Rates & Barrels - How to Become a Pitching Nerd

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Eno, Trevor and DVR discuss their paths into becoming pitching nerds while pulling back to discuss the baseline metrics they care about, and digging into a few of the newer tools and numbers they utilize to analyze pitchers.  Rundown 7:45 What Are the Basic Things You Like to Know About Pitchers? 13:33 Year-to-Year Correlations of Pitching Stats 18:47 DIPS Theory & Other Changes Over Time 29:37 The Rise of Deeper Arsenals 34:58 Looking at Changes in Pitch Mix Over Time 43:34 *Newer* Pitch Details to Consider: Vertical Break 53:12 An Example of Seam-Shifted Wake 58:54 A Few Other Tools From Baseball Savant Pages Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social Follow DVR on Bluesky: @dvr.bsky.social Follow Trevor on Bluesky: @iamtrevormay.bsky.social e-mail: [e-mail] Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Hosts: Derek VanRiper, Eno Sarris & Trevor May Producer: Brian Smith Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Robert Mays. The NFL playoffs are here, and we've got you covered on the Athletic Football Show. For wild card weekend all the way through Super Bowl 59, my co-host Derek Klassen and I will guide you through every game, matchup, and big time performance on the way to one team lifting the Lombardi Trophy in New Orleans. Catch the Athletic Football Show wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Thursday, January 9th. Derek Van Riper, you know, Sarah's Trevor May full house here with you today.

We've got a special episode. We're calling this how to become a pitching nerd. And I think there's like a biography element to this real quick that we should get into like Trevor when did you realize that you were a nerd about pitching? At what point in your life or in your career did it click you? Whoa, I'm I'm more into some granular detailed aspects of this than other people around me. And you were surrounded by pros. You were you were there right at what point did you know you were also a nerd?

Well, I've known my whole life that I was into nerdier, the nerdier side of things, but it was about what was available when it became really clear to me. My mom literally just gave this to me a few weeks ago, a big box full of a bunch of stuff I did in high school, just some of my high school stuff. There's a big binder and I kept every stat,

like what I could, I tried to remember everything that happened in the game, how many innings I threw, strikeouts, all this stuff. Of course, I probably embellished quite a few times. I used to keep my statistics since I was like 10, just because it was interesting. I just liked the aggregation. My wife calls it number go up. I love grinding things out.

So when I play video games and stuff, I play games that also are number go up. So, uh, so it started there, probably in high school, I realized I'm like, yeah, no one else keeps their stats. And this is an advantage. And then in pro ball, you know, I was always interested in like, we have video and we have like the box scores and stuff, but I was like, there's so many steps between correlation between like using this stuff. And then when advanced analytics happened, I started to get more used by teams and there was a room of nerds.

And I, uh, realized I was spending more time in teams and there was a room of nerds and I realized I was spending more time in there than I was in the locker room. That's when it was, I was, oh, I'm, this is the way that I can get an advantage or this is the way that I'm going to become the best version of myself. I got to use this strength or this natural like interest I have. So that's when I really needed to do it. But of course then I just overloaded myself and had to figure out how to use it right. But yeah, so two phases, high school and then probably was like 24, 25.

It's changed a bunch of times along the way, right? Like the stuff that you've been able to access readily has changed a few different times along the way. I realized that Trevor May was a pitching nerd when Max Scherzer was yelling at me about stuff plus, which was not even the first time that he yelled at me about stuff plus it was like the fourth or fifth time but it was the first time that another player like took part in the conversation and basically defended me a little bit so uh I really appreciated that yeah I remember that we We were lockers next to each other. For me, it was, you know, I think one of the things I was extremely lucky to grow up watching

Greg Maddox and Tom Glavin and John Smoltz and what was interesting about them and Steve Avery, actually, I thought that was important because the four of those guys, and Steve Avery doesn't get the love or anything, but the four of those guys pitch very differently. They're like maybe archetypes in the history of baseball. Tom Glavine is your kind of soft-tossing change-up command guy, and John Smoltz is your power four-seam slider guy, and then Greg Maddox is, you know, movement and command. And then Steve Avery was big curve ball, you know, with a little bit like the, you know, Barry Zutto's Adam Wainwrights of the world.

You know, I think if he'd had a longer career, we might, we might appreciate him more, but we had these four archetypes. And so growing up, I already had this like, which one is better? You know, that's something you spend a lot of your time as a kid with other kids discussing. And you know, anytime you're like playing stickball, whatever you get to be like, Oh, I'm what am I? Like, who am I? And it was, I was always like Gary Sheffield with the bat wag when

I was at the plate. And I was always John Swartz when I was on the mound. And so I had to kind of think about why I'd made those choices as a fan and I got to sit you know nearly behind home plate for you know for weird reasons and I got to see all the movement so that just really set me up and then when I was writing about fantasy it just it was obvious that pitching was my best foot forward. And that was where I was doing my best analysis. So but that I think early on, I realized that I cared about, you know, these things a little bit more and a little bit more detailed than some of the other kids my age. I started with some fruit snacks that were numbers and I was about five years old. Those were always the go-to fruit snacks for me. That was like the beginning of realizing I was a nerd

everybody else it what they wanted Flintstones or Power Rangers or whatever like they wanted cool stuff and I'm like not give me the numbers. I want I want numbers Yeah, I want to do math while I eat my fruit snacks I love the number go up though though because I had a pretty extensive card collection and I had like three binders and The first binder was like, you know know not a common but not a dollar and the second binder was everything over a dollar but not like over five dollars the third binder was sort of like five to ten and then they got a jewel case if it was over ten bucks and I conceded back at yeah I got the back end I would go through them and I'd move them.

The exact same thing. Move them from binder to binder like, oh, you moved into the big binder, you know, or like, you know, you open a card, you open a pack with the Beckett so that you can kind of just like go through it right away. And to this day, I spent most of not most of the lot of the break sorting through cards. It's a little bit more depressing these days because you can find a good card, but it has to be like the pink refractor with the mojo wave for it to be like, you know, really worthwhile. You know, just the regular base card is, you know, not worth anything.

Oh man, lugging the beckets around. I mean, I had a subscription, I think, at one point every month. What's up? What's down? What's that one dollar, five dollar threshold? Yeah, same same key numbers. But all right. So a lot of this comes back to fantasy analysis, just general player analysis, too. And thinking about things we see, we watch a game, things we hear for listening to a game.

And I think Trevor has an interesting job that started up this year being part of the Nerdcast where you have the challenge of presenting a lot of advanced stuff to people that maybe have never heard it before. Sometimes people that are lukewarm about hearing it, they're just there because that was the channel they flipped the game on and you've got to make it digestible. That's what we're going to try to do over the course of this show is talk about some of the things we really care about when we're analyzing players, got to make it digestible, right? So that's what we're going to try to do over the course of this show is talk about some of the things we really care about when we're analyzing players, try to break it down in a way that can make it

a little easier to get to if it's something you haven't done before or just something that's been challenging in the past. Right. So at the beginning, like, what do you want to know when you pull up a player's page? What information do you want to have? What are the basic things you think are important to know about a pitcher? And where do you like to go to even get that information with so many different options at your disposal now? You know, I just gravitate towards strikeout rate, you know, strikeout rate and strikeout minus walk rate is an incredibly powerful tool for all the stuff that we've come up since and you talk about in zone lift rates or stuff or all this stuff.

