One of a Kind
Posted by Michael.
I wasn’t fortunate enough to ever get to watch Niekro, and was pretty young when Candiotti was still pitching, so the only knuckleballers that I’ve watched with any kind of critical eye have been Charlie Hough and Tim Wakefield. I remember being transfixed when (I think it was) Fox debuted their super-slow-mo camera showing Hough’s knuckler as it dodged and darted, and so with Wake coming just a few outs short of a no-no a couple days ago, I decided to delve into PitchF/X and see what I could do.
Turns out that process was a lot easier than expected, thanks to Dan Brooks. I still want to write my own PFX tool, but for this post I’ll get started with his stuff.
What’s amazing about Wake is that when he’s on, he’s able to control this ball that essentially travels 50 feet and then is a study in random walks. Let’s start with perhaps the most basic of PitchF/X charts, showing the strike zone superimposed on each pitch’s location (marked as a ball, strike, or put in play (X):
So, this wasn’t a case of Ron Kulpa getting fooled into calling strikes; Wake seemed to have pretty good control of the thing.
Anyway, now let’s look at one of my favorite charts, showing the horizontal and vertical movement of Wake’s pitches:
What’s so fancy about that? Well, nothing, it looks like a random mess of splatter-paint, but that’s exactly the point! For comparison, here’s what Houston’s Mike Hampton did that same night, with a more conventional arsenal:
… where here you can see each type of pitch and how it moves – the four-seam fastball (FF) stays up relative to the two-seamer (FT), his big-breaking curve is rather distinct from his slider, and note that one reason for his success on Tuesday night was that his change-up had movement very similar to the two-seamer.
So with that comparison, you see why I love the blind-man-with-a-paintball-gun result of Wake’s Break Chart. Up, Down, Left, Right, it was moving all over… and big kudos to our rookie backstop Kottaras for handling both the weight of the moment and the bite of the knuckler.