Rafael Soriano's immaculate inning

Oh, I forgot to post this earlier. In Monday's Rays-Angels game, Rafael Soriano pitched an immaculate 9th inning - three strikeouts on nine pitches. According to The Immaculate Inning website, this was the 44th occurrence in Major League history of such an inning. Soriano struck out Erick Aybar, Mike Napoli, and Peter Bourjos on the minimum number of pitches, with six swinging strikes, two called strikes, and one foul ball. Ross Ohlendorf was the last pitcher to have an immaculate inning, performing it on September 5th of 2009.

Nova's first start

Ivan Nova made his first career start yesterday, and he did a good job. It's easy to overlook Nova's effort given the two dramatic home runs by Jose Bautista, Bautista's antics, Brandon Morrow's 12 strikeouts, Jerry Meals' inconsistent strike zone, two Toronto ejections, and a near brawl in the sixth inning. Yes, it was a fun and eventful game. But Nova's pitching, other than throwing up and in to Bautista after his first home run, wasn't really that eventful at all. After he got out of a tough first inning in which he loaded the bases with nobody out (helped by a double play turned by Brett Gardner and Francisco Cervelli), he just went about his business, getting groundballs and keeping the Jays from scoring. Except, of course, for the two-run homer by Bautista in the 3rd inning. His final line for the evening was 5 1/3 innings, 6 hits, 2 runs (both earned), 1 walk, and 3 strikeouts. That's a game score of 50, which is exactly average.

Nova went to work with four pitches: a fastball, a hard curveball, a hard changeup, and a slider that the YES Network's Jack Curry said that he is still developing. The velocity exceeded expectations, lighting up the gun at 98 mph (97.5) in the first inning and averaging 94-95. The curve was typically in the low 80s, the slider a bit more than that, and the change a bit more than the slider. Nova appeared to have best command of the fastball, on which he got two swings and misses and generated 9 ground balls out of 13 balls in play. I think it's a four-seamer, maybe a combination of a four-seamer and a two-seamer, but whatever it is, it gets some good dropping action relative to the average fastball, which leads to lots of grounders. A bit less than a third of the 73 pitches Nova threw were fastballs; he had a tougher time commanding the 23 offspeed pitches. Of those pitches, 20 were out of the strikezone, and only four of those pitches were chased (all of them changeups). In addition, it was a hanging slider that Bautista was able to hit out of the park in the third inning.

Now, the Yankees have to figure out whether or not Nova was good enough for another start. I'm interested to see what they come up with.

For those who are interested, below I've included the average pitch movement for Nova's start. It's from the catcher's perspective, so pitches breaking armside (from a righty) will have negative horizontal movement. Also, it's relative to a theoretical pitch without spin. I mentioned the extra "drop" on Nova's fastball earlier; the average big league fastball "rises" (compared to the spinless pitch) 9-10 inches, while Nova's only "rises" about 7.5. Of course, this becomes more significant when compared to other parks, but the Toronto system seems like it's calibrated well, and the fastball movement would explain the groundballs. Some video of his pitches is here.

Welcome, Ivan Nova

The Yankees called up Ivan Nova over the weekend and will give him the start against the Blue Jays later today. He was up with the big club back in May, but he only pitched three relief innings over two games. Just a bit of background on Nova ...

He was born in San Cristobal, Dominican Republic, in 1987, and was signed by the Yankees in 2004. He's been solid throughout his minor league career, and has never reached Baseball America's list of Top 10 Yankees prospects. He's billed as a guy who works down in the zone with plus velocity, sometimes reaching as high as 97 mph. Here are some results from the minors:

Year	Class	IP	ERA	FIP	K/9	BBHBP/9	GB Rate
2006	Rk	43	2.72	3.73	7.53	2.09	.443
2007	A	99 1/3	4.98	4.28	4.89	3.35	.472
2008	A+	148 2/3	4.36	3.33	6.60	3.21	.507
2009	AA-AAA	139 1/3	3.68	3.94	5.81	4.13	.544
2010	AAA	145	2.86	3.52	7.14	3.04	.517
	MiL	575 1/3	3.80	3.72	6.32	3.33	.508

About Nova and the starting situation, Girardi had this to say: "The greatest problem to have would be if he pitches extremely well on Monday." This is true in that it is both a problem that many teams would want, and also one that Girardi's going to have to give some serious thought to. Let's say Nova pitches very well today. I think it would be pretty difficult for the Yankees to not give him another shot, given how A.J. Burnett and especially Javier Vazquez have been pitching recently. But would that mean that Vazquez is just gone from the rotation? Does he go to the bullpen? Is it logical to put Nova in the rotation based on one (hypothetical!) good start? This is something for Girardi and the Yankees to figure out.

