April 16, 2021
With Statcast replacing their Trackman (radar-based) cameras with the new Hawkeye (optical-based) system in 2020, what we’re now able to see on the field has taken another giant leap forward. What was once inferred is now being observed and those observations have led to ground-breaking work by Barton Smith, Driveline Baseball, and others in fully parsing the forces in play when it comes to pitch movement.
I highly recommend the above readings (and a host of others) for a more in-depth explanation but here are some cliff notes for those new to the concept of seam-shifted wakes:
Every baseball spins in a certain direction, spinning around a certain axis, resulting in a certain movement. The old method of determining spin direction was to use the movement measured by Trackman and work backward to
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In last week’s Instagram Live with Brennen Davis, Brett had me ask the top prospect what the best pitch was that he faced at the Alternate Training Site. He offered two (6:50 mark): the slider that has raised Adbert Alzolay’s floor and ceiling, and Jason Adam’s changeup.
I might have guessed the Alzolay one, but the Adam answer took me by surprise, and led me down quite a wormhole. And in doing so, has me wondering if we’re sleeping a bit on Adam’s ceiling as a late-inning reliever.
Before Brennen’s answer, I’d have answered that the breaking ball was Adam’s best pitch, a 3,000-rpm slurve that yielded an absolutely ridiculous 69.2 whiff% in 2020 (Brooks Baseball separates these into two, a slider and curve, which I think is correct, but they serve similar functions). And in 2019, when Adam was with the Toronto Blue Jays, he had the most success with his four seam fastball that combined elite spin and mid 90s velocity. And yet Brennen’s telling us that the best i
January 29, 2021
Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and FanGraphs author Ben Clemens break down the Marcus Semien, Andrelton Simmons, and Tommy La Stella signings, the Steven Matz trade, and Masahiro Tanaka’s decision to return to NPB’s Rakuten Eagles (with digressions about Japan’s tradition of awarding the uniform number 18 to aces and the greatness of Hiroki Kuroda) before explaining what the internet-driven inflation of GameStop stock has to do with the Mets, why Billy Beane isn’t leaving the A’s after all, and why teams are so intent on treating the competitive balance tax threshold as a salary cap. Then (57:32) they’re joined by Dr. Barton Smith, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Utah State University, to discuss how the Hawk-Eye component of MLB’s Statcast system is enabling new breakthroughs in pitch design, the concepts of seam-shifted wake and spin mirroring, which pitchers and teams are on the cutting edge, why some earlier analysts were wrong a
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