For the four-seam fastball, you will hold the ball with your fingertips perpendicular to the seam and the rounded seam, the horseshoe seam, will be facing your ring finger when you throw. This tends to be quite a popular way tohold a ball ready for a pitch in baseball. Because of this...
and Robinson not only suggested that Ramirez throw his sinker more often, but helped him make necessary tweaks to his grip and arm action to turn the pitch into a legitimate weapon. Last season, Ramirez’s sinker had a Run Value of -9. This season, it already has a Run Value of -4....
Like Soto, it’s not like the answer here is “never throw a fastball ever.” But Stanton runs a roughly 40% swing-and-miss rate on breaking balls, and even if he’s still able to get to power there – we’re hardly suggesting that slugging .567, as he did on breakers this year...
Manny Machado singled up the middle to open the inning. Cody Bellinger struck out swinging for the first out. On a grounder up the middle from Yasiel Puig, Brock Holt got the forceout at second, but the throw wasn’t in time at first. With ...
about every night you will see a parade of relievers (many of them failed starters) who pitch exclusively out of the stretch, throw with a cross-fire delivery from the far arm-side of the rubber, and rely on a fastball/slider combination to overpower hitters and keep the ball out of ...
Still, today’s managers might not be so willing to change pitchers so frequently1 if they didn’t have all those guys waiting in the bullpen who can throw 95-100 mph at will. So, usingFanGraphsfastball velocity data, we set out to answer the question: What percentage of relief pitchers...
1. The four-seam fastball In 2019, Cease threw his fastball hard (at 96.5 MPH, it was one of the dozen hardest among any regular starting pitcher) and with excellent spin (87th percentile) and in such a way that it was routinely tattered by opposing batters, allowing the7th-worst result...
And, on the mound, the equation spits out an elite fastball. When he's firing that fastball out of his powerful drop-and-drive delivery, Strider's other main pitch, his slider, becomes just as unhittable. "If anything, it allows me to throw a harder breaking ball -- I don't have ...
This was the real problem in Pfaadt's first shot at the Majors, that his primary four-seam fastball is … just OK, or maybe not even. At 93.7 mph, it doesn’t have terribly notable velocity. There’s not any particularly interesting movement to it. It’s a straight fastball that’s...
The instruction was to drop down and try to throw similarly to Chris Sale, the better to help Webb move away from the high four-seam approach that didn’t work for him and get the most out of the east/west sinker/slider game that did. Chris Sale has one of the lowest arm angles of...