Halladay’s Stuff

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.