TravJ14

The move on Cease's changeup isn't particularly exciting at all, but if he can throw it for strikes to throw off the hitters' balance, I'm all for it. Changeup in green below. #bluejays

Dylan Cease's changeup has a small sample size, but it is currently the best pitch in baseball (min 3 pitches). The location is a little all over the place, but so far it's generated 7 whiffs on 8 swings. #mlb #baseball #bluejays

Framber Valdez's changeup has generated a freaky little amount of whiffs so far this year, with 7.5% (2nd lowest is 18.2). Despite this, he has not allowed a lot of damage, .238 xwOBACON, and his changeup has been the 3rd per-pitch changeup so far this year.

Despite the rocky start, Eury Perez has shown a lot of promise. 5 above-average pitches (although 4 are just slightly) with above-average whiff rate, but has below-average locations on each of those 5 pitches. Just turned 23 today, so more than plenty of time to develop. #marlins

A lot of young pitchers are having trouble with their 4-seam location. This list includes: Bubba Chandler Eury Perez Andrew Painter Chase Burns Emmet Sheehan Each of these players has a below-average Good Pitch%, part of the reason for some inconsistency.

Roki Sazaki is having serious command problems. Only "Good" graded locations on 60.2% of pitches (65.8% league average), including 56.5% good pitch locations on his 4-seam, which is the lowest mark among all starters (min 90 pitches). #mlb #baseball #dodgers

@PitcherListPLV Not a single right handed batter is crazy lmao

Dustin May (STL) struck out four and allowed one earned run over six innings against Cleveland

I just can't give up on Jack Leiter. 5th in my models rankings that combines whiff rate with location stats, and 5/6 of his pitches grade out as 108+, where 100 is average. The sixth is a 98.1 graded sinker, but his location stats are below-average.

I've liked most of the results that I've gotten for my pitching model, but there's one major concern. He's putting it in great spots (over 35%) and has 4 pitches with over 42% whiff rate. However, when he's hit, he's hit HARD, the 3rd worst xwOBACON (min 100 pitches) #cubs

I can't be the only one who wants Graham Ashcraft to succeed. He's throwing the cutter even harder this year (98.6), and disintegrating with the slider (61.3% whiff). Part of the reason he has 13 Ks in 9 IP. #mlb #baseball #reds

These lefties have great to elite fastballs, and the league is seeing it, hope to see them keep this hot start going for the rest of the year. #mlb #baseball #guardians #orioles

Sabrowski's 4-seam is the 4th best in baseball behind Schlittler, Abel, and Misiorowski (min 100 pitches). He's been spamming it (70.9% usage), just as the guardians are spamming calling the bullpen to put him in (10 G, 9IP so far).

Some bullpen appreciation: Grant Wolfram and Erik Sabrowski. Both have elite fastballs according to my model. Wolfram's sinker has a score of 142, Sabrowski's 4-seam is at 123 (average score of 100).

8 more pitchers finished with an above-average score from last night's slate. Those include: Jack Anderson Nolan McLean Aaron Nola Jacob Misiorowski Merrill Kelly Michael Lorenzen Trevor Rogers Colton Gordon

Wanted to follow up with a leaderboard of last night's best performers. Yamamoto - 96.9 Abel - 95.3 Gausman - 94.3 Detmers - 90.9 Weathers - 90.3 These scores are a combination of the great/good pitch% illustrated in my last post and overall whiff rate. League average is 81.3

I'm looking forward to working on this metric, and I think combining this stat with whiff rate could yield some great results. More content coming soon.

Crochet's season averages before this were 64.6/29.6%, dropping down more than 5% in both metrics. It's not the be-all, end-all, and I have some playing around with it to do, as some pitches have inherently larger good/great areas, which can skew the data.

I'm proud to announce the introduction of two new location-based stats, which I call good-pitch% and great-pitch%. Below is a visualization of the locations of a RHP slider to a RHB (good slider location on the left, great slider location on the right).