Pitch Metrics: An Introduction

At Optimum Athletes, we have recently incorporated Trackman technology in day to day training for our pitching and hitting athletes. The move to Trackman has allowed us to accurately understand how our athletes are developing and gives us a better metric datapoint to help optimize their game.

Now that we have the ability to track the spin of the baseball coming out of pitchers’ hands, we know exactly how much movement each pitch has. There is no more guessing if the pitch was good or not just based on what we see with our eyes. We have objective data that shows us why some pitchers have a “rising fastball” or a “frisbee slider”.

This is one of my better high vertical break fastballs at 97 mph.

Adam Ottovino displaying a disgusting frisbee slider.

Optimizing your pitches is a major part of what makes you a good pitcher. So it's important to understand what makes your pitch move the way it does in order to make adjustments to make it better. 

Pitch metrics are used all over professional and college baseball. Scouts don't just want to see how hard someone is throwing or how many outs they get in a game. They are asking to see the movement profile of all of your pitches. “How much vertical break does his fastball have? How much horizontal break does his slider have?” These are some of the questions that have become important for some college and professional scouts to ask when scouting a player. I've even seen a scout with a big league team say that he stopped scouting a pitcher who didn't have the fastball profile he was looking for. That team looks for specific types of fastball movements in pitchers and sometimes don't even bother continuing scouting guys that don't have what they are looking for.

An example of vertical and horizontal pitch movement generated by Trackman from a player bullpen (IT WAS NICK MEARS).

All of these numbers aren’t just for pitchers to understand. A large part of scouting reports for hitters in professional baseball is knowing what kind of movement the pitcher they are facing. They are given all of the movement numbers for every single pitcher that they will be facing in a series. Looking at the numbers will tell them exactly if the pitcher throws a “carry fastball” or a “sinking fastball”, a “sweep slider” or a “12/6 curveball” etc. This helps hitters know what to expect when they step into the box without having to guess what a “big breaking ball” looks like. They have data to tell them exactly how “big” it's going to be. 

In the next few weeks I will be going over the different types of pitch movements and how we can optimize each one of our pitches using them. Check out the next part of the series, Vertical and Horizontal Movement coming next week.