The Nuttiest Pitches: Curves

This week’s nuttiest pitches might even have a point. But let’s just start with the GIFs. Because it’s fun to watch crazy pitches do crazy things.

Let’s do the uncle charlies, the yakkers, the yellow hammers — curveballs are on the menu today. As usual, we’re looking at the last three years because that’s what MLB.tv allows us, and we’re sorting PITCHF/x to find the pitches with the most extreme horizontal and vertical movement, as well as velocities.

Biggest Drop
That’s the thing you think of first when you think of a curveball anyway, is the drop. Watch this curve start above Ryan Doumit’s eyeballs and then land on the plate.

That’s twenty inches of drop. Amazingly, this is the second-biggest drop in the last three years, and Yu Darvish owned the first-biggest (-22), and it came in *the next at-bat*, but this was one was more visually pleasing. Darvish struck out 11 in 6.2 innings that day, and we know why. They had no chance on the big, old, slow, disgusting, hammer. We miss Yu.

Biggest Swerve
What do you call horizontal movement? Sweep? Run? It’s a curve, so let’s call it swerve. Scott Feldman shows up all over this list, but the weird thing is, they’re all from one game. On May fifth last year, Scott Feldman did this a ton:

“Oh he hung that one,” said the announcer right after the pitch, and his partner agreed: “A number of these breaking pitches are just getting away from him.” So maybe Feldman shouldn’t get credit for getting his swerve on. Let’s look to Corey Kluber, who usually leads the league in horizontal movement on his curve and had the sixth-most extreme swervey curveball over the last three years.

“No way that’s a strike no way that’s a no way no way. No way.”

Slowest
That’s another thing we associate with normal curveballs, is that they are a change of pace. Slow and bendy. The problem with looking into the PITCHf/x database for these is that so many of the slow curves are mistakes in the PITCHF/x system. And then the others look like this:

That’s the slowest actual curveball thrown by a pitcher in the last three years, and it registered at 52.4 mph off the hand of Jered Weaver. But was it even actually a curveball? I mean, we know Weaver’s heading down the slow, slower, slowest trail that Jamie Moyer once blazed, but this is ridiculous. It’s a flub.

Let’s return to Yu, because he prides himself on the slow curve. He should.

YuSlow.Gif indeed. That’s an actual slow curve, registering at 53 mph. Of course Mike Napoli didn’t swing. He probably had time to laugh and rethink his strategy and decide to not swing again.

Fastest
Now here’s where we get to the point. If a curve is fast and hard, is it even a curve anymore? Because all the hardest curves in PITCHF/x are actually cutters. Even the ones with a bit of drop.

Here’s a ‘curve’ from Mark Melancon. It went 90 mph and had 2.5 inches of run, and 6.5 inches of drop. If you remove the velocity from that line, you might say, sure that could be a hard curve. The average slider gets about eight inches less drop than that pitch, so yeah, sure it’s a curve.

But this is what it looked like.

Nasty, yes. A curve?

Now that you’ve (probably) decided that there’s no way that’s a curve, let’s try something else. Harry Pavlidis helps run Brooks Baseball, where they clean up the definitions of pitches by hand. I asked him for the hardest ‘actual’ curve of the last three years. Voila:

That’s an 89 mph pitch from Craig Kimbrel. Once again, it’s nasty, especially since it came after 97, 97, 97, 98 and on a 1-2 count. But is it a curve? It had only 1.7 inches of run and three inches of drop. Melancon’s pitch had more ‘curveball’ type movement, and yet it’s called a cutter and we all agreed it was not a curve.

And so this is why it’s so hard to say prescriptive things about pitches. We can barely even define them correctly. We might not even know what defining them correctly means.

Hey at least we know these pitches are all nasty in their own ways, I guess.