Park Effect
There are a couple of things we know for sure about pitchers, and one of them is that fastball velocity almost always peaks early and declines as a pitcher ages. Rarely will you see someone begin throwing harder later in their career, especially pitchers who have had to deal with a long series of injuries.
Chan Ho Park wants to be the exception that proves the rule. Here is his average fastball velocity for each of the last four years.
2005: 89.3 MPH
2006: 89.5 MPH
2007: 88.4 MPH
2008: 92.3 MPH
That 2008 reading sticks out like a sore thumb. For those wondering if it’s an anomaly due to the Dodgers gun, it doesn’t appear so – Chad Billingsley, Derek Lowe, and Brad Penny all have the same or slightly lower fastball velocities that they did a year ago, and the Pitch F/x data on Park confirms the BIS data we have here on the site. Chan Ho Park has, for whatever reason, found an extra 4 MPH that he hasn’t had in a long, long time.
It’s showing up in the results, too. His strikeout rate is the highest it’s been since 2002, and his 4.09 FIP would be the fourth lowest mark he’s posted in his career if he can keep pitching at this level the rest of the season. Of course, that FIP is a pretty far cry from his current 2.36 ERA, which is built on a ridiculously unsustainable 89.7% LOB% – his run prevention is going to regress even if he can keep pitching as well as he has up to this point.
Generally, we would look at a 35-year-old who hasn’t been an effective pitcher in years as a prime candidate for collapse, but armed with the knowledge that Park is throwing harder than ever, we have real reason to think he might be able to keep getting hitters out. The real question, then, is how on earth he found that kind of extra velocity at this stage in his career?
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Well, the skeptical answer is pretty obvious, (hmmm, a late career resurgence? Whatever could be causing that?) but perhaps after years of struggling with injuries, he’s healthy again.
I don’t recall Park’s typical velocity in his pre-Texas days, but it wouldn’t shock me to know that he had screwed up his mechanics and arm in an attempt to overcome the extremely unfavourable Texas envirnoment (for pitchers). Going from the Dodgers (pitcher’s park, usually quite strongly if memory serves) to Texas (a less extreme Coors) could really screw a pitcher up…and trying to throw harder will both lead to injuries and bad mechanics.
And most obviously, he’s been relieving this year. I think of it as the “all-star game effect”, after the place many of us first notice that starters throw a hell of a lot harder when told to go out there and throw 20-40 pitches.