I was reading an article on DRaysBay (SB Nation Rays' blog) the other day in which they put together a list of their 2011 pitchers and their pitches that caused the most swing and misses. So yeah, I'm stealing the idea from them, and I thought it would be cool post here. We aren't dealing with anything too advanced here, simply our pitchers' pitches that generated the highest whiffs per swing; or in other words, the nastiest pitches among the 2011 pitching staff. So let's check it out, broken down by starters and relievers, and sorted highest to lowest.

2011 Starting Pitchers (min. 100 IP)
PITCHER, PITCH TYPE, WHIFF/SWING%
1. Capuano, changeup, 39.57%
2. Gee, changeup, 36.55%
3. Gee, curveball, 34.88%
4. Capuano, slider, 33.00%
5. Niese, curveball, 26.98%

2011 Relief Pitchers (min. 30 IP)
PITCHER, PITCH TYPE, WHIFF/SWING%
1. K-Rod, changeup, 51.66%
2. Acosta, slider, 43.52%
3. Parnell, slider, 40.48%
4. K-Rod, curveball, 36.73%
5. Byrdak, slider, 34.76%

Other observations/thoughts:
- Mike Pelfrey's sinker was the un-whiffiest pitch among ALL pitches on the entire staff.

- K-Rod's changeup was ridiculous; a whiff for every other swing on it? That's incredible. I did not expect K-Rod's curve to rank that highly either.

- Acosta's slider was excellent; that's another I did not see ranking that highly.

- Gee's curveball may be the biggest surprise on the starter's group; he only threw 10% of the time, but it clearly induced a good amount of swings and misses. Jeremy Hellickson's curve was eerily similar in this department, throwing it just 11% of the time but getting a whiff per swing on it 34.43% of the time. Like Hellickson, it appears as if Gee has 2 good swing and miss offerings in the curve and changeup, further boosting my confidence that his strikeout rate will go up.

- Guess who had the whiffiest fastball? D.J. Carrasco. Yes, seriously. Byrdak was 2nd, Igarashi 3rd. For starters, Gee had the whiffiest fastball.

- Dickey's knuckleball had a swing and miss rate of 20.08%; his changeup (yes, he threw one) was over 30% but I did not include it since he threw it less than 5% of the time.

- Best slider among starters? Chris Capuano.

- I miss Chris Capuano.

How do some newcomers look?
- Francisco's best swing and miss pitch (in 2011) was his splitter, coming in at just under 33%. He also induced a swing and miss rate of 23.60% on his heater, not bad for a guy who threw his fastball a hair under 70% of the time.

- Rauch threw 5 different pitches last season but it was easily his curveball that was his whiffiest pitch at 33.33%, but he only threw it 8% of the time. Rauch depends most heavily on his slider as his go-to offspeed pitch, but he saw his whiff/swing rate on that pitch drop from 28.87% in 2010 to just 19.83% in 2011.

- Ramon Ramirez is good at missing bats. His slider whiff/swing rate came in at nearly 41% while his changeup came in at 35.71%.

Anyway, that's all I have. It'll be interesting to track some of these whiff rates in 2012, but that's just some perspective on which pitches were the nastiest in 2011 among (some former and some current) Mets.

Any surprises to you? Did you expect Capuano to have the nastiest pitch among starters? What about Gee's stuff; 3 pitches with whiff/swing rates greater than 20%, 2 of which were greater than 30%? Were you all stunned when saw Pelfrey's sinker was bad at inducing swings and misses? Kidding.

** All data is from Brooksbaseball.net, which is shaping up to be the best resource for PFX data on the internet. **

This furthers my hope that if gee can command his fastball better he can be a mid rotation starter.

Not supprised at all! Dillon Gee's stuff has been way underrated for a long time, even by him. If he gets back to attaching with it the way he used to he should have a very good year!
Nice article by the way.

I'm still skeptical of how differently Gee's curveball, a pitch he himself has criticized and said needs to improve, looks on this set of data vs. the Texas Leaguer set. Not saying either one is right or wrong, but I think maybe the lesson is that since he threw it so infrequently, a mis-characterization here and there may be able to skew those numbers a bit.

