FG on Fox: What Makes a Good Curveball?

There are all sorts of prescriptions for a good changeup. We talk about things like ‘velocity gap’ and ’tilt’ and ‘fade’ when we talk about how good a changeup will be. But what about the curveball? Can we spot a good one coming?

We can use our Arsenal Score work to identify good curveballs in general, just as we used to find bad changeups a couple weeks ago. Basically, by weighting grounders and whiffs on a pitch, we can assign it a score based on those easy-to-identify and important outcomes.

According to this metric, here are the best curves thrown at least 100 times last year.

Pitcher GB% swSTR% Arsenal Score
Brett Cecil 56% 29% 5.34
Mark Melancon 55% 25% 4.19
Nick Masset 90% 15% 4.15
Craig Kimbrel 62% 23% 4.04
Blaine Hardy 91% 14% 3.75
Vic Black 78% 17% 3.72
David Robertson 60% 22% 3.69
Carlos Martinez 53% 24% 3.50
Cody Allen 53% 20% 2.35

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.





With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.

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Poor Man's Rick Reed
9 years ago

Even when there’s no big, new revelation, it’s still cool to see ideas that we know (or at least suspect) to be true demonstrated with shiny numbers. Good work. Go math!