=700&type=8&season=2010&month=0&season1=2001&ind=
Mitch Kramer is pretty good but lets see how he is doing at 2000 IP.
Roy Halladay is like the universe expanding. Whereas we think of the universe expanding into a further space, it is, in fact space itself which must expand to accommodate the existence of the universe. Halladay’s improvement can only be seen in retrospect because the act of his becoming better created a new value of best.
Chew on that for a while.
flavorless!
Was at the game yesterday…was in awe of him. One other thing I noticed about Halladay is that he seemed to work much faster than the average pitcher. Does anyone have data on that?
Yeah we do have those data. From the pitchf/x data we know the amount of time spent between pitches. It is called pace and can be found on the pitchf/x page for each pitcher. Here is the post introducing it. It doesn’t show up in the leader boards. But it does look like Halladay is much faster than average.
Since 2004-5 he’s been a fast worker as it helps keep him in his rhythm plus he usually pitches to contact which also speeds the game up.
Roy’s starts are usually 2 1/2 hours long.
Fastest MLB game I’ve ever watched was a Roy vs Mark Buehrle game. Completed in under 2 hours IIRC.
I can’t find Cliff Lee on that list of best in decade. Is it me?
Must be something funny about how ‘Qualified Only’ is defined. Switch it to ‘All Players’ and Lee shows up 24th with 30 WAR.
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=n&type=8&season=2010&month=0&season1=2001&ind=0
He hasn’t been good all that long. He’s really only been an elite pitcher for maybe the last 3-4 seasons.
A quick look at his career stats disproves this rather easily. He has been elite since 2002.
I don’t see why every pitcher doesn’t throw a cutter.
You can throw it about the same velocity as a four seamer, control it about the same, and it moves toward the hands of an opposite handed batter (which they don’t like). Combine that with the change and he can pitch effectively to both sides of the plate as well as up and down in the zone.
As soon as a young pitchers hands are big enough they should start working on a change (any variety) and cutter (c-grip fastball). That gives you a pitch that moves and an offspeed pitch that are relatively easy to control and easy on the arm.
Really to throw a cutter all you do from a 2-seam grip is slide your index finger over to your middle finger. Curveball-grip fastball. There’s also no giveaway at release point.
Roy Halladay does so many things well, it’s ridiculous.
That is the exact same thing I have been preaching for several years, every high school pitcher should develop a change and cutter if they want to minimize the damage to their arms until they are fully mature. Save the slider and other hard breaking stuff for later.
Out of curiosity, try to come up with one thing he does not do well. He’s even bunting better this year.
small talk on gameday
He sucks at being “effectively wild”.