What’s the most exciting play in baseball?
The answer will depend on who you ask. Some may feel that watching a long home run fly over the wall is the best, others will say it’s watching a player leg out a triple or making an incredible defensive play.
You know what’s making a strong charge toward the top of this list, though? Watching pitchers unleash absolutely filthy pitches while on the mound. We can thank the Pitching Ninja for opening our eyes to the ridiculous things hurlers do on a daily basis.
With that in mind — along with the All-Star break coming right around the corner — we were wondering what some of the most and least valuable pitches have been thus far in 2019 for starting pitchers. This was determined by using FanGraphs’ pitch values on a per-100-pitch basis, which helps standardize the data used.
We looked at five different pitch categories (fastball, cutter, curveball, slider, and changeup). For a starter to appear here, he’s had to throw the pitch at least 5.0% of the time while on the mound and also qualify for the ERA title. All pitch values are current prior to Wednesday’s games.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
