Pitching by the Numbers: Pitch dominance

Elite skills translate into elite production and fantasy stats. For pitchers, the best way to measure skills is to look at the pitches in their repertoire and assess how dominant they rank by measuring how frequently batters swing and miss at them.

Our first fastball list is dominated by relievers, mostly because relievers throw relatively few pitches per outing and thus can put more effort into each one. So we've supplemented it in the text that follows.

The best starters (miss rate in parentheses): Brandon Beachy (11.5%), Scott Baker (10.8%), Michael Pineda (10.5%), Brandon Morrow (10%), David Price (9.6%).

No need to detail relievers anymore because there are plenty of starters represented on the remaining charts. There have been closers who have been changeup specialists (Keith Foulke the chief among them). But generally baseball people do not want their short men relying on a feel pitch when the game may be on the line with the first batter faced.

The guy who jumps out is Volquez, who is obviously in the best pitching environment in the game now, too. His ability to make batters miss his changeup is a really strong buy sign for me.

There are algorithms used to identify pitch types and sometimes the distinction between a cutter and good moving fastball can be tricky. It was only 15 years ago when Mariano Rivera pretty much put the pitch on the map. Now everyone throws it. Note that the Red Sox have three pitchers in their rotation who feature the pitch. I wonder if you want pitch-dominance diversity on a staff (with secondary pitches). But at least Lester throws it from the left side (generally, cutters are more effective against opposite-side hitters).

This is a high risk/high reward pitch given the strain that it puts on the elbow, especially. Relievers seem to be able to get away with high rates, but starters who throw it more than 30 percent of the time make me a little queasy. Kershaw, though, is 25.5%, so I would not discount him for this (or anything, as he's going to be the most valuable player, not just pitcher, in most formats this year and especially innings-capped Yahoo! leagues).

I had an AL East scout tell me a few years ago when discussing Phil Hughes that he didn't like that Hughes's best pitch was his curve because, he asked rhetorically, "How many curveball specialists are there nowadays?" There's no doubt that the usage of the pitch is declining relative to a generation ago when it was the second most utilized offering (hence the the two fingers catchers use to call for it). But the effectiveness of it generally seems to have taken a hit, too, when we look at the best practitioner of it today, A.J. Burnett. Who wants him? Roy Halladay uses it a lot, too. He can get away with umpires calling it a strike, maybe, because they get into the habit with him of calling everything a strike. But if umpires are not giving the high strike, pitchers who throw it need to generate misses and you see how much easier it is for hitters to make contact on this pitch than on the more radically moving, higher-velocity slider.

Michael Salfino (Twitter @MichaelSalfino) is a quantative sports analyst whose writing regularly appears in the Wall Street Journal.