His splitter and change-up travel at nearly the same speed and have nearly the same break. I’m not entirely convinced these are two different pitches. He’s upped his K/9 rate from 2011’s 8.1 to 9.8 so far this year as well. This sort of weaponry hasn’t hurt Hamels’ numbers (in a contract year, no less), as he is 4-1 over 40.1 innings pitched, and sports a 2.45 ERA. The 27-year-old California native has dropped his off-speed pitch on hitters at a mind-boggling whiff rate of 50.12 percent since the start of 2011 (926 times thrown). Hamels is currently taking a lot of heat for his actions concerning Nationals phenom Bryce Harper, but that doesn’t take away from his repertoire on the mound. (Note: all whiff/swing stats reflect numbers appearing on through Wednesday, May 9.) National League starters The question I was kicking around: If there was a situation where you absolutely had to keep the ball out of play, which pitch would give you the best chance, and who throws it? Here are the results. The minimum for all pitches is 200 times thrown, to ensure a big enough sample size of pitches. I’ve broken the leaders down between 2012 starters and relievers by league, including guys who are on the 15-day DL (but not on the 60-day, or are currently in the minors). I did more and more digging, until eventually I combed through every pitcher (and breaking ball) in the majors and came up with combined whiff/swing data from 2011 and ’12 in a search for the pitch with the highest swing-and-miss rate in baseball over the past year or so. A quick check with the numbers over at Brooks, and it turns out I didn’t need glasses (more on that later). Bard’s fastball certainly had something taken off-he wasn’t throwing 99 miles per hour anymore, which was to be expected. Reports coming out of spring training said he’d developed a second, tamer version of his notorious video-game slider. Yet I still can’t give it up.Īs a Red Sox fan, I began tinkering with the feature while wondering how dialed-back Daniel Bard’s stuff has become since his conversion to starter. Brooks Baseball has been both a godsend to my baseball watching experience and a bar-of-soap-in-a-gym-sock to my family life-I think my wife filed divorce papers last week while I was surfing its pages. With that said, when I discovered the whiff/swing tool so generously provided by the guys over at, an obsession was born. But that doesn’t mean those pitches aren’t fun to watch.Ī swing-and-miss can be one of the most spectacularly violent moments in all of sports, and often happens dozens of times within a single game. The presence of a lights-out, swing-and-miss pitch in a pitcher’s repertoire doesn’t guarantee he’ll use it properly, or even that the pitcher will ever figure out how to pitch in the major leagues.
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