One of the most powerful predictors is just strikeout minus walk rate. And that's why you have people like General Manager of the Tigers, you know, you have him talking about controlling the zone being, you know, at the plate hitting and pitching being like basically the key to baseball. And, you know, I think in some ways he's right because, you know, at least that from a pitching standpoint, if you strike guys out and you don't walk them, that's the game. You know, that's pretty much it. And there's a lot of nuance we'll get into after this. But that's that's where I start. How about you, Trevor? What's the basic for you? Where do you where do you want to go

when you begin to put that profile together? Well, I want to say even the step even before what you're gonna look at, and for those of you at home, focus on having a good question first. I think that sometimes things get like, people go, is he good or bad? There's just too much nuance, you're gonna be bouncing around and going yes and no and yes and no if you don't narrow it down

a little bit more. And so the goal usually is to figure out which one of those archetypes that you know mentioned earlier that the guy is and then go from there based on what you know about what those guys usually do. And then the fun thing is when you find them doing things that outside of the scope of things with are like a hybrid or whatever. So I use the same similar I think the walk rate and the strikeout rate are a great place to start, sorry, not stop, because it's so representative of swing and miss versus not swing and miss.

Those are kind of two hallmarks of different kind of archetypes, though swing and miss has become, I think, more common and more guys have that as part of their, we don't have guys who strike out four per nine anymore. You just don't go to the big leagues if you do that. You can't do that anymore. You can't do a, you'd be like a gym caught or, or, you know, like it's just not, it doesn't exist. And, but you understand that our sinker ballers strike out,

or sinker baller like still strike out the guy relies heavily. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So K to walk percentage ratios are one. And then right after that, it would probably go to ground ball versus light ball. All right, so that you can then keep developing that archetype, which is attached to like the home run rate. So you're like, okay, you strike out a lot of guys, cool. But when you give up contact, are they home runs? And if the home run rates are, okay, we're cooking now. And now you're starting to build a good picture

and then you can start getting granular based on the archetype you just said. So like, that's kind of the process, but the walk and strikeout rates, like you can even use, I usually get a fairly good idea by just going like how many innings have you thrown, how many walks you have and how many strikes. You don't actually, I don't feel like I need to be exact with that because it can get kind of, you know, you want to see if there's something glaring there and if it's about average across the board, it doesn't really tell you much.

Then you get a little, go a little bit farther down. So that's, that's kind of how I try to approach it. And one thing that's just changed over time since the three of us got into baseball, she's 25 years ago now, stats per nine, like those are much less prevalent in the conversation now. We have K percentage and BB percentage. We have better ways to look at individual skills.

And I think you can still take away a good idea of, oh yeah, this guy does miss a lot of bats. Oh, this guy does walk too many guys or he doesn't walk a lot of guys. You can do that with the Ks per nine and walks per nine. But I think changing the denominator to batters face and having K percentage and walk percentage just gives you a more accurate snapshot.

You know, put together this board, just looking at some guys that have below average strikeouts per nine and above average strikeout percentages, right? So you can get a little bit tripped up just by looking at the wrong list. It's usually kind of in the middle. It's not like you're gonna be way off on guys,

but I do think this is a shift I've seen the last few years that I'm totally on board with because it's much more intuitive to me to just think about the percentage of total batters faced that you struck out, right? You see elite relievers run like a 40% K rate. That's easier to understand than 18 Ks per nine, especially for a guy that probably pitches one inning at a time. Right. I think the per nine, especially with pitchers, starting pitchers,

you know, pitching fewer innings themselves. It's the per nine thing kind of goes out the door a little bit. And then what you notice is there's a link between strikeouts, for nines and walk for nine, because if you look here, all these pitchers have really great walk rates. And what happens is if you have a bad walk rate, if you put a guy on, that's another chance to strike somebody out. Now, are you any better because you put that guy on and gave yourself another chance to strike out a guy in that inning?

No, not necessarily. So these pitchers actually can strike guys out on an average or better than average rate. It's just masked by the fact that they don't walk anybody and that gives them fewer chances to strike guys out. So it's not that any of these guys are real standouts, although Kirby and Burns are pretty good for strikeout rate. It's just that you might look at their canine and say, oh, these guys don't strike anybody out. And that's, I don't think that's the case either. So it's just a little bit more precise to use a strikeout rate, strikeout percentage rather than K per nine. The other broader application here,

we're trying to understand what players do well. A lot of times we're trying to make predictions, trying to figure out what's going to happen next. That's a huge part of our show. It's a huge part of playing fantasy baseball. So, you know, you put together some year to year correlations of a bunch of different pitching metrics and it's interesting and it's not really that surprising.

When you start to look at very granular skills, you see better, stronger year to year correlations than you do on results based metrics like ERA, for example. Yeah, and this is part of why I look beyond ERA, even to judge how good a player has been this year, because it's not a really good You know estimator of true talent if it's if it's this noisy year to year It's not really telling you that much and on the left what you'll find is ground ball rates fly ball rates things like stuff

Swinging strike rate strikeout rate. These are all really strong here to year meaning that they're giving you a lot of signal. And so this is a little bit of a, you know, when, when Trevor and I talk about going to ground ball rates and going to strikeout rates, this is why we do it because it's giving us more signal. It's telling us more about what's happening on the plate. You know, having behind the scenes, what's really, really happening. When you look at something like line drive rate, that is incredibly noisy. You could look at a player and say, oh, you know, in the first couple of months of 2024,

this guy has given up the lowest line drive rate in baseball. Well, this graph here tells you that that's not very predictive. You know, the stats with a higher correlation year to year are more predictive than ones with a lower. So line drive rate, batting average on balls and play, home run rate. That's noise. If you've got a player that suddenly has broken out, it seems, but it's just not giving up any home runs, it's just not likely they'll continue that. They'll go and regress to their career norms when it comes to home run rate. And so that's why this chart right here is a lot of the basis of the way I analyze baseball. I'm looking for things that are sticky year to year,

that are predictive, and tell us more about what's actually happening. And I want to avoid talking about the things that are not predictive. I love that, by the way, that chart so much, because for my whole career, my left on base percentage was always high. There was constantly like, oh, yeah,

he's done a really good job for five straight years, but he's gonna regress to the, no, it's not that core, it comes down to the way I kind of think about it, and that chart kind of displays this beautifully, is how many scenarios or how many situations that are encompassed in that statistic can be value outliers, meaning it could go from being really low value for you or high value for you. What's the range of that and how many options are there in that range that are indicative

by that stat? And when it comes down to ground ball percent, like you give up a ground ball, you can't give up a home run. Like that's not possible. Like, so that's not in the equation, which is the highest value thing a hitter can do against you. So once that's, it's going to correlate better with your success. If you don't give up a ton of fly balls, it just generally does. You're just not going to give up a lot of home runs if you're not giving up a lot of fly balls. But when you go to ERA, there's so many things that could, that

your defense could be terrible and your score could be an asshole. You could be on the road to get the road scoring at the home scoring, you know. Yeah, there's nothing you can do about these things. There's none of these things that are out of control. And a lot of like left on base has to do with how your infielders hold guys and how your catcher can throw and all this stuff that you don't have any control over. So it is fun to kind of look high level and say, Hey, is this telling could this tell me, tell me where else to look? That's kind of what I use those type of things for. Because if it's, if it's outrageously high, and there is some some bad luck when you never have bad luck, usually, then it points you to

whether or not the defense is bad or not. You can go find that as opposed to just being like, well, I don't know. And then moving on to the next thing. That's not the defense is bad or not. You can go find that as opposed to just being like, well, I don't know. And then moving on to the next thing. That's where the value is in those statistics. Yeah, I think the the large swath of batted balls in play don't necessarily get as much attention as they probably should. I remember when Babip was new as like a public facing stat. And I think there was this belief that, oh, Babip should be about the same.

