The Worst of the Best: The Month’s Wildest Pitches
Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of the year’s fifth edition of The Worst Of The Best. If you click here, you can find all of the Worsts Of The Bests. Or you can get to them some other way, because they’re not hidden. All right, so, I would like to begin this post with a joke. Question: which is Jeff Manship’s most favorite baseball team? Answer: why, it’s the Seattle Mariners, of course! This has been the joke. An alternate similar joke would instead choose to highlight the Pittsburgh Pirates. That is a worse joke. We may now move on to the rest of this post, joking complete.
We’ll watch the wildest pitches thrown in the month of August, as captured by PITCHf/x and as mathed by myself and a spreadsheet. PITCHf/x did almost all of the work, but I’ve tied the bow, so I figure I deserve at least 80% or so of the credit. This is all about distance from the center of the estimated strike zone, and since that’s the system I’ve used the whole time, that’s the system I’ve increasingly convinced myself is more than fine enough. Featured in detail will, like normal, be a top-five list. Also, there is a next-five list. The next-five list comes first. Every time, I wonder why I write this paragraph. At least it’s over now.