I feel very comfortable saying his changeup is a real good pitch. The numbers match the eye test there. But I'm not 100% ready to say I am a firm believer that the curve as it stands today is a plus pitch that he needs to uncork more in the same mold it was last year. I just don't remember it being that useful, mostly due to a lack of command of the pitch, which is more in line with the other set of data. The truth perhaps lies somewhere between.

Maybe this is already factored in, but wouldn't this stat be more useful with "ball rate" included? If a pitcher's pitch has a 40% K rate, but the pitcher can't keep it over the plate, it's not very useful.

How is it mis-characterized? Brooks Baseball folk manually sort the PFX data. IF anything, sites like Fangraphs, Texas Leaguers, and other non-manual PFX places are inaccurate since they go by MLB's classifications which are full of errors.

Also, Joe Leftkowitz's PFX database, which, like Texas Leaguers and such, is NOT manually edited, has Gee's curve with the following whiff/swing rates last year:

Vs RHB: 37.8%
Vs LHB: 28.6%

Rough average: 33.2% .. that's right in line with Brooks Baseball. Are you sure you're reading the right thing, and not whiff%? Whiff% and whiff/swing% are different.

In fact, looking at Texas Leaguers, they don't even have whiff/swing% as an individual stat.

I think what could skew your memory a bit is that Gee induced a swing at roughly 27% of his curveballs, which doesn't seem like much. Jon Niese, to compare, induced a swing on roughly 44% of his curves and Hellickson (who I keep bringing up) was at about 38%. So Gee might lag a little behind in that department, but when they DID swing at the pitch, he did a pretty good job of making them miss. I'm not saying it's a plus pitch or anything like that; I think he'd have to bump up the amount of swings on it for that to be true, but it's at least a positive sign he's shown he can miss bats with it.

Whoa. Wait a second. You're right; I'm comparing apples to oranges. We discussed whiff% the other day. I never went back and re-checked this data against what we discussed the other day but its totally different things.


However, now knowing this, my skepticism remains, and is in fact confirmed. Thae whiff/swing% totally skews its effectiveness by not taking into account whether the pitch was actually able to elicit swings often enough to use the good whiff/swing%. According to texas leaguer (again, just using this for consistency purposes), it only elicited swings 25% of the time. Since it was a pitch he threw for strikes less than 50% of the time, not like he was freezing guys with it left and right either.

I think this is the case of small sample noise that would not be replicated had a) he thrown the pitch more b) guys swung at it more and/or c) he put it in the strike zone more, which would make guys more honest with it.

Texas Leaguer has him throwing a total of just 243 curves. Only 106 of those were strikes. Only 63 were swung at, and only 21 were swung-and-missed.

The strong whiff rate on his changeup accounts for 121 swings-and-misses on 634 thrown. I think thats a lot easier to draw conclusions on than the curve.

Not trying to bash Texas Leaguers, or any other PFX database for that matter, but you should just use Brooks Baseball. It has everything you need and it is far more accurate with labeling pitch types since it's done manually.

You might also want to read the bottom part of my last post.

A quick perusal (and now I'm loving this Brooks Baseball site NMig so I'll blame you when I get fired) says there was no other pitch on the Mets starting staff that even really approached the low strike % and swing % that Gee's curve had. Closest competitors would be Niese's changeup, and we know about his issues with that pitch, and Dickey's "sinker" - which is usually thrown in a 3-0, taking, get-me-over type situation.

I think there is some factors in there that indicate that the whiff/swing thing is not necessarily a great tell of the pitch's effectiveness in this case.

I don't necessarily disagree. I wrote in my prior post: Jon Niese, to compare, induced a swing on roughly 44% of his curves and Hellickson (who I keep bringing up) was at about 38%. So yeah, Gee lags behind in that department, maybe skewing the numbers. I'm not saying it's a plus pitch or anything like that though; I think he'd have to bump up the amount of swings on it for that to be true, but it's at least a positive sign he's shown he can miss bats with it in some form.

I probably should have looked at swing% too (the DRaysBay article I saw didn't), but Gee's curve is probably the only outlier there. Good to know now.

And yeah, Brooks Baseball is awesome. From accurate classifications, velocity, game-by-game charts, and then all of the in-depth toys to play around with. Definitely the best PFX site on the internet.

Dickey's change up must be 10 mph fast than the knuckler.