The fastest fastball in baseball is pretty easy to measure. As is the slowest curveball, and so on.
But the best fastball? That’s not so easy and it gets even more difficult to discern with the variety of secondary pitches thrown by today’s major leaguers.
That’s where sabermetric pitch values come in. Fangraphs.com captures each particular pitch thrown by a particular pitcher and quantifies it as better or worse than average based on the runs it allows.
It’s calculated in the same way as Win Probability Added (WPA), meaning it measures the expected run value based on every count.
When Mike Trout takes a first-pitch fastball for a ball with no outs and no one on base, for example, it increases the Angels’ chances of scoring by .02 of a run. If he swings and misses at a fastball for strike three in the same situation, it’ll decrease their chances by .09 of a run.
Add that up, and it’s not a perfect system. There are other factors in each at-bat that are impossible measure. But it allows a worthwhile look into something we’d be rather clueless about otherwise.
This way, we can see Angels pitchers are responsible for three of the six worst fastballs in the majors, among pitchers with at least 50 innings in 2013, with Joe Blanton taking the cake at 28.9 runs below average. Jason Vargas (20.1 runs below average) and Tommy Hanson (16.7 runs below) are the others.
And we can see two Angels throw some of the least effective cutters in the game. Only ex-Angel Dan Haren has had less success with his cutter than Jerome Williams (minus-8.2 runs) and C.J. Wilson (minus-7.5) this season.
It works the other way, too. Pitch values also show Josh Hamilton was the worst hitter of sliders in the major leagues this season — by a pretty large margin.
He was 12.3 runs below average against the 377 sliders he had seen entering Friday, the ninth-worst mark in the past decade.
What can we do with this information? We can’t say for certain that Hamilton will always be a bad hitter of sliders, or anything like that. But we can boil down a lot of struggles in 2013 to that pitch, ascertaining it’ll be a (stated or unstated) focus of his over the offseason to better his approach against it.
We can also say Blanton should throw fewer fastballs and more sliders, curves and changes (minus-3.2 runs among them) if he plans on returning to a major league rotation anytime soon.
But no cutters because those were even worse than fastballs on a per-pitch basis this season.
These pitch values give us a window into a particular player’s successes — or failures.
Contact the writer: pmoura@ocregister.com
