Prospect Stuff Study

PitchFX is a wonderful thing.

Every time any pitcher throws a pitch at a big league stadium, we get some pretty good data that quantifies his performance. In preparation for our end-of-the-year top 25 pitching prospect list, I began gathering some PitchFX data this evening. What started as some basic notes turned into the monster of a list below. The list is of the 10 pitchers who have thrown in the bigs this year but still figure to enter 2010 as prospects.

Methods

All of the data below was gathered using the outstanding PitchFX tool from brooksbaseball.net.

Note that the overall swing-through data for individuals as well as starters and relievers is purely an average of the data. Stupid, I know. By the time I realized that I should be counting swing-throughs, I was already about 40 outings deep into this research. But things actually evened out pretty well; you can always perform your own quick estimations.

Velocity ranges are estimated and rounded down. The fastball ranges should be pretty accurate, but secondary ranges may be a little off.

I need to throw out some giant disclaimers:

1. We're still dealing with tiny samples on each of these pitchers.
2. PitchFX data isn't flawless. I did make some minor tweaks for pitches that I believe were incorrectly categorized.
3. I attempted to list data for each outing when the pitcher recorded three or more outs.
4. Make sure to check out my notes at the bottom of the list.

Rankings

Here are some pitch rankings based off of my interpretations of this LIMITED data:

Fastball

1. Neftali Feliz
2. Antonio Bastardo
3. Brian Matusz
4. Aaron Poreda
5. Jhoulys Chacin

6. Daniel Hudson
7. Carlos Carrasco
8. Wade Davis
9. Jon Niese
10. Madison Bumgarner

I intentionally put in the gap between Chacin and Hudson as a divider. These ranks are based off of swing-throughs generated and velocity.

Changeup

1. Jhoulys Chacin
2. Brian Matusz
3. Carlos Carrasco
4. Daniel Hudson
5. Madison Bumgarner

It's hard to judge these changeups because pitchers don't typically throw many changeups and we have small samples.

Curveball

1. Neftali Feliz
2. Carlos Carrasco
3. Brian Matusz
4. Jhoulys Chacin
5. Jon Niese

Feliz has only thrown a couple of curveballs per outing, but he has gotten swing-throughs five of the 20 times he's thrown the pitch. Matusz threw a lot of curveballs in his final three outings this season -- after hardly throwing the pitch in his first five -- and had success. Wade Davis has just one swing-through with his curve, though he has thrown it 23 times. Still, this isn't enough data to rule out his curve as above-average.

Slider

1. Brian Matusz
2. Aaron Poreda
3. Jhoulys Chacin
4. Neftali Feliz
5. Antonio Bastardo

Matusz has four potential above-average pitches. It's really not fair.

 

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