Data are from Fangraphs and Minor League Splits.

Yankees' pitch times

Quantifying which pitchers are quick workers has always been intriguing to me. The PITCHf/x data has a time-stamp that goes down to the second, so with some Excel manipulation (I'm learning!), it is possible to get a feel for. I haven't seen a whole lot of work done on the subject, other than a few articles by PITCHf/x guru Mike Fast. Anyway, I attempted to test out some pitch times on the Excel file with the Yankees' 2010 data. I had to set a few different parameters to make sure that the data was accurate. I eliminated: the first pitch of each plate appearance so that I wouldn't get the time between each PA; all pitches with runners on base since the data doesn't detect pick-off attempts; and all intervals of either 0 seconds or greater than 1 minute since they either represent either an error in the data or a game delay. The quickest worker on the Yankees so far this year is Dustin Moseley, who takes an average of 18.3 seconds between each pitch. Joba Chamberlain is the slowest, averaging almost 26 seconds. The data looked realistic, but all I had to compare it to was one 2008 article by Mike Fast on his blog, in which he displayed the pitch times for the pitchers of all 30 teams. I got in touch with Mike a few days ago, and it seems like we're using similar parameters. For the Yankee pitchers who have pitched in 2008 and 2010, here is how my data compares to Mike's:

Name	2008 Time (in seconds)	2010 Time (in seconds)
A.J. Burnett	24.7	24.7
Andy Pettitte	22.1	22.3
Boone Logan	21.4	23.5
CC Sabathia	23.7	24.5
Chad Gaudin	20.6	20.8
Chan Ho Park	22.8	22.8
Damaso Marte	21.5	22.9
Dustin Moseley	22.7	18.3
Javier Vazquez	22.9	23.2
Joba Chamberlain	25.1	25.9
Kerry Wood	20.7	20.5
Mariano Rivera	22.7	21.4
Phil Hughes	25.1	23.5

It looks legit. This is pretty exciting. I'll do a lot more with this in the future.

Further reading: Mike Fast did another article on pitch times, this one for The Hardball Times, in 2008.

Observations, rhetorical questions, and a lack of answers about Chamberlain

Watching Joba Chamberlain pitch out of the bullpen this year, I've made some observations. Three platoon-related things that I've recently been thinking about are ...

a) He really likes to throw outside fastballs, both to lefties and righties

b) For some reason, he throws harder against righties

c) I feel more confident in his abilities when he's facing righties

What I see/remember and what the facts are frequently differ, so I decided to check out some pitch data on Chamberlain this year to see if what I thought meshed with reality. First, the pitch locations. This chart shows the approximated frequencies (smoothed by Excel trendlines) of Chamberlain's four-seamer location to righties (blue) and lefties (red).

The peaks of both curves are both on the outer half of the plate. This is pure speculation - Chamberlain led the majors in hit batsmen last year with 12, and quite possibly got a reputation for being a head-hunter after his really weird beanball thing with Kevin Youkilis (there were also minor incidents with Jason Bay and Evan Longoria last year). Is it possible that he's trying to shake that label by pitching inside less? Well, before putting any stock in that whatsoever, I looked back at his 2009 data to see if there were similar trends among pitch location. Turns out there were, though they were less exaggerated:

Maybe there's something to it. Chamberlain hasn't hit anyone this year, and he's one of only six relievers with a minimum of 50 IP with that distinction. Moving on ...

I had a suspicion that Joba was throwing his hardest against same-handed batters. Whatever the reason, that is in fact the case:

+--------------+--------------+

|FF mph to RHB-|FF mph to LHB-|

+----------------+------------+

|----94.97-----|----94.02-----|

+--------------+--------------+

This leads in nicely to my final point about Chamberlain - I've just been feeling better recently when he faces right-handers. But why? Here are a few splits.

