Petti: Velocity trends and MLB pitchers to watch in 2013
From SABR member Bill Petti at FanGraphs on October 24, 2012:
I’ve written quite a bit this year about pitcher aging — specifically, trends in velocity loss for pitchers. There are two general findings that I want to revisit today and apply to pitchers from 2012; the predictive power of velocity loss in July and end of season velocity, and the impact of losing velocity in one season on next season’s velocity.
First, a pitcher’s velocity will tend to vary throughout the year. Trying to get a read on whether a pitcher is having trouble velocity-wise during a season is difficult if you simply compare to last year’s overall velocity. So I compared a pitcher’s velocity in each month to their velocity the previous year in that same month and found that pitchers who lose at least 1 mph of velocity in July are 13.7 times more likely to finish the entire year down at least 1 mph.
Second, 91% of pitchers that do finish a season down at least 1 mph compared to the previous season will lose additional velocity the following season (average decline of 1.6 mph), with only 7% regaining some (but, likely, not all) of that velocity back.
With the close of the 2012 season, I checked back on how well July-over-July velocity trends predicted full season declines as well as which pitchers ended the season losing over 1 mph off of their fastball.
Read the full article here: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/velocity-trends-and-pitchers-to-watch-in-2013/
Originally published: October 24, 2012. Last Updated: October 24, 2012.