Like the league Babip should be 300 or there's like a spot where it should be. It's like, no, of course not. The type of contact you allow is going to make a big difference and your defense is going to make a huge difference. And when you see extremes in either direction, that's when you dig deeper. OK, why is this pitcher running a 360 Babip? What was the career rate? Each pitcher's individual baseline, I think, was something that we kind of figured out

quickly was that we should be looking at how much are you off of your own established norm? And is that the result of your own skills loss or factors that are outside of your control? Right. So one thing that I think that can kind of like some, you know, a couple of things that you just said together in kind of a historical way is that we we've had these big, you know, sort of discoveries in in in Saber Metrics or whatever. And one of them was called dips theory, and that's defense independent pitching. And the idea is that basically the batting average on balls and play across baseball is around 300 every year. And a pitcher who has like a 240 one year is not any more likely to have a 240 again the next year on that batting average on balls

and play. They're more likely to progress to that mean that 300. And that sort of spawned this whole slew of stats. We did gain knowledge from that. There's something called fielding independent pitching that is actually more predictive than the ERA because why? It takes all balls and play out of it except for home runs, strikeouts and walks. And by focusing on those three things, it became more predictive than the ERA. And that was a great advancement. It's maybe not as important anymore because we've developed better things. And we also developed this understanding that, you know, there's a pitcher's own baseline

and that the more information we get about this single pitcher, the more we can say, okay, this guy, Tom Glavin, he has a low BABBIP because he throws a change up, he throws, he gets people swinging outside the zone, it's soft contact, he's a soft contact merchant. If we have somebody who looks like Tom Glavin and we have two months of him, we probably shouldn't anoint him Tom Glavin right away. You know? We should probably wait to get a little bit more information. Somebody like Corbin Burns throws a cutter a lot

and he has a low babbitt for his career, like a 270 or something. I think that, you know, given how long we've seen Corbin Burns be dominant this four full seasons we can start to believe that he can suppress balls and play given that his main fastball is this strong cutter and that's going to suppress balls and play that's going to suppress his bad bit. I'm a believer in you know a lower bad bit for him you know. I'm on a group chat with someone who told me he believes in it around 20% and he thinks

I believe in it around 70%. So there's always going to be nuance in these things. And one thing that I think there's this temptation when we find these new discoveries to be like, oh, this is true and it's true for everyone. And I don't care that Trevor May's left on base percentage was you know what it was for so long. It's 70% right every across the board every year so where I'm gonna predict him to have a 70% next year and I don't care what he's done before. I think that we should keep an open mind to like investigating pitchers a little bit on a

unique level because their mix, their skill set, what they put together is unique and they may prove to be an outlier. Now you should be a little skeptical at the beginning given this research that we found, but as they give you more and more information, the more you can believe in it, I think. Hey, it's Lauren Dragon from Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from the New York Times, and I test headphones. Sweat is actually conductive because of the saline content in it, so we basically make our own fake sweat and spray it over and over on these headphones

to see what happens to them over time. This is 85 dB of airplane noise. We're going to put on some noise-canceling headphones and see how well they actually block out the sound. Put them on the ground and kick them over there. Okay. Go. Are they broken?

No. I have 3,136 entries in my database. Kids, workout, running. Does it have a connector that's lightning or USB-C? What version of Bluetooth is it? Does it have FDX HD? We have ones that track your heart rate. At Wirecutter, we do the work so you don't have to. For independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world, come visit us at ny times dot

com slash wire cutter. We even have one that's solar powered. There's another way to kind of paint with a broad brush here though with the balls in play right there's ground balls and fly balls and I realized within fly balls there's a lot of different types of batted balls there. There's infield fly balls, there are line drives, there are just fly balls that go to the outfield, and even fly balls that go to the outfield are hit in very different ways. But you put together this chart looking at ground ball pitchers versus fly ball pitchers, and just the differences that we tend to see with strikeout rate in particular. That kind of jumps off the page.

Home run percentage, not a surprise. Fly ball pitchers give them more home runs than ground ball pitchers. That one kind of jumps off the page. Home run percentage not a surprise. Fly ball pitchers give them more home runs than come around ball pitchers. That one kind of explains itself. But do you also find that when you look at pitchers in buckets like this, you gravitate more toward outliers like the ground ball guy that also has the K rate like that's higher than expected, right?

Do you start to dig into the more unique aspects of pitchers that should fit into one of these groups but clearly don't? Well, I just think that some of my takeaway here is that we want pitchers to get up ground balls versus fly balls. But when you start grouping pitchers like this, and this is over the last three years if you look at the ground ball pitchers they are giving up stuff where other you know they're giving up whiffs because in order to get ground balls you pitch more at the bottom of the zone there are fewer whiffs at the bottom of the zone and so you have that that lower strikeout rate those are outs you know so the fly ball guys is saying well I'm gonna get you know they have a 25% strikeout rate versus the ground ball guys have a 21% strikeout rate fly ball guys are saying, well, I'm going to get, you know, they have a 25% strikeout rate versus the ground ball guys have a 21% strikeout rate. Fly ball guys are saying I want those outs.

And when you look at balls and play, you know, the sort of seeing eye grounder gets a hit a little bit more often than those lazy fly balls. So the fly ball batting average on balls and play is lower than the ground ball one. And you see that reflected in the pitchers where the fly ball batting average on balls and play is lower than the ground ball one and you see that reflected in the pitchers where the fly ball pitchers have a 270 bat around and the ground ball ones have a 300 as a group and so, you know when you get all the way down to like an ERA estimator like Sierra You might be surprised to find that they're not that far apart The top 10% in ground ball rate over the last three years among starters have a 3-8-5 Sierra, and the top 10%

among fly ball guys have a 3-9-8. If you're trying to play fantasy baseball and you're looking at this, you might take the fly ball guys because there's not that much of a difference, and you get the extra strikeouts, and strikeouts are a category. If you're a team that has a big park, like Oakland, you might gravitate towards the fly ball guys

because you say my park suppresses home runs and so I like all these other things. And then you might understand that like why Colorado throws their fastballs low in the zone when nobody else does. I think they're a little bit afraid of the home run. Cincinnati, New York, these are places where people throw more low fastballs, even LA. And some of that has to do with being afraid of how the park interacts with home run rates. So this just sort of tells you that these archetypes, as different as they may be, are

surprisingly similar in that when you become a ground ball guy, you give up some of the things. When you become a fly ball guy, you give up some of the things. When you become a fly ball guy, you give up some of that. You're trading homers for strikeouts. And it explains a lot of what happens, you know, in baseball. I think baseball has been trending more towards we want the strikeout guy. We'll give up the home runs if we get those strikeouts and so on. So this is just the last three years trying to look at what the difference is between ground ball guys and fly ball guys.

