The big name we will hear a lot today either because he is or is not traded is Roy Halladay. Dave Cameron broke down his value and if he is traded we will have analysis of the trade here. Until then I thought it would be cool to look at his stuff.
For the past two years he has had five strikeouts for every walk and over half of his balls in play have been groundballs, amazing. Here are the pitches he does it with.
Interestingly his pitch proportions against RHBs and LHBs are quite similar. He throws a lot more changeups against lefites, but the proportions for his other pitches are very close.
+-------------------+------+------+
| | vRHB | vLHB |
+-------------------+------+------+
| Two-Seam Fastball | 0.34 | 0.31 |
| Cutter | 0.39 | 0.43 |
| Curveball | 0.26 | 0.20 |
| Changeup | 0.01 | 0.06 |
+-------------------+------+------+
His cutter and curveball are both amazing, worth 1.5 and 2 runs above average per 100 over his career, respectively. The cutter’s worth comes from his ability to get it in the zone over 60% of the time while still getting a healthy number of whiffs (14%) and a good amount of GBs (48%). His curveball is a whiff-machine, it has the third highest whiff-rate of any curveball in the game this year 39%, while still being in the zone 44% of the time, fairly high for a curveball. His two-seam fastball, is also very good worth about half a run over 100 pitches. It gets most of its value because it induces 65% groundballs per ball in play. Tons of strikes, tons of groundballs, and a fair number of whiffs, what more could one ask for?
Combine those two amazing pitches with one very good one and you have one of the greatest pitchers in the game.
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Excellent work, Dave. Now let’s not let Cameron find out you called him Cameroon.
Whoops, thanks for noticing that. I changed it. I must have had west Africa on the mind.
I assume the huge disparity of the vertical movement is due to the different ballpark readings. A curveball with positive vertical movement? It is not really a curve then, more of a slider.
Anyway good stuff Dave
I think you are probably right. I used all pitchf/x numbers, going back to 2007 when the ballpark discrepancies were even worse. The old Yankee Stadium was particularly bad and I am sure he had lots of starts there over the pitchf/x era.
Amazing!
Those really are four distinct pitches. And he mixes them well and throws them all quite often. Now wonder he’s the best pitcher in baseball.
Correction: He’s THE greatest pitcher in the game. I think Greinke will regress like he already is and Doc will catch up to win the Cy Young. Edwin Jackson and Jarrod Washburn are also bound to regress. I say Halladay is gonna go on a dominant run like we haven’t seen even from him yet.
Doc could always use that changeup more, its actually effective. There was 2-3 starts where he threw it about 20 times, needless to say in 2 of them he went 9 innings.