Pitch Type & Velocity

I put up something new today which I think is very cool. Under each pitcher page, in the very bottom table, you can now see the percentage of each type of pitch a player threw and its average velocity. These stats are available from 2005-2007 and will be updated daily when the season starts.

Some quick things to note:

-The average velocity is in parenthesis next to the % of the pitch thrown.

-The percent of any known pitch type is a percentage of only known pitch types thrown. XX is an unidentified pitch type and is taken as a percentage of all pitches thrown.

-PO are pickoff attempts and are calculated as a percentage of all pitches thrown.

A huge thanks goes out to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing me to do this. This is a work in progress and there’s more that can be done with stats like these so feel free to chime in with suggestions.

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Update: I’ve removed SW (Screwball), FO (Forkball), and SI (Sinker) and moved them into SF (Split-fingered Fastball). There were just so few pitches categorized as those three, it didn’t make sense for them to have their own bucket.

FB: Fastball, CT: Cutter, CB: Curveball, SL: Slider, CH: Changeup, SF: Split-fingered Fastball, KN: Knuckleball, XX: Unidentified, PO: Pickoff Attempt





David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

14 Comments
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dan
18 years ago

Will this be added to the leader boards too?

Joe Aiello
18 years ago

Just what I need. Another excuse to look at stats. =)

David Appelman
18 years ago

Yep, it will be added to the leaderboards.

tricer
18 years ago

I really like this new feature, but I’m unsure what the abbreviations mean.

FB : fastball
SL : slider
CU: curve?
CB: ??
CH: change?

Can someone please clarify?

tricer
18 years ago

Ahhh, nevermind. I see that CU is cutter, CB is curveball, and CH is changeup.

Looked at Andy Pettitte’s page to figure this out.

Al
18 years ago

FANTASTIC! Hands down, one of my favorite sites on the web already just got down right addictive with this new feature. Keep up the solid work and thanks again for always making my day a little brighter.

Tom G, ballssticksstuff.com
18 years ago

Kudos, this is a great tool added to a wonderful toolbox [wait, that doesn’t sound right…]

tangotiger
18 years ago

Fantastic!

Note: I’d make cutter CT, as CU can be confused for curve,or ChangeUp.

tangotiger
18 years ago

Any chance you can put average speed of each pitch?

David Appelman
18 years ago

Tom, it’s already there. In parentheses next to the % of the pitch. Going to switch CU to CT as well, good idea!

studes
18 years ago

I agree that this is fantastic. I was wondering if the major league averages are listed anywhere, for comparison’s sake?

David Appelman
18 years ago

I’ve never looked at the major league averages, but it’s a good idea. I’ll run them when I get done with the leaderboards. On that note, Pitch Type should be in the leaderboard section sometime tomorrow afternoon.

Dave
17 years ago

This is amazing! It answers a lot of questions I had about pitchers. Any way to include their max speed on the fastball? Do 2-seamers count in the fastball column? Is is known how much 2-seam fastballs bring down the overall fastball speed? Sorry, just curious.

Stros in 2020
14 years ago

What is FC and FT in the pitch type.