Yeah, Trevor, do you think the shift in the game has moved away from guys trying to be ground ball pitchers? Like generally, it's just not a thing. Like if it happens to work that way, if the stuff, the arsenal, the pitches a guy has, where he locates will work that way, or if the situations call for it, maybe there's a little bit of that to it as well.

But it just doesn't seem like this is something a lot of aspiring big leaguers want to do the way they did 10 plus years ago. Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons. And yes, I agree that it has gone to the wayside like the like the term. Just let them hit it or pick a contract, which I hate. I've always hated that term just because it feels like you're you are in my mind. I was always like relinquishing a little bit of competitiveness like it's inevitable

you're gonna hit it so like I'm already like kind of going to plan B from the beginning and I understand the value of it because when you're developing a picture you're trying to make it simple and you're trying to make guys not worry about too many things and some keep it simple stupid another thing that everyone says there's a lot of platitudes of baseball. And that works for a lot of people. Like I totally understand the reason it's gone to the wayside is the strikeout is the, the analytics movement, basically every big, uh, the thinker early as they all joined teams.

They would just say things like, what is the currency of baseball? We're trading in runs. So how do we prevent them? How we score them? Once it becomes an equation like that, how do you equal runs and how do you prevent runs? You try to look at where the highest like the no value situations are in a strikeout is very unlikely to score run to produce a run. It just is. It could in swings and misses. Sometimes that guy gets a base. But the babbitt on a strikeout is almost zero.

And the babbitt on a ball is basically zero. 300. You know, the more often we can get this, this not going to produce a run situation to happen, the better that makes a lot of sense. But then you get nuance from there. So I think we're seeing guys who start the sinkers coming back in a way and then we're thinking about it. Like I want to throw it in a place where I can get, get a swing and miss, but I probably won't happen as much.

But the next thing I want is something softly hit. And then we'll deal with it from there Then it becomes plan B again as opposed to being the first thing you're trying to do But one thing, you know said that I think is awesome is the way that it's trade-offs And it always kind of ends up like the game shifts a little bit year to year But one a strike a sinker guy or a ground ball guy versus a fly ball guy Doesn't really deviate in terms of overall value. Generally like one's not way more valuable than the other overall usually, but it's about

when you're deploying these people. So if you're coming out guy, second and third with one out in the sixth inning, you're pulling your, your, your starter to bring a guy who's a ground ball guy. You don't have a double play ground balls. Not ground ball is going to increase the chances that those two guys score if this guy can't go get a strikeout to get the two outs. That's a situation where you need a dude who you might be like, yeah, he might walk this guy.

It's just as likely to walk him or strike him out. But if he walks and face load it, then he gets a strikeout, doesn't matter. So he's more valuable in this moment than the other ones. You can't just stack your team with one type of guy. When he comes down to sinker guys or ground ball guys, starters can get away with stuff like that a little bit more. And then, so guy that did that,

especially in the last four or five years, was Scherzer. Scherzer was like, I'm okay flipping over a big curve ball to get a guy to roll over in the first, because I want to go deep into games. But if I need to turn into monster strikeout guy, I know when to do that. I can turn it on and turn it off. And those are the best starters, I think guys that can cruise and then guys can go like, uh, uh, Wheeler does it pretty

well. He can, he goes into, I need some strikeouts and he has the ability to do it, but he doesn't need to do it all the time. Cause at the end of the day, he wants to get as deep in the game as possible. That's his main, you're touching on something I think is really important now, which it doesn't actually take a really big sense of analytics or anything, is that the larger arsenals are more in vogue. We're seeing more cutters and more sinkers. We're seeing more fastballs. When I look at my rankings that are coming up, guys that seem to just be really solid and maybe sometimes outperform some of our expectations.

Wheeler is the god of this, you know, has six pitches, three fastballs, command of all of them. And the fastballs. Great. That's a great example. But there are other guys that have a lot of fastballs and are good that kind of do a little better than you might expect. Like Max Fried always seems to outproduce his product, his projections. And it's because he has these extra fastballs. Hunter Brown added a sinker and became more of a three fastball large mix guy. Aaron Nola added a cutter and has become more of

a three pitch three fastball guy. Sonny Gray has been aging pretty well three fastballs six pitches. Schwellenbach kind of came on the scene last year three fastballs six pitches. So a lot of these guys that you know that we like have multiple fastballs and they're working in what you're talking about. They're trying to do different things. There was a big signing, Justin Verlander to the Giants, one year 15 million. He'll come up again later. But one of the things that I want for him is to vary his fastball approach because he's

been doing, he was told when he came from Detroit to Houston, his fastball approach. Because he's been doing, he was told when he came from Detroit to Houston, your fastball has great spin, great ride, it plays at the top of the zone, throw at the top of the zone for more whiffs. And that led to a renaissance for Justin Verlander that created Cy Youngs and championships. And you know, that was great for him.

He's on the other end of his career. This is gonna be one of his last years. He had one of his worst seasons last year. He's still working on the playbook. I have a dominant fastball I'm gonna throw it high in the zone. What I want him to do is throw it low in the zone. Not a lot, not all the time. I want him to throw some fastball because what you see if you look at his slider it should be good. Stuff says it's good. It's an 87 mile an hour slider. We know that 87 mile an hour slider is supposed to be good. Like it should be a good slider,

but they're not chasing on it outside the zone anymore. And I think that's because they're like, man, I'm hungry for that high fastball. I like it now. It's 93, it doesn't have as much ride. I like that high fastball. And if I'm gonna be hungry for that high fastball that fat that slider outside the zone Don't look good to me anymore. What happens if you if I he throws some low fastballs now the hitter Takes it because he thinks it's a slider and they get up called strike and now oh now you got count leverage

Now oh wait now both those pitches are better both those pitches are better right and if you throw the low the low fastball like that's down your head and now you can't just sit high fastball there might be a low fastball it's going to make the slider better so i want him to become a little bit more nuanced in in what he's doing that's jumping ahead a couple steps but it's relevant to what we're talking about in terms of fastballs what's in vogue you know in terms of sinker ballers right now, we have Fromber Valdez and we have Logan Webb, Christopher Sanchez, you know, not a really long list. That's, those are the guys that come to mind.

Rangers, Rangers Suarez. Yeah, that's. And it technically Manaya, but he's throwing singers up, which is a whole different thing. So we're not going to get it. Yeah. We got into the two Seamer in great detail last year, like February, March or so. We're kind of going pitch by pitch. So if you want to hear a little bit about how Two Seamers have changed and where they're being thrown and why that works, there's a lot in that episode. Yeah, I think it's the last February. It's been a while, but there's another aspect to this.

Okay, so the core skills, the strikeout rates, the walk rates, the things we were talking about at the top of the show, you can get them lots of places. Fan graphs, baseball reference, almost anywhere that has baseball stats. Once you have the core skills in mind for a pitcher and you want to start looking at things like the pitches they throw, I feel like there's one place I always gravitate toward and it's baseball savant. And I think it's because they have a lot of good visualizations that you can dig into

when you want to go deeper, but even the real basic stuff, it's just easy to look at the player card and see here are four pitches, here are five pitches, here's the velocity on those pitches, here's how often they throw each of those pitches, and here's the league average velocity on each of those pitches, all just right there, top of the player card. And I find that to be kind of the best way to pair the core individual skills with the result sort of stuff that I'm looking at first.

