Mike Fast has been doing some great work at Baseball Prospectus this year, and today he continues it with a look at how the speed off of the bat affects balls in play for both hitters and pitchers. It can get pretty dense, but Fast does a good job explaining both where the sabermetric consensus on pitchers and balls in in play is today and where it can go with this sort of analysis, plus he’s promising a second, more extensive article. I’d highly recommend reading the whole thing, because it’s very interesting stuff.
The short version of it, though, is that pitchers do appear to have some control over how the speed off of the bat, which would imply that they also have some control over batting average on balls in play. They don’t have as much control over it as batters do (which is why stats like DIPS and FIP have been useful), but they do have some control. There’s obviously a lot more analysis to be done, relating these numbers back to performance, but it does look like it’s a big leap in understanding what pitchers can and can’t control on the mound.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
