Diamondbacks 7, Tigers 6 - Coke Flat, Homer Hoppin' in Diamondbacks Comeback Victory

They forgot about the runner on third. As soon as he stumbles over the mound, the Giants win. Granted they probably would have walked off anyway but you have to know when the let the ball drop. Huff might have grounded into a double play on the next pitch.

Because he’s Brad Penny.

What I wish for Burroughs, at this point, is for him to be consistently spectacular at Triple-A again, and then get packaged as part of a trade to some other team. I don’t see us ever calling him up again after the performance he gave us, but he is still a good guy and a good baseball player and might have a chance with another organization.

Because if not, I would be very leery of DFAing him unless we are going to trade immediately for at least a #4 starter. I’m more bullish on Collmenter than a lot of folks here, but something like that only comes along once a season, if that. At any moment we might have to send Collmenter to the ‘pen, Saunders might start to suck again, and then we have a gaping hole in our rotation, with only Owings and Corbin to fill it. I’d rather have Duke in there even if half his starts are bad — the bullpen can fill in when necessary.

But yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing him go if we had a viable trade in the offing.

the horizontal x vertical movement graph actually doesn’t tell you anything about the pitch being bad

the “movement” graph doesn’t actually measure real movement the way you are thinking about it. what it measures is movement relative to a spinless ball thrown. and since it’s a breaking ball, it’s probably not supposed to have any spin. sliders almost always have zero vertical movement, because they are vertically “spinless” if you will. some sliders do have horizontal movement, but many pitchers will throw horizontally “spinless” sliders as well. anyway, I looked at the rest of Purcey’s pitches, and he actually only threw four sliders the whole outing.

http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfxVB/pfx.php?s_type=3&sp_type=1&batterX=0&month=06&day=24&game=gid_2011_06_24_arimlb_detmlb_1%2F&year=2011&pitchSel=453515&prevGame=gid_2011_06_24_arimlb_detmlb_1%2F

if you look at the sliders he threw, the movement on the HR pitch isn’t any different than the movement on his other sliders, which all turned out fine. really, the question here shouldn’t be about movement, but about location.

when you look at the location, you see that ordinarily it’s not a terrible pitch. very inside, but that can oftentimes jam a hitter. the problem is, the pitch is up (which I highly doubt he intended for a slider) and we’re talking about Wily Mo Pena, who’s got some crazy bat speed, and throwing an inside hanging slider to a 28-year-old who has the bat speed to turn on it and whack it out of the park is probably not a great idea

just wanted to clear up the pitch f/x analysis :)

I’m not expecting Pena to do anything against Verlander tonight. That’s not the kind of player he is. This is why I see him as primarily a bench bat. If you are facing a pitcher (reliever) with control issues (Guti) or a mechanics problem (Heilman), you bring in Pena and he will hit some home runs off that pitcher. Against pitchers with perfect control he is terrible, but you make even one mistake against him and you are looking for your ball in the stands.

And that was a very big homer.

for posting the above in the wrong place. It should be up about 6 spots.

yeah, i’ll try to find an article showing you a normal distribution of spin motion on a breaking ball (both curveball and slider)…..but in case i can’t find it i’ll try to just explain it myself first

fundamentally, the spin of the ball isn’t able to characterize a pitch as good or bad. in reality, location is the only thing that matters for a pitch. of course spin affects location, but everything else does too, including velocity, release point, gravity, among others. the best example is this: let’s say a pitcher throws a ball at 50 mph with no spin, and a pitcher throws another ball at 100 mph with no spin. on the horizontal mov’t vs. vertical mov’t graph, those pitches end up in the exact same location on the graph, because the graph only measures how much the pitch moved compared to how it would have moved with no spin. on the other hand, in reality, the 50 mph pitch ends up in the dirt about ten feet away from home plate or something, and the 100 mph pitch ends up painting the strike zone (i actually have no idea what the actual locations are, but hopefully you get my point), because the force of the velocity counters for the force of gravity more in the 100 mph pitch.

the Purcey example is actually a perfect example of why you can’t read the chart at the top and assume it has a correct breakdown of pitches. those charts are based off a weird algorithm that is based off numerous factors (pitch movement, pitch location, pitch release point, etc.) that isn’t always accurate. instead, reading the clusters shows you exactly what type of pitch was thrown, and how often. when you look at the cluster graphs (of some type of movement vs. velocity) you’ll see that Purcey throws three types of pitches, a four-seam fastball (which can vary its horizontal movement based on pitchers, but should always have a positive vertical movement because it’s thrown with topspin), a two-seam fastball which has slightly less velocity than the four-seam fastball, and a breaking ball (that in Purcey’s case, doesn’t have any real spin, horizontal or vertical)

just trying to show another example of why spin can’t tell you a ball is bad. fastballs always have topspin (imagine your self releasing a fastball, and as the ball curls through your hand and leaves your finger tips the latest at the top, you can see the fastball generate a topspin as it leaves your hand) and thus will always have positive vertical movement on a movement graph. on the other hand, despite this, many many fastballs end up being bad fastballs that are located smack down in the middle of the zone and get launched for home runs.

Sorry, this was the only article I could find. Gives a brief description of sliders, and how some pitchers throw spinless sliders, which are nothing new. There’s a better table out there, that actually graphs a normal distribution of sliders and all major pitches and their movements (depending on pitcher). But here you go!

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/pitch-identification-tutorial/