Like, okay, so this is how they get there. This is the stuff that they're using to make this happen. So what do you guys look for when you're starting to break down a pitcher's arsenal, the core things? Number of pitches came up before, right? I mean, more is generally better, always better? Is there a time where more pitches is a bad thing? Like, maybe if the quality of those pitches is just awful,

it starts to work against you a little bit, but I have come to the point where changing what the hitter can rely on is such a huge part of it. Keeping them guessing probably adds a lot of value, even if those pitches are kind of average or even a tick below in many cases. But what else are you looking for when you're starting to analyze an arsenal on a player page? Well, I think one of the easiest things, you know,

we're often looking for like breakouts or, you know, this player has changed his performance and like, you know, you know, do I believe in it or not? And I think one of the easiest ways to, you know, see that as change in pitch mix, you know, like you said, you can't just look at number of pitches and say, that picture is good. Kyle Gibson has six pitches and Seth Lugo has six pitches

and Zach Wheeler has six pitches. That does not mean that they are the same. As much as I love Kyle, he's not Zach Wheeler. I think he would agree. And so one of the things I'd like to look at is change of pitches and change of mix. And what you'll see here is Garrett Crochet's pitch mix change. And when he first came into starting, he was throwing a four seamer and the second pitch that he threw the most often was the sweeper. And what he found was the sweeper righties were hitting it really well. And so you see over the course of the season, the rise of the cutter, that's the brown pitch.

And he was really dominant through the middle of the season, just being a fastball cutter guy because he has such a great fastball and Velo is another easy way to see this. He's great Velo. We can get into pitch shape later, but great Velo, great cutter. But if we were talking about next year, I almost find that last month or so to be really interesting as well, where Garrett Crochet brought in a sinker and then also brought the sweeper back and almost was a four pitch, I mean, pretty much was a four pitch pitcher for the last two or three starts of his, of his season there. And if you're looking to think like, what will Garrett Crochet do this year? I think he's going gonna look a little bit more like he did

in September when he had four pitches and was also, was dominant, but in a way that might be more useful for a full season because he has four pitches and become more of a starter. I think that pitch mix tells you a lot. So just looking at his pitch mix, looking at the pitches he trusts, looking at the pitches that are getting out,

will tell you how many pitches does he trust. And right now, four. And I think that's a good number. Yeah, our role is big thing. What pitches and what are the usages? First thing, it's also the first thing on the page too. So that's helpful. The big thing I want to do, especially again, it comes down to what question are we trying to answer? Are we trying to predict what this person's going to do? Are we trying to figure out how they've been performing versus the league? Which that one thing that Savant does so well is has all of those major categories all represented

with the red and the blue lines with where you rank in the league. So, you know, if you see a lot of red, it's usually a good thing. I think that's a pretty solid place to start. And if you don't see a lot of red, you can start to go look under the hood a little bit more. So I always want to know how those things have changed over time. I love the game to game too, because that takes me into their brain, into their mind, so that now if I am, for example, if

I'm watching a Garrett crochet start, you know, for the first time since May, and we're doing for example, the nerdcast on, you know, Sunday night baseball or something. That is really interesting stuff to know because it might change what he'll throw in different situations. And you can kind of talk about that shift in his mindset and where his confidence is.

You can see where it is, what his backs against the wall. Is he just gonna go to the best pitch he has or is he gonna do something else that may indicate his game plan changed a little bit, or they're sticking over the catcher or something, which is all very interesting kind of stories to tell. A couple other little things that I like to do as well is go check out the rankings in the league versus others and the run value of each pitch that's farther down the page.

I did this the other day with Charlie Morton. We're talking about him on SiriusM and his curve balls always is. His positive pitch run value. Always. It's always as high as value pitch, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can just go and throw curve balls. It usually tells you one, how good the curve ball, how well it's locating and how well it's moving, but also how well the other pitches are being used

because they're there to set it up. Like that's how curve balls work. With that knowledge, you can then start to say, moving forward with the Orioles, what was the biggest issues last year? For example, Charlie, a big thing for him was command. Command of his fast balls. It was just bad.

Like he just threw a lot of fours in the middle, threw a lot of cutters down the middle. Those are his two that he throws the most of the time. He wasn't locating those very well and that made his curve ball not get chased as much. And they got better as the year went on and that was shown in the statistics. So the last thing that I wanna make sure I've checked out

is also location and you can go see all the heat maps for where they throw all the pitches. I wanna see tight clusters, I don't wanna see pitches off all by themselves all over the place. That speaks to not very great command of that pitch. So the guys with the tightest clusters of most pitches tend to be able to throw them in the places they wanna throw them more often.

But also, it tells you where they're trying to throw them all the time. Corbin Burns is a great example. You check out his, all of his pitches are tightly clustered, all of them. And he tells you, he basically throws each pitch type in one spot and then expands from there. And when guys do that, that means they're pretty dialed in

with what they're doing. They're in a rinse and repeat situation if they're healthy. And those are the type of guys you want on your fantasy team because they're gonna come out and output every single week as long as they're pitching. And I think Corbin Rose is a pretty good example of that as well. So all of that kind of stuff gives you a top level,

I think of what they throw, how well they throw it to where they want, and what their go-to value pitch is going to be and how they set that up. You can get all that information from those. I do like the breakdown of number of times pitches are thrown against righties and lefties too, because you can just at a glance get a sense for how many pitches they actually have for hitters on each side of the plate. You might realize, oh, there's four pitches here, but it's two pitches against lefties, two against righties based on the typical pattern. So maybe that that arsenal is not as wide as you might think

just based on what those pitches are or when they throw them. You saw real growth from Clark Schmidt when, you know, he used to be kind of like two pitches for lefties and two pitches for righties, sinker sweeper, for righties, cutter curve for lefties. And he actually took a big step forward when he started throwing, you know, all four pitches to both sides. I think that was a big part of, of his growth last year. So I think that, you know, on the savant page, there's this part where it says move it and It is helpful that it's color-coded

But if you look at Garrett crochet's thing you might say oh his cutter has less drop than average His foreseam has less drop than average. Why are these great pitches? You have to remember Velo. I Mean he sits 97 from the left side as a starter So, you know, that's why I think it is important still to look at the run value. You look down at the run value, you see, oh, his four-seam fastball is one of the best in the big leagues this last year,

despite the fact that he doesn't have a great ride. So these things all go together. The one problem with run value is that it can be a little bit messy because it does involve the contributions of your teammates, you know. And, you know, my famous example is R.A. Dickie's fastball always had a great run value, even though he threw it 86 and be tempted to be like, well, maybe it had a great movement. No, no, no.

It's because he threw the knuckleball 85% of the time. And every time he threw the fastball, people were like, whoa, what's that? Your timing was completely thrown off. Right, so run value, I think is an okay place to kind of sanity check and check things out. But one of the reasons that we look at movement and one of the reasons we create or have stats like stuff plus

is because they give you a sense of how the release point, the VLO and the movement all interact. That's where we start getting into 201 I think a little bit because it's a little bit harder to do this stuff. It's harder for me to tell you. I can tell you a few things. A slider over 85 is probably good. If you have better than 20 inches vertical brake, and this is vertical brake without movement on Savant, if you have more than 20 inches of vertical brake, it's a good fastball. If you look at this list, there's not that many bad fastballs.

