The Worst of the Best: The Week(s)’s Wildest Pitches
Hey there, readers of the written word, and welcome to the first part of this edition of The Worst Of The Best, a FanGraphs Friday series that could be best described as “almost weekly”. It is most definitely weekly in intent, but it is most definitely not weekly in execution, as evidenced by last Friday, or next Friday, or many of July’s Fridays. It is weekly enough that, when a Friday is missed, I hear about it. It is aweekly enough that, when a Friday is missed, I don’t hear about it much. While I’m here — recently I was reading an article about Chris Archer, and about how he tries to use his relative fame to spread positive messages to people who need to hear them. I, too, have a platform, right here, so as long as I have your attention, let’s all stop giving other people flat tires. Let’s stop doing that thing where we step on the backs of other peoples’ shoes or sandals. You think you’re being funny, but flat tires are received even worse than tickling, and tickling is never a good idea. Let’s also all stop tickling. Stop being monsters.
In this post, we examine wild pitches, and instead of covering the most recent one week, we’re going to cover the most recent two weeks, the window being August 23 through September 5. Here’s a link to the whole series archive. This is a top five of pitches far away from the center of the strike zone, because that’s our best approximation of location intent, and it’s based on PITCHf/x so I’m going to miss anything where PITCHf/x glitched. Someday, PITCHf/x won’t glitch anymore. Someday, we’ll have an agreed-upon way to write out “PITCHf/x”. That day is not today. Three pitches that just missed: Scott Rice to Andy Dirks on August 25, Tyler Thornburg to Clint Barmes on September 2, and A.J. Burnett to Brandon Crawford on August 25. If you’d like write-ups for those pitches, might I suggest you write them yourself? I’m not some kind of writer-monkey. Now, here, let me write, for you.
