This Week’s Fastest and Slowest Secondary Pitches for Whiffs

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:

Here, moreover, is the fastest secondary pitch of the week — in this case, a splitter thrown by White Sox right-hander Maikel Cleto at 92.3 mph to Austin Jackson on Wednesday:

And here’s that same pitch, but in slower motion, such as to reveal the surprisingly considerable downward vertical movement.

And here’s the final stanza from a poem by Charles Baudelaire that concerns a shooting gallery located right next to a cemetery, for some reason, and which also concerns life’s calamitous brevity, probably:

[B]eneath a sun which scorched the brain, and in that atmosphere charged with the ardent perfume of death, he heard a voice whispering out of the tomb where he sat. And this voice said: “Accursed be your rifles and targets, you turbulent living ones, who care so little for the dead in their divine repose! Accursed be your ambitions and calculations, importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter near the sanctuary of Death himself! Did you but know how easy the prize to win, how facile the end to reach, and how all save Death is naught, not so greatly would you fatigue yourselves, O ye laborious alive; nor would you so often vex the slumber of them that long ago reached the End—the only true end of life detestable!”