Tristan McKenzie's Velo really fell off and his command really fell off, but like Javier, Vesilla, Estrada, Pepio, Cortez, these are good fastballs. I'm going to have to throw you a wrinkle here. I put vertical release point on here because Alex Vesia throws 20 inches of vertical break from a foot lower, a foot plus lower than Justin Verlander. So just think about sort of the geometry of that where you're getting a short guy throwing a guy with great ride, throwing a pitch with great ride versus a tall guy throwing a pitch with great ride, you kind of expect it more from the tall guy.

And so even a guy like Pepio or Estrada throwing it from a foot lower than Verlander, it's less expected for the hitter. So this is where you start. You can kind of do this. This is a pretty easy search to do on savant where you just include vertical movement and release point as your output and you can start to see how different it is for Nick Pivetta to throw a pitch with great ride versus Christian Javier You know that foot difference is a big deal When you stand in the box against Nick Pivetta and you see this tall big guy with the with tall release point you expect more of that movement think of a better and you see this tall big guy with the with tall release point, you expect more of that movement.

So there's there's a tension between actual movement and sort of expected movement given that release point. I think movement and ride in particular something we've talked a lot about on this show, but I think this is an area, you know, since 201. It's where some people's heads start to spin a little bit. And like, OK, but why why do I care about this? Like, this seems like a bridge too far. If I can look at run value, if I can look at things that take

a better snapshot of the result, why do I need to know this? What can we learn by going more granular like this? In that context, so if we stay even in the release point context with the vert, you've got to first establish what the first statistic means. So vertical is by all, for all intents and purposes, define gravity or the perception that it's defined gravity. So if you have a high release point,

human beings, not just hitters, all human beings, we learn to account for objects falling because of gravity. We see it happen every day all the time. It's a natural thing that we instinct that we get. So when a guy throws a pitch that doesn't react to gravity as much as you saw that it should, you swing under it and you're hitting the bottom of the ball or missing a lot. And that's what ride, that's the value of ride going above bats. And once you know that you can go, okay,

what other elements would increase this effect? And that would be a low release point. Now, one other interesting thing that I would probably even layer on after, cause I've been, okay, lower, these guys got low release points. I was a guy, you know, mentioned that this was literally my bread and butter. I'm six foot five. I'd stood up really tall. And then when I threw, I dropped guys got low release points. I was a guy, you know mentioned that this was literally my bread and butter I'm six foot five I stood up really tall and when I threw I dropped down really low and I had a like a five and a half

Mine was lower than best he is and I am much taller than him So I started like verlander and I ended like vesia It's jarring because it's like that's not what you're supposed to look like you guys like you don't throw like that That I had a very long extension. It was always $95 in the league. Um, so I was also closer to you and my release point was low because my extension was a lot long because my arm, my arm angle wasn't low. It was just three quarters. It was pretty normal.

And so the way I got the low release was by being farther out with extension. Now some guys throw sidearm, right? That would give you a low release as well. And if you get ride from sidearm, that's a different kind of deception because it looks like the ball is supposed to run and it doesn't. I think a guy who does that, who has figured it out to his science, Josh Hader. He also throws his sinker that seam shifts into a four seam, which is another thing that's crazy.

But I think that to thrive that low of a release point, he has to do that in order to get right on his fastball. It wasn't on purpose, I think he's just always done that and it seems to work. So that's why his fastball swung a miss that like so much. So I would add extension on and then if I'm really getting granular, I would say horizontal release point to give me an angle or even, well they have arm angles now

so you can like add an arm angle to that as well and get an idea of where they are in their slot. All of those things would give me an angle or even with they have arm angles now. So you can like add an arm angle to that as well and get an idea of where they are in their slot. All of those things would give you an idea of how effective that ride will be. And the really interesting part about all of this, everything you just showed, uh, you know, is the guy with the highest release point, Justin Verlander, what you just showed tells us that throwing on the bottom of the zone would be smart because it looks like he's going to. Yeah you stand in the box and there's

the scouting support. So their eyes are up. So then bringing it down it's gonna do the opposite effect they're gonna think it's gonna go below the zone naturally and then it's gonna hit the bottom of the zone. If you could give him even an average thinker you know so that he just feels like I'm throwing something else down there you know I think that would be huge. Anything that could go below the zone that they have to respect will make that fastball be taken down there. I think the other part of the question is, you know, why do we care about this stuff? And I think to some extent it's because if you're looking at one or two starts and this is a little bit more fantasy, but I think it actually is really important in today's league

we're seeing more and more pitchers being used because of injury rates. And so it's more and more likely if you're a hitter stepping into the box or you're pitching coach dealing with a pitcher that you're dealing with a pitcher where you don't have an extensive track record and you're just like I've never seen this guy what am I looking for? And so let's say a guy comes out and either you're a fancy owner or you're a hitter or you're a pitching coach and you have one start of information on them. If you have one start of information on them, it probably is not like we just showed you. Don't look at his home run rate. It doesn't matter how many home runs he gave almost like he could have given up three and you and you be like, Oh, he's terrible. No, don't do that.

It could have just been his first start in the major leagues. And you know, maybe he struck out a guy, a bunch of guys, or maybe he didn't maybe he didn't was on the same page with the catcher, whatever, you know, even strikeout rate, these things are more powerful in the smallest samples than strikeout rate even in strikeout rates, the most powerful thing, you know, So when you are looking at somebody who doesn't have a long track record, I think it helps. So Jeremiah Estrada, you're saying, he has a 19 vert. That's great. So I'm looking at this other pitcher, Yukimatsu. He has a 19 inch vert. That must be great, right? Well, now bring in the VELO. Okay. Well, the VELO is a little different on these guys. And then why isn't Tristan McKenzie great? He, right? Well, now you bring in the VLO. Okay, well the VLO is a little different on these guys.

And then why isn't Tristan McKenzie great? He has it. Well, he's releasing it from almost a foot higher. So these are ways for us to get beyond the first level stats, which are very powerful. And the more you have to sample, the more you can look at K-B-B. And eventually, like in my example with Tom Glavin, if you have 15 years, you can look at K minus VB and eventually, like in my example with Tom Glavin, if you have 15 years, you can look at ERA. Well, and I do think this is where the pitching plus,

the stuff plus models that are out there, those give you, I think, a much more digestible sense of the characteristics of the pitch without having to get into the granular details of vert and release point, right? You get it back to one number within the arsenal. And I think that, that's like the entry point into this. And if you want to understand how the model works,

that's where you start digging into the very, very hyper-specific stuff, but it's there. That's the best part about this. It's all out there now. This stuff wasn't available 10 years ago. When the stuff plus revision comes out, which will be in, you know, soon, I promise, the one thing that we have changed is that 100 equals average for a pitcher. And so we've refocused this so that it's a little bit more and there's like larger ranges so you can kind of get a sense, a better sense of like where

pitchers stand on the equivalent to other pitchers versus it used to be kind of the average pitch was 100. We kind of wanted to make it more pitcher based. So, you know, when you when you talk about vertical movement, the average vertical movement is around 16, I think. So, you know, above 16 is good, but you got to watch that vertical release point. The average vertical release point, I think, is around five point eight, five point nine, maybe around six, actually. You got to think about that. The average strikeout rate when we're looking at that is up to 22%. So it's got to be over 22% if you want to have a good strikeout rate. It's a good idea to have an idea of what's average,

what's elite when you're looking at each of these stats. And then you can get into some real cool stuff. We've included this in Stuff Plus, but I wanted to point this out. You were talking about Josh Hader recently. I can't think of two more opposite pitchers than Josh Hader and Clay Holmes. So I just wanted to show this as an example of seam-shifted wake where Josh Hader's fastball, if you look at the seams right now, they're not gathering anywhere. Look at the Clay Holmes seam. Let's put that up for one second, more second. Look at the bottom left side of Clay Holmes' ball.

