Back to player cards

The first thing listed is the player's name, the last team he has played a game for, and what hand he throws with. Only players with a minimum of 100 pitches while PITCHf/x was on are listed. Be a little careful looking at the numbers below as some of them have very small statistics. Also, to try to give you a true representation of what a pitcher throws I am showing each pitch like it was thrown at sea level at standard temperature (59 degrees). If I didn't do this pitches thrown in very warm weather or at Coors would break up to 25% less and you would end up with even more confusing blobs to look at.

The first table labeled Pitch Averages shows what type of pitches the pitcher throws, how each pitch moves, the initial speed of the pitch, how often he throws the pitch, and how often he throws it against right/left handed batters. Here, break represents how much the ball moved in a certain direction compared to a ball thrown without spin. Negative x is towards a right handed batter and negative z is down.

The next table labeled Pitch Type by Count is a breakdown of what the pitcher throws depending on the count. Because many counts already have very low statistics I am not going to further break that down to left and right handed batters.

The plots follow and they visually show each pitch. The first plot shows the break in x and z of the ball. Again, if the ball was thrown without spin it would land at the origin on this plot. The next two plots show the break versus the speed of the pitch. The last plot shows the release point for each pitch. Sometimes pitchers have a slightly different release point for a curve ball than their fastball. This might be tipping their pitch to batters. If that is happening you can see it here. Also, you can tell if the pitcher is throwing over the top, at 3/4, sidearm, or even underhand. Some pitchers have multiple arm angles and some will only throw a certain pitch from a lower arm angle. This plot is where to look for that.