Shark Spellcheck F7 Jeffrey Alan Samardzija Starting pitcher Call him what you want, but Jeff Samardzija’s impressive spring training carried over into the regular season. In just his sixth big league start, and first since the end of 2010, the former Notre Dame wide receiver was one Starlin Castro throwing error away from a complete […]

We (Harry and I) have released PITCHf/x based statistics for every umpire that has called a PITCHf/x enabled game, provided that they called enough pitches to accurately represent their called strikezone. We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to read this post before using our umpiring data. Being an umpire is hard. It might be […]

About a year ago, sometime during John Lackey’s precipitous decline into worthlessness, I started paying attention to an odd phenomenon in which he would lose velocity during games: Here, we can see a clear slope in fastballs thrown over the course of the game. It’s as if there’s some direct, measurable relationship between how many […]

Last night during the heart-stopping Syracuse-Wisconsin game, Harry and I were talking (okay, Harry was mostly watching his team win by the skin of its teeth) about ways to improve the Brooks Baseball player card system. We exchanged some data and are presenting the first of our “data-driven” search tools—pitcher similarity. This feature is incredibly […]

No Pujols, no La Russa, no problem.

Here’s something new. Jeffrey Gross from THT Fantasy and I are exchanging “watch this guy” ideas—fantasy picks from one side and PITCHf/x based picks on the other. First up is Jeff’s first breakout candidate for a cheap but valuable pitcher—Kansas City’s Danny Duffy. The PITCHf/x data we’re discussing can be seen on Duffy’s player card […]

Your definition of fun may vary. But Yu Darvish and his eight-pitch mix are going to make life interesting for catchers, hitters and even PITCHf/x analysts. Here’s a picture from his Cactus League debut. The pitch in red was a strike three splitter to end an inning. The axes show movement during the flight to […]

I thought it important to describe a new feature we’ve added to the PitchFX Player Cards over the last month or so. I’ve previously tweeted (@Brooksbaseball) about these features but haven’t described them in detail. When the cards first debuted, we were asked by a number of people to provide average data for comparison, especially […]

The radar gun in Peoria may be running a little warm, but Andrew Cashner was throwing gas. The ex-Cub came in for the Padres in the sixth inning. He threw nothing under 101 mph and broke 103 a few times. Even if you deduct a couple mph for what are probably calibration issues with the […]

How Brett Myers will do as a closer and how valuable he is to the Astros in that role is not the question for this space. Just the fastballs. Let’s take a look at some quick-and-dirty numbers (four- and two-seam fastballs all together; age determined by season year minus birth year—neither precise nor seasonal). If […]