There's a seam there all the time. And that seam is gathering there, and that's pulling the ball down. And so Clay Holmes is really high up in the air, and he throws this ball where the seams are gathering on the bottom, and it just dives. Hayter throws a ball where the seams don't gather anywhere bottom and it just dives. Hader throws a ball where the seams don't gather anywhere. It's just cutting through space and so it does not dive at all.

But Hader's throwing from this release point that's way out there, sidearm, and so you as a batter, you expect this is going to dive, this is going to fall, this is going to have a lot of sideways movement and then he throws this thing that doesn't because it kind of cuts through the air. Clay Holmes is tall, he throws from a high release point, you expect that ball to have ride like Justin Verlander and instead he uses the seams on that ball to gather on the bottom and pull it down and give you this tremendous sinker. And that is modern baseball right there. So it's a little bit hard to kind of see that

happening but I think one of the things you just want to be aware of when you're looking at pitchers and you're looking at a small sample pitcher is just deviation from average. You just want them to not be average. You want them to either have plus VELO or plus ride or plus ride relative or weird release point or maybe six pitches. Schwalbebach, I'm big on Schwalbebach because he does a lot of these things. He has, you know, impressive ride given a weird like kind of a sidearm slot. He used to be a shortstop, so he throws from like way out there and he has impressive ride and he has multiple pitches, fastball, cutter, slider, curve, change, like you know he has

a large arsenal, good command, you know these are the things that I'm looking for in various degrees. You can't always get, I don't have a you know a ton of examples, oh what's the next Spencer Schwann box? Like oh you know oh I've got five other examples, it's not it's not that easy, but you know that's what you're looking for in a breakout and if you were looking at Spencer Schwalbeinbach. It's like, oh, you know, oh, I've got five other examples. It's not, it's not that easy, but you know, that's what you're looking for in a breakout. And if you were looking at Spencer Schwalbeinbach early on, when he, when he'd given you, when he'd given you just a little bit of information, you could have seen with the stuff plus with the number of pitches,

with the VELO, with the release point, if you'd fallen along, you would have picked up Spencer Schwalbeach after one start because of these various ideas. It's interesting too, if you look at a bunch of the numbers we've talked about over the course of this show, Sierra, look at a leaderboard like that. Schwalmbach was 15th among pitchers with 100 innings pitched last year in Sierra. So he pops on that leaderboard, but he also pops in terms of K percentage. He's over 25%. He doesn't walk a lot of guys under five percent, like every little thing you could look at. He's good or very good at, which is it's it's surprising to

me because so much of the conversation around who is going to step up in that rotation was around A.J. Smith, Schaver and Hurston Waldrop this time last year. And Schwellenbach comes in and just does all the things people were expecting those two guys to do, if not more. Yeah, interesting. I think what was the conversation with Schwellenbach earlier this past year, you know, like about how he was talking about, like how he's really conscious of his horizontal movement on his foreseam, because he knows that the more it moves,

the less his ride is effective. Yeah, he cuts his foreseam because he knows that the more it moves the less his ride is effective. Yeah he cuts his foreseam to reduce the horizontal movement so that it doesn't look like a kind of a side army sinkery type pitch. So it doesn't run like a side army run fastball supposed to run and so they're trying to get hitters see two things. They think they see lots of things but they see two main things. One is hand position at release. And then the second kind of B one B decision is the spin. So the adjustment of the swing is the spin. I'm a swing. I'm not going to swing. Am I going to hold back? Am I going to try to flick it and whatever?

And for a guy like, uh, both of the guys we just showed actually, Clay Holmes and Hader, you see the ham position. It's weird. And then you see the spin of the pitch and both of those spins don't make sense for how they move either. So it's like both decisions they're making are confusing to hitters and it's hard to do hard to get comfortable with unless you see them a bunch of times.

And then we're both relievers, not clay anymore. And that's why starting pitchers tend to give up more contact than relievers generally percentage wise at the end of the day you're just they're trying to move those pitches off of like you said it out of that like average range into elite one way or the other if you're if you're like Maranta you're trying to make it so bad that it's good with your slider trying to make it go the other way something that no one ever sees because they see it as breaking normally and it's going backwards there There is such thing as so bad that it's good.

That's a real thing in baseball. I don't think it really exists in any other sport. Uh, it's just uniqueness. And, and I think that's what the pitch design revolution has done now. And that's why pitching is so good. I think overall is guys are refining those things quickly and then just putting them in games. I just wanted to maybe come up with a couple of pictures that kind of maybe satisfy some of these equations.

One idea that I had is Osvaldo Bido with the A's. He only has average vertical break on his fastball. However, if you look at his Zavant page, you realize he has a 30 degree arm angle. So by having average vertical break from a kind of side army slot and even his picture on savant like his profile picture, you can see his arm slot and you'd be kind of surprised to have average vertical movement from that arm slot. Given his arm slot you would expect more sinkery movement. He does have good sideways movement. Maybe if he cut the ball more like Schwalbach he could have a little

bit more success but already he's shown some success you know in terms of stuff plus the numbers are there. He's got above average stuff on he's got four or five pitches. He's got multiple fastballs. He throws a four seam and a cutter and a sinker slider and change. He's got four or five pitches. He's got multiple fastballs. He throws a four seam and a cutter and a sinker, slider and change. He's had some success. The run value on four of his five pitches was positive last year. So there's a lot of things that are popping for him.

Luis Castillo, Luis Al Castillo, the one who just got traded to the, to the guardians. Yeah. You see the picture there of, of Bido. Like that's, that's a kind of a side army slot right there to have average vertical movement out of that is pretty good. And you can see the little radar thing there with that movement profile, um, you know, it kind of gives you a sense.

Yeah. Rater scope gives you a sense of, you know, it's also nice sometimes to see a pitcher occupy like lots of space within that radar scope. Like, you know, have different movement profiles of different pitches that take up space in there that the batter is going to be looking at those four pitches and trying to discern between them and they're going in different directions. And Castillo has two breaking balls and two fastballs. And I think has a similar amount of, you know, does he pass the, the one question that I'm not sure about

and want to go down a little bit is does he pass the command test? So as you can see, we're talking about, you know, Trevor was talking about the tightness of the clusters. That would be an example of that. So multiple red dots, not good. Force seems not super tight, but it's okay-ish, but that change up is a scatter shot.

The cutter is all over the place. And even the slider, there's a lot of middle, middle sliders there. So, you know, you want him to step forward a little bit with the command. The nice thing is command is a little bit iffier in terms of being sticking season to season. So, you know, this of being sticky season to season.

