A few days ago, while Kiley was dominating with his prospect coverage, I asked you about your favorite team’s pitching coach. I was a little fearful that no one would participate, since, who cares, you know, but many of you still found it in your hearts to throw a vote my direction. In all, there were thousands and thousands of votes, and while everything had to be split 30 ways to get material for each team and each coach, I was still left with sufficient sample sizes for all — even for the two new coaches who haven’t been coaches in a season yet. Bless the FanGraphs platform, and bless the FanGraphs readers. That means you!

I ran this project because I couldn’t recall seeing such a project run in the past. And also, I’m fascinated by crowd-sourcing and fan opinion, and while we all know this project won’t actually uncover the game’s best and worst pitching coaches, data has been generated, reflecting something, and now we’re in position to analyze the data. Let us do exactly that. Here are fruits of labors.

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You know the difference between control and command? Mariano Rivera is why the difference exists. Some pitchers are good at throwing strikes; Mariano Rivera was good at throwing Rivera strikes, which were simply strikes where Rivera wanted them to be. They looked a lot like any other strike, and pitch to pitch you wouldn’t really notice a difference, but over time, pitches pile up, and locations really matter. No one has located quite like Rivera, and you can guess the effects. Or you don’t have to, since Rivera’s career is complete and we have a full statistical record, but anyway. Because Rivera could locate, he could make certain numbers work in his favor.

Yeah, he struck guys out. Yeah, he didn’t walk guys much. Those are the basics. But Rivera was also skilled at allowing weaker contact than your average other guy. One of the reasons we’re usually skeptical of BABIP-suppressing skill is that most pitchers just aren’t good at hitting the same spots over and over. Rivera was one of the exceptions. He limited the singles, and he limited the non-singles.

Let’s take a look at something. PITCHf/x captured only the last few years of Rivera’s career, but Rivera was still outstanding when the cameras were installed, so we have a good amount of data. Let’s consider balls in play that Rivera allowed on pitches that were out of the strike zone. (Thank you, Baseball Savant.) You know what those balls in play are? They’re worse balls in play. Worse, relative to pitches over the plate.

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Two bits of news spread almost simultaneously Monday night: Bruce Chen signed somewhere for a minor-league contract, and Barry Zito had signed somewhere else for, also, a minor-league contract. This is the season of minor-league contracts, as the pool of available free agents has been reduced to a puddle on an otherwise dry concrete foundation. But of those names still out there, Chris Young has a certain intrigue. If Chen and Zito can find opportunities, it stands to reason Young should find one as well. Right?

Certainly, his agent has been called. Certainly, there have been feelers. And it’s not a complete mystery why Young remains unsigned. This is Chris Young, to the naked eye:

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I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to understand and appreciate the potential impact of pitching coaches. I mean, I always had some suspicions, and I was one of those people really interested in Rick Peterson back in the day, but, in March of 2006, the Mariners traded Matt Thornton to the White Sox for Joe Borchard. You have to understand what Matt Thornton was at the time — though he had a big arm, he’d been infuriating with Seattle, incapable of throwing consecutive strikes. I remember being overjoyed about his departure; he’d walked one of every six batters, proving himself completely and utterly unreliable. A big arm without any control? There are a million of those. They just about never figure it out.

Instantly, Thornton figured it out. Because Don Cooper figured it out. Cooper had figured it out a couple years earlier.

 The left-hander always possessed a gifted arm, with a fastball in the mid 90s, but also has battled control issues. Thornton mentioned that Cooper noticed the flaw two years ago, while watching game film on him, at a time when the White Sox were interested in acquiring the one-time first-round draft pick from Seattle.

“I kidded him by saying, ‘You could have sent me a little note or something,'” said Thornton with a laugh. “It may have been a little different for me.”

Thornton, as a Mariner, threw 59% strikes. His first year with the White Sox, he threw 67% strikes. He’s maintained the same rate ever since, and though Thornton’s career is just about up, he’s 38 years old, and for a time he was a premier lefty reliever. He’s totaled more than $20 million in career salary. If it weren’t for Don Cooper, who knows what would’ve happened with Thornton’s professional path? Would he still be set for life? Would he be a realtor?

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I’m never really sure how much to review recent articles. Last week I wrote a lot about pitch comps. Compared Henderson Alvarez‘s changeup to Felix Hernandez‘s changeup. Compared guys to certain signature pitches like Aroldis Chapman‘s fastball and Clayton Kershaw‘s slider. Wound up with this Marcus Stroman absurdity, in which Stroman is flattered by some of the strongest comps in the game. The basic idea: Stroman’s regular fastball shares the same traits with Johnny Cueto‘s. His sinker shares the same traits with Roy Halladay‘s. His curveball shares the same traits with Jose Fernandez’s. And so on. The whole idea was comparing pitches to other pitches based on average velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. It’s a little informative, and sometimes a lot of fun.

