Best and worst pitches on the sox

[southsider2k5]

Cool article, click the link to get the charts.

 

http://www.csnchicago.com/09/04/11/Sale-Sa...47246655268-914

 

By Brett Ballantini

CSNChicago.com White Sox Insider

 

I recently sat down with Chicago White Sox reliever Chris Sale to discuss his slider, which hit the majors full-force last August, when he revealed it to one of the best hitters in the game, Joe Mauer, and whiffed him with three straight sliders in one of his first appearances in the majors.

 

It’s a foregone conclusion that Sale’s slider is one of the most wicked pitches in the White Sox arsenal, but is it the fiercest on the staff?

 

I took a look at the dozen regulars in the rotation and pen and studied their runs saved per 100 pitches, a stat you can ferret out yourself over at FanGraphs, and came up with the top 10 White Sox “out” pitches.

 

It bodes well for Sale when and if he eventually joins the rotation that his changeup—which GM Ken Williams raved over during his very first interview about Sale back June 2010—is even more effective than his killer slider. But in a nod to how strong that slider is, Sale has shifted about seven percent of fastballs thrown in 2010 to sliders in 2011.

Perhaps the most laudatory pitches in the top 10, however, come from Crain and Santos at No. 6 and No. 7, because to have a bread and butter pitch like a fastball actually be an effective tool for outs speaks to the bite their fastballs have.

 

Will Ohman’s curve is actually the third-most effective pitch on the team, albeit in a small (5.19 runs saved although just 0.6 percent of his pitches) sample size. I asked him whether he had even thrown a curve this season, figuring another pitch might have been erroneously noted as a curve, and it was in Ohman’s long relief stint in the Aug. 3, 18-7 blowout vs. the New York Yankees where the lefty broke the pitch out. As a routine pitch, Ohman can’t handle throwing the curve given two arm surgeries, he said, but in that circumstances, it was necessary to get him through the outing.

 

Matt Thornton possesses two of the most-hittable pitches on the team this season, with 19.49 runs saved having thrown just a handful of changeups. He appears to have lost the bite on his slider, not just because it has cost the White Sox -4.99 runs, but in that he is throwing it just 3.9 percent of the time, as opposed to 12.9 percent for his career. Overall, the slider has been (barely) a negative pitch for Thornton in his career (-0.29 runs) but as recently as 2009 it was a pitch that saved him 2.94 runs. For the first time in his career, Thornton appears to be throwing a cutter (8.2 percent of pitches), but it isn’t working; similar to the slider, Thornton’s cutter registers as -4.21 runs, the worst on the staff.

 

Josh Kinney hasn’t pitched enough to include in this survey, but his most effective pitch this season has been a slider that is saving 2.10 runs—and not coincidentally, he’s throwing it four percent more than he has in his career.

 

On a similar note, Santos has struggled with his changeup (-3.02 runs) and thus has thrown it just half as often this season, while the team’s top pitch, his slider, is being thrown 10 percent more often.

 

For those who think Floyd is just a phenom arm in a surfer’s body, consider this—his most effective pitch this season, and the fourth strongest on the team (cutter, 2.45 runs) is a pitch he has never thrown before in his career. He appears to have traded in his slider (0.85 runs saved in his career) for the cutter, and the one-year returns make it look like a savvy move.

 

Jake Peavy has scuffled this year and doesn’t show up on the top pitches list, but one interesting note is that in spite of his arm still in rehab mode, his velocity is almost imperceptibly down (fastball 91.6 mph career, 90.7 in 2011), with all his 2011 pitches combining to be thrown at around 0.5 mph slower than his career velocity.

 

Rookie Zach Stewart also has a small sample size, but the early returns suggest ditching his curve (-7.76 runs, thrown 6.5 percent of the time) for his changeup (1.15 runs save, thrown 4.3 percent of the time).

 

Phil Humber is one of the most incredible stories of this fading White Sox season, and a key element of his success was his work with pitching coach Don Cooper on a slider, which Humber last threw in the majors—to much less success—in 2006 (-0.27 runs, thrown 16.7 percent of the time. Under Cooper’s tutelage, Humber’s slider is the White Sox’s 11th most effective pitch, saving 1.30 runs in 2011 while being thrown with the same (16.7 percent) frequency.

 

Buehrle has told us all about perceiving greater velocity on his curve, Chicago’s fifth most effective pitch in 2011 at 2.09 runs saved. While in truth he’s added just one mph to the pitch, his curve is the most effective it has been since 2002, when it saved the White Sox 1.91 runs.

 

The numbers indicate it is less effective than his changeup, but Danks is throwing ten percent more cutters this season, and it is a plus-pitch (0.13 runs saved), the team’s third-most effective cutter behind Floyd and Buehrle.

 

Not to end on a bum note, but here are the five least effective pitches for the White Sox so far in 2011, applying the same minimum five percent of pitches standard as the list above:

 

 

Brett Ballantini is CSNChicago.com’s White Sox Insider. Follow him @CSNChi_Beatnik on Twitter for up-to-the-minute Sox information.

[Balta1701]

A 0.9 mph decrease in your fastball over the course of a full season is not "Imperceptibly down."

[Rowand44]

Nice and scary(for the opposition) to see this backed up with statistics: "It bodes well for Sale when and if he eventually joins the rotation that his changeup—which GM Ken Williams raved over during his very first interview about Sale back June 2010—is even more effective than his killer slider."

 

Keep him healthy and Chris is going to be a top of the rotation starter.