+------+-----+-----+--------+------------+------------+------------+

|------|K/9--|BB/9-|GB Rate-|Whiff Rate--|Chase Rate--|Zone Rate---|

+------+-----+-----+--------+------------+------------+------------+

|vs RHB|9.31-|2.79-|.506----|.240--------|.323--------|.523--------|

+------+-----+-----+--------+------------+------------+------------+

|vs LHB|9.78-|3.52-|.484----|.182--------|.282--------|.391--------|

+------+-----+-----+--------+------------+------------+------------+

Alright, but those averages are skewed by the different pitch mix against righties and lefties:

+----------+------------+------------+------------+------------+

|----------|Pitch%------|Whiff Rate--|Chase Rate--|Zone Rate---|

+----------+------------+------------+------------+------------+

|FF vs RHB-|.591--------|.138--------|.288--------|.566--------|

+----------+------------+------------+------------+------------+

|FF vs LHB-|.722--------|.078--------|.211--------|.407--------|

+----------+------------+------------+------------+------------+

|SL vs RHB-|.372--------|.366--------|.384--------|.453--------|

+----------+------------+------------+------------+------------+

|SL vs LHB-|.157--------|.432--------|.615--------|.361--------|

+----------+------------+------------+------------+------------+

Now we're getting somewhere. Chamberlain has better control against right-handers, as evidenced by the lower walk rate and higher strikezone rate for the fastball. The whiff rate for the fastball is much better to righties. Is that directly caused by the better velocity? And is better velocity due to being in more pitcher's counts? These are questions that are tough to answer, particularly given the small sample sizes. The slider looks like a more effective pitch to lefties for some reason, but he only goes to is 16% of the time - again, this is probably related to worse control. Maybe the pitch's effectiveness against lefties is due to the limited sample? Would being in hitters' counts more make him go to the slider more? That's a lot of questions that I don't really have answers to. That's for Chamberlain and Jorge Posada to figure out.

So, in conclusion, it looks like there actually was something to those three observations, but trying to rationalize them can get very confusing ...

Data is from MLBAM and Fangraphs.

Marcum's curveball was MIA against the A's

Just a quick note on something that I found interesting. Jays' starter Shaun Marcum pitched a brilliant game yesterday against the Athletics, going the distance while allowing only one hit (a homer to lead off the 7th) and one walk while striking out five. While following the game last night, I noticed that he wasn't throwing his curveball. It seemed particularly odd for him since he's not a hard-thrower. I looked back at his data this morning and it appears that this was the first game all year in that Marcum did not mix in a curveball. His mix of fastballs (straight, cutting, sinking), changeups, and sliders only gave him a range of about 10 mph from 78 to 88; I've also seen him drop the change into the low 70s from time to time, which he did not do yesterday. Marcum hadn't allowed a hit for the first 6 innings, so it might have been a matter of sticking with what worked for the first part of the game.

Gameday data is from MLB Advanced Media. By the way, Marcum's a very interesting pitcher given his ability to change speeds and inability to blow hitters away with his fastball. His repertoire certainly deserves a greater look.

Hughes' declining strikeout rate

Phil Hughes picked up his 14th win of the season yesterday, allowing three runs in six innings to beat the Royals. He didn't record a single strikeout in the start, which is something he had only done one other time in his career (a 1 2/3 inning effort against the Orioles in 2009). Hughes' strikeouts per 9 innings rate now sits at 7.35, which is the lowest it's been all season. Through May, it was around 9, and through June it was in the 8s. Yet, Hughes has maintained a similar rate of contact throughout the season. I've prepared a two-axis graph with one side showing cumulative K/9 and the other showing cumulative whiff rate (swings-and-misses per swings), centered around approximated league averages for both metrics. I find plotting whiff rate and strikeouts to be significant since swing and misses correlate well with strikeouts.

Other than his first two starts of the season (the second of which was a 10 strikeout, 1 hit performance against the A's), his whiff rate has not seen the decline that his strikeout rate has --- in fact, his whiff rate is currently slightly higher now than it was in the middle of May. So, to me, it appears that the recent dip is more of a typical regression than a decline in ability.

Gameday data is from MLBAM.