Mata: A symphony of movement in four pitches
From Matthew Mata at The Hardball Times on February 10, 2017:
As may or may not be clear from the title of this article, we’re going to be looking at four versions of pitch movement for a lot of pitches. The purpose of this analysis is to try to get a better understanding of how batters track pitches in the presence of movement. To this end, we’ll use previous methods to find projected pitch locations to simulate how batters may estimate where a pitch will end up at the front of home plate. Since we don’t know which version of movement may be best to utilize for this application, we’ll apply all four under consideration and compare the results.
Since there are a lot of visuals and data we can generate for this analysis, we’ll restrict it to a specific case; however, this can be generalized to any pitcher and any type of pitch. In this case, we’re focusing on Julio Urias‘ curveball and, later on, curves from left-handed pitchers to right-handed batters.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/a-symphony-of-pitches-in-four-movements/
Originally published: February 10, 2017. Last Updated: February 10, 2017.