Largely famous for his very celeritous fastball, Kansas City right-hander Yordano Ventura recorded six of his 10 strikeouts on Monday night against San Diego via his very sufficient curveball (box).
It’s not clear right now to what amusing and/or important ends this animated GIF will be used of Denard Span saying “Come on, man” to Cliff Lee in the fifth inning of tonight’s Washington-Philadelphia game (box). That those ends likely exist, however, entirely justifies the publishing of this post and, within it, the aforementioned GIF.
There a number of ways in which Daren Willman’s Baseball Savant site could be utilized but isn’t being utilized by the present author — largely because the main constraint with regards to that site isn’t its lack of possibilities, but rather the author’s lack of imagination.
Spending the last hour-plus within the sexy confines of that site hasn’t changed matters that considerably; however, it has compelled the author to produce the three GIFs below.
For what follows, what I’ve done is to identify both the fastest and slowest secondary pitches from the past week (i.e. since last Friday) which induced swinging strikes — where “secondary pitch” is defined, for the purposes of this exercise, as any pitch not classified as a four-seam, two-seam, or cut fastball by PITCHf/x.
Here, first, is the slowest secondary pitch of the week, an 0-0 curveball thrown at 62.2 mph by Paul Maholm to Charlie Culberson last Saturday that was actually classified as an eephus:
Manny Machado has just been activated from the disabled list. For this, he is a happy person. When people are happy, they express their feelings utilizing different channels. Some prefer smiling. Others, drinking. The most cavalier combine the two. Manny Machado chooses to please the Gods of his inner self with the help of the age-old, Kevin-Bacon-endorsed art of the dance. Behold.
This has been Baseball Players Twerking.
Because it’s impossible to watch every game — and sometimes even just one game — on any given day, it’s equally impossible to make a judgment as to which single pitch might have been that same day’s most transcendent one to have witnessed. And yet, one notes, such information might be the very thing to make this miserable life a slightly less miserable life.
With a view to addressing this suddenly urgent matter — and also with the assistance of this site’s Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank — the author has endeavored to develop a methodology by which to identify at least one of each day’s most transcendent pitches in a more or less objective fashion.
Said methodology follows, with almost nothing in the way of explanation, but no less wisdom for that reason.
1. Utilizing Baseball Savant’s PITCHf/x utility, search for every pitch from the previous day that (a) wasn’t a four-seam fastball, (b) was thrown with two strikes, and which proceeded to (c) produce either a swinging or called strike (and therefore a strikeout). (Click here for an example of this exact search for April 30).
Ready the sails
and fasten the cannons.
Stay the swabbing water.
A rasping of metal,
a yawning of lumber,
a rushing of sweet, warm winds —
the heavens don’t have enough space
for the mighty flying Venable.
H.M.S. Werth and her volleys be damned,
the suggestions of gravity and her laws be damned,
the thermodynamics and basic mathematics —
all of it be damned.
Send this vessel skyward,
make this Venable flying,
and they’ll remember that name.
It was the author’s intention, originally, to utilize a combination of Brooks Baseball’s very useful PITCHf/x game-log information and also MLB.TV to the end of reproducing in these pages the most transcendent of Corey Kluber’s pitches from his complete-game, 11-strikeout performance on Thursday (box).
Notably, however, that same dumb author’s body is currently located about 15 miles from the Spanish border in the Pyrenees. Beautiful, is one word it would make sense to use. Lacking in the highest-speed of internet, is another collection of words that are relevant in such a case.
In the place of that hypothetical GIF is the more real one embedded here — namely, of the only actual footage available to the author in this instance. Disappointment, is the thing that’s very clearly abounding.
As the many-worlds theory tells us, the Michael Pineda Pine Tar Incident has already happened in alternate universes, but with slight variation. Presented below — in GIF form — is one such variation.
You nasty, Alternate Michael Pineda.
Generally speaking, the tastes of the vulgar crowd are precisely the sort that ought to be ignored. In the case of George Springer, however — which Houston Astros prospect is distinctly compelling — the tastes of the vulgar crowd and also the tastes of those with more sophisticated interests appear to be entirely aligned.
There’s a certain sort of pain a ballplayer is compelled to endure as a result of striking out in a major-league game. There’s another sort of pain — a more immediate one, surely — which a ballplayer clearly is forced to tolerate on such an occasion as he’s hit by a pitched ball.