So you know, this is another thing you can do. Oh, here's a guy who checks all the boxes without command. Let me watch a couple spring starts. You know, let me see if he's dotting the ball better this year. And so, you know, that's I think that's a that's a sticky wicket for at least Castillo to his, his command. So, you know, those are two guys that don't have much track record and sort of focusing too hard on ERA or especially don't look at home run rates or K minus BB even, you know, you might be missing, you know, they have the parts to maybe put it together this year.

So we're looking at the baseball savant page if you're just listening to the podcast version of the show and I want to ask you guys about the visualization on the right side, the movement profiles. Ideally, do you want to see multiple pitches clustered together? Like you can see it's yellow and brown dots for the slider and the cutter that are kind of close together for the movement profile. And then you've got the green and orange and the red stuff, the four seamer, slider, and sinker that are all a little closer together.

Do you want combinations of pitches that look similar to the hitter? Is that something that kind of stands out as good? Like if you saw four pitches and they were all scattered all over the place and nothing resembled anything else, wouldn't that make the pitches a little more predictable in the eyes of the hitter? You want them close, but not too close. You have the idea of a bridge pitch, right? So you want like a lot of of real estate being covered by pitches,

but you don't necessarily want a lot of a lot of overlap from pitch to pitch as much. So that's kind of the best of both worlds. It's a balance. Scoob will occupy more space. Throw up Wheeler, too. Yeah, I get you. Look at Wheeler here. Beautiful. Scoobles like that's looking how much. Throw up Wheeler too. Yeah, I'll get you a little look at Wheeler here. Beautiful. Scoobles like that's looking how much look at Wheeler, dude. Wheeler's great. And see how they all kind of seem to like, it's almost like they're moving. Yeah, they're connected. Yeah, they're connected. He connects them, but they're not

overlapping. Because that a lot of that a lot of teams like look and see you overlap with these two pitches a lot. Let's not throw one, let's make one really good one. His slider and his cutter were like the same thing, and they were like, just throw the harder one. At the very end, if you wanna just be frustrated, you just check out Justin Steele's crazy variation. Yeah, well, there's always an outlier. He says five pitches are one pitch.

So it's the other way, he's just so confusing because you can't tell what he's throwing. Oh, they're splitting it up a little bit more now. Oh they are. Yeah. Long conversation I had with Mike Petrioli. He's like, dude, this guy is killing me. He's killing me. I don't know what to do. Because he says he throws, he's like, I throw fastball slider. And you're like, well, you throw curveball sliders. There's kind of two sliders in there. Look at his, if you zoom in a little bit on the yellow, I think that's a slider. Like there's two groupings there. And that's, that's, that can be interesting too,

is to like, that shows to me like feel, I guess, you know, sometimes can be shown and like, oh, these are two distinct clusters within one pitch type. That gives me a sense that like, there's also a righty lefty split there, I believe. We looked at it. Yeah, we got into Justin Steele as someone that seems to have an advanced ability to manipulate his pitches.

Like, he doesn't have six different pitches necessarily, but he can throw three variations of each thing he throws. So then it kind of turns into six, unless there's a day where he doesn't have the feel and then he's down to like one pitch, which is... And sometimes he doesn't. Yeah. That becomes the downside of Justin Steele. And one thing that I would also suggest is even though that these sliders

on Savant are so visually appealing and, you know, great. And it's a little bit like sometimes people use the baseball reference player comparison to like end arguments, you know, skeins right across the board. Yes, he's great. There's something blue on there. What is it? Oh, extension. And you look at Wheeler, you know, it's red mostly across the board, but his barrel rate is low and his ground ball rate is low.

And so they're blue. And when people use the baseball reference thing where there's like 10 categories and oh, this player wins in six or seven of them, so he's better. Not all those categories are equally important. If you're looking at these sliders and you see that oh Zach Wheeler's great except for look at his barrel rate. Maybe he's not as good as you think. No, barrel rate is one of the least stickiest things on there.

If you think about home run rate, barrel rate is linked to home run rate. And the other one that's a little bit low ground ball rate. Oh, maybe he's maybe not that great of a pitcher. He doesn't have any ground balls. Well, we looked earlier and he's just decided to make a handoff or he'd rather have the strikeouts than get a ton of ground balls. He can get ground balls. So I wouldn't look at his sliders and say, oh, well,

you know, he gives up too many barrels so Zach Wheeler's not good. That said, if they're all red though, if you're 90th percentile on every single thing for hitters and pitchers, you can be very confident that they're the one of the best. Like just look at Bobby White Jr.'s thing. It's, you're like, he's incredible. Like it's very clear he's incredible. Yeah, he chases a little too much Trevor so I think we should dial it back a little. Look at those those top six. I'm like, well, you're the best at all the stuff. So I'm going to give it to you.

And then the aggregate ones at the top, they do do a pretty good job of putting the more important stuff at the top. Yeah. And that's why when we were looking at the movement profiles, I just thought this is an interesting choice by Savant to put this chart at the top of the page. It seems like it's important to the people there presenting the data to have that information there. And it's relatively new. It's not something they've had there for more than what, a few months now. I think maybe maybe it was there all season, but I don't think it was there prior to that.

So I think it's something a lot of people are just starting to see and use for the first time as they kind of go through their offseason analysis. And if you're looking at Wheeler, he brings a lot of the things together that we've been talking about, which is his arm angle is 25 degrees. It's even lower than Bido's, right? And so what you have to do mentally is you're looking at this shot, this chart,

and it says that, oh, Wheeler's fastball moves like MLB average because there's this little shading behind it. And it says, oh, it moves like MLB average. You have to remember, A, Zach Wheeler throws really hard. B, he throws from a 25 degree arm angle, which is on the same chart. And so he's throwing sidearm and getting average vertical movement on a really hard fastball that he can pump up to 99. So, you know, even when the pitch looks like it's in average territory

and like, oh, Zach Wheeler, average movement, not so great. Well, given his arm slot, given his VELO, it is great. So they are putting a lot of the right information there. The hardest part about analyzing pitching, I think, is that you still have to kind of, you know, put it together. You still have to kind of like look at a few things and be like, oh, wait, well, given his arm slot and given the V lo you know like you kind of It's it's not easy to put one number in front you if you want one number Just use K minus BB, and you'll probably be right 90% of the time, but you know Use those two and then just forget everything else that we were just talking about

You'll at least survive. You'll survive in your fantasy leagues and you'll you won't be a total doofus. I think that's a that's how I live most of my life, actually. Just try not to be a totally. I mean, if you're looking at a pitcher who's giving you one start, it's like you go to go to these places and you can be ahead of the league. Right. Because I do think there are people that get tripped by small sample size results. And this is a great example of why you can, or how you can get around that and make a better

decision than other people in your league or other people that you're watching the game with. We're gonna go. Nice long episode today. A lot of news coming up on Friday. I think every time we talk about the Dodgers, they make a move which makes the things we said about the Dodgers completely useless like 20 minutes later. So we spared ourselves from Dodgers, they make a move which makes the things we said about the Dodgers completely useless like 20 minutes later so we spared ourselves from Dodgers talk today. We'll have that for you on Friday. You can find us on Blue Sky, you can join our discord with the link in the show description so that's gonna do it but this episode of Rates and Barrels we're back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening.