A Brief wOBA Allowed Leaderboard

In the research for the piece I just posted on Johnny Cueto, I ended up with a treasure trove of data on pitch type outcomes during the PITCHF/x era. It is really fun information, and so I figured I’d share a few tidbits here that don’t necessarily lend themselves to an entire post. This post is basically just a list of interesting numbers without any commentary. Enjoy!

First, here are the 10 lowest wOBAs allowed for all pitch types for starting pitchers in 2014, setting a minimum of 100 pitches thrown for each pitch type.

Pitcher	Pitch	wOBA
Julio Teheran	Change-Up	0.059
Collin McHugh	Curveball	0.093
Julio Teheran	Curveball	0.099
Chris Sale	Slider	0.100
Gio Gonzalez	Curveball	0.123
Josh Beckett	Curveball	0.128
Hisashi Iwakuma	Splitter	0.131
Corey Kluber	Curveball	0.131
Masahiro Tanaka	Slider	0.133
Masahiro Tanaka	Splitter	0.140

Keep in mind that there’s a huge selection bias here, in that breaking balls and off-speed pitches get thrown primarily in pitcher’s counts, when the expected wOBA is much lower. So, you don’t want to say that Colin McHugh’s curveball is the second best pitch in baseball. It’s not. But it’s been a pretty fantastic out-pitch so far this year.

And now, the laggards, though we’ll only do bottom five in order to limit our the amount of public shaming.

Pitcher	Pitch	wOBA
Sergio Santos	Four-Seam	0.639
Edward Mujica	Four-Seam	0.617
Sean Marshall	Slider	0.602
Jhoulys Chacin	Four-Seam	0.596
Eric Stults	Curveball	0.592

Maybe time to mix it up or just try something else entirely, boys.