Get to Know: Pitch Types

Pitch Type Abbreviations:

FB – fastball
SL – slider
CT – cutter
CB – curveball
CH – changeup
SF – split-fingered
KN – knuckleball
XX – unidentified
PO – pitch out

About split-fingered pitches: Split fingered pitches include splitters and forkballs.

About the percentages: All pitch type percentages for identified pitches are calculated as a percentage of only identifiable pitches. Unidentified pitches are calculated as a percentage of all pitches.

About the velocity: Next to the percentage in parentheses is the average velocity for the pitch type. If it reads 00.0, it means there is not enough data to calculate the average velocity.

About the leaderboards: On the leaderboards, pitch type percentage and pitch type velocity are broken out into two separate columns for each pitch. The percentage columns are labeled “%” and the velocity columns are labeled “v”.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

About the data: All pitch type data is collected and provided by Baseball Info Solutions.





David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

8 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Roman
17 years ago

I am pretty sure sinkers are considered fastballs in the baseball world, not sure how BIS categorizes them though.