I Heart Appelman

Going into the day, I was planning on writing this post about Dontrelle Willis. The guy shut out the Rangers last night for 6 1/3 innings, giving up one hit, walking two, and striking out five batters against one of the league’s best offenses. 60% of his pitches were strikes. He hit 93 on his fastball. In short, he looked like the D-Train of old, and gave the Tigers a needed shot in the arm.

Willis’ performance deserves a post of its own, but it will have to wait, because as I was writing it up, I got an email from R.J. Anderson to our author mailing list. It read as follows:

I’m guessing there’s an announcement coming soon, but the Pitch Type Linear Weights are amazing.

Wait, what? Pitch Type Linear Weights?

Since I was already on Willis’ player card, I scrolled down. Sure enough, there they are. Linear weight run values for each pitch type going back to 2003. My jaw hit the floor. If I wasn’t already married, I would propose to the FanGraphs stats section.

Want to know what pitch Dontrelle dominated with back in 2005? That would be his fastball, which was 44.1 runs above average that year. Or, for just sheer amazement, look at Zach Greinke’s pitches this year – all four of his pitches are at least +1 run better than average per 100 pitches (which is what the /c denotes), but his fastball and slider are just disgusting. Or you can look at Cliff Lee, who is dominating with his slider/cutter this year.

I’m a little bit biased, since I write here and all, but this is an amazing addition, and for us to have access to this kind of data – for free! – is mind blowing. Let’s all give David Appelman a standing ovation.