I wanted to put together this follow-up, which serves to caution you not to make too much of a good comp. There’s more that goes into a pitch than how it moves, and how fast it moves. There’s definitely more than that, when it comes to how a pitch works within a given repertoire of many pitches. And, our examples: Cole Hamels and J.A. Happ. Last week, when I ran some pitch comps, I found that Happ’s changeup compares the strongest with Hamels’ changeup. For one thing, we know Happ’s changeup isn’t as good as Hamels’ changeup. For another thing, it goes deeper than this.

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Some weeks ago, I was tooling around on the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards, and one thing led to another, and I noticed that Marcus Stroman had developed a sinker that looked and worked an awful lot like Roy Halladay’s sinker. It was a pitch that just came to Stroman during the course of the 2014 season, and he debuted it early in the second half, and this is the FanGraphs post that resulted. Blue Jays fans derived a modest thrill from seeing Stroman compared to one of the best franchise pitchers ever.

This week, I’ve run some posts calculating certain pitch comps. I’ve developed a method that’s different from the method I used when I compared Stroman and Halladay, and here, you can see, for example, the best comps for Sonny Gray’s curveball. I thought today I’d put Marcus Stroman under the microscope. Stroman is a genuine six-pitch pitcher, and here’s his second-half breakdown, by usage, according to Brooks Baseball:

• Sinker: 32%
• Four-seam: 23%
• Curve: 16%
• Cutter: 15%
• Slider: 8%
• Changeup: 6%

For each of the six pitches, I calculated the best comps, out of right-handed starting pitchers during the PITCHf/x era, spanning 2008 – 2014. The results are absurd. Marcus Stroman has got some weapons. Consider him excessively armed and absolutely terrifying.

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At times, last season felt particularly rough for young hitters just getting their feet wet. There were problems in Boston, where, for example, neither Jackie Bradley nor Xander Bogaerts performed anywhere near the level of expectation. In St. Louis, the late Oscar Taveras had trouble getting into a groove and earning a regular job. Javier Baez mostly looked like a mess for Chicago, and for all the hype, Gregory Polanco eventually came up to join Pittsburgh and underwhelmed. Nick Castellanos was fine, but nothing revelatory. Billy Hamilton had a terrible second half. Jake Marisnick didn’t hit, and Jon Singleton didn’t hit, and so on and so forth. There’s nothing quite like top prospect hype, and there’s nothing quite like watching a top prospect struggle to hit at the highest level, after all the anticipation.

In each case, there was just anecdotal evidence, but put enough anecdotal evidence together, and you have a story. For at least several months, people have been discussing the theory that there’s a widening gap between the major leagues and everywhere else. Alex Speier is currently writing about this at the Boston Globe. There are reasons to believe this to be true; there are elements to playing in the majors that haven’t always been present. Most importantly, there’s more information than ever, so young players don’t show up as unknowns. Reports get generated, and reports get spread, and, faster than ever before, opponents are able to zone in on a given hitter’s weaknesses.

The feeling is that the majors have never been this hard for rookies. The feeling is that rookie hitters are facing an uphill battle, and hitting a baseball is no walk in the park even at the best of times, where you’re facing Kyle Davies in Colorado. There are feelings, and then there’s information. Let’s see what we can do with this. How have the majors lately been treating rookie bats?

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Let’s talk about release points. Are you ready to talk about release points? Of course you are — there’s no preparation necessary. If you’re on FanGraphs, there’s no becoming more ready than you already are. Good news!

Among all the things PITCHf/x keeps track of, release point is one of them. Or should I say, two of them; the system tracks both horizontal release point and vertical release point. For our purposes here, we’ll focus on the horizontal release point tracking. On this scale, which is shown in units of feet, 0 corresponds to the middle of the pitching rubber. A negative number means the ball was released more toward the third-base side, and a positive number means the ball was released more toward the first-base side.

Right-handed pitchers have negative horizontal release points. Their arms, after all, hang off from the sides of their bodies, nearer to third base than first. Left-handed pitchers are just the opposite. With side-armers, you’ll see extreme release points, three or four feet from the middle of the rubber. Occasionally you get someone even more extreme than that. A more ordinary pitcher will have a release point separated from the middle by a foot or two. This is only a little bit interesting, but let’s get into some information. Last year’s Brewers were mostly right-handed. Let’s examine those same Brewers.

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Apparently this is the week where I do whatever anyone says. Yesterday I identified some comps for various signature pitches around the league. In the subsequent comments, a request:

Well-Beered Englishman says:
As long as we’re making requests, I say hop in the time machine and compare somebody to Mariano.

So it shall be. Let’s see if we can find a decent comparison for Mariano Rivera’s cutter, which has been the most signature of signature pitches. There’s been no greater example of hitters being unable to do much despite knowing exactly what’s coming. With Rivera, there wasn’t a lot of mystery. Just precise, pinpoint location, in areas that ensured his success.

In terms of style, the best comparison for Rivera is probably Kenley Jansen. Jansen dominates with a cutter and little else, and if that sounds familiar, it’s because that was Rivera’s whole game. But this investigation is a little different: this is looking for cutters most like Rivera’s cutter. Research was performed using the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards and Brooks Baseball player pages.

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