Research – Palatable PitchZones

by
January 22, 2006

In the past week I've gotten some really great feedback on the PitchZone charts. In the hopes of making them more accurate and just simpler in general, I've revised them to be just a 5×5 grid, with the 9 boxes in the center being the strike zone. Remember that these are the percentage of all pitches that become hits for each box. Here's the major league average:

PitchZone

I also got a lot of requests to break them out the four different pitcher-batter match-ups. Here's that:

PitchZone

And finally, let's take a quick look at Abert Pujols and Vladimir Guerrero:

PitchZone

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Guerrero is pretty scary. I'm pretty happy with these, so they'll probably start showing up occasionally in Daily Graphings for batters. Next up, I'm going to start looking at contact rates, swing percentages, and BABIP by pitch location. Then of course, there's the pitcher's side of things which I have a feeling is going to be a lot more complicated.





 

David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

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Mike
19 years ago

David,

Great stuff! I prefer these pitchzones over the other ones – they’re much easier to read.

It would be interesting to break down these pitchzones by HRs (or doubles or any other stat) hit in each zone.

You mention contact rates (I assume swings with contact divided by total swings); I wonder how the contact rate correlates (how much it increases/decreases) with each zone or if it correlates with any other stat. It might have some predictive power.

What do you mean by swing percentages?

I’m not sure major league teams break the zones down like you’ve done, but I wouldn’t be surprsied if advance scouts using something similar to what you’ve done when preparing their pitchers for batters of opposing teams.

-Mike

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