Staying Grounded

The last two posts have covered the best and worst fastballs when it comes to generating ground balls upon contact. The worst fastballs doubled as the worst pitches overall. Enough foreplay with the fastballs though, it’s time to reveal the best overall pitches. Who had the biggest, manliest, most groundballsiest pitches of 2009? Unsurprisingly, of the top five, four are curves with the misfit being a changeup.

Starting at the bottom of the list, we first encounter Erik Bedard and his curveball. Said pitch racked up an impressive 71% ground ball rate when put in play. Ahead of him is that aforementioned changeup, thrown by the master of the ground ball and the walk, Fausto Carmona. 74% of the time that Carmona’s changeup made contact with a bat, it fell toward the earth in rapid fashion.

We go back to curveballs for good now with our third place finisher, Chris Jakubauskas who, like Bedard, was with the Mariners. Now a Pirate after being claimed off waivers last November, Jakubauskas’ curveball registered a ground ball 75% of the time which is about all he has going for him. Coming out of the desolate wastelands of the Independent Leagues, it’s impressive enough that Jakubauskas has such a good pitch at his disposal.

Tying that mark was another AL West hurler, Gio Gonzalez. Gonzalez is a weird specimen, racking up huge strikeout rates but possessing no ability to consistently find the strike zone. His curve is about his only good pitch at this point, but if he ever manages to cut down his walk rate, he could make a big leap forward.

Finally, atop the leader board is Yovani Gallardo and his curve, which eeked past Gonzalez and Jakubauskas to the 76% mark for ground balls. There’s not much that needs to be said about Gallardo. We all know he’s good, he just needs to stay healthy.





Matthew Carruth is a software engineer who has been fascinated with baseball statistics since age five. When not dissecting baseball, he is watching hockey or playing soccer.

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Franco
13 years ago

Wow, 15 HRs let up by Chris Jakubauskas in 93 innings even with an extreme groundball pitch and playing half his games in Seattle. I guess the rest of his pitches are extreme flyball contact…… and deep ones at that.

Basil Ganglia
13 years ago
Reply to  Franco

I recall something published here within the last year or so about LD/FB rates for groundball pitchers – namely that extreme groundballers tend to have higher than normal HR/FB ratios.

Presumably that’s because, as groundballers, hitters generally are not hitting under their pitches. Consequently, when a batter puts one of their pitches in the air, there’s a better than normal chance that it’s a well-struck flyball.

Matthew Carruth
13 years ago
Reply to  Basil Ganglia

That’s the exact opposite of what was shown!

Franco
13 years ago
Reply to  Basil Ganglia

I didn’t do a ton of research, but a quick look at a couple famous groundballers like Brandon Webb seem to verify this theory. All the curveball/change up guys mentioned in the article seem to have a HR/FB rate ~12%. Guess they get GBs 75% of the time and hang the rest up there on a T.