Take a minute to browse the Fangraphs leaderboards. They let you look at league leaders for just about every stat you can imagine from the basic stats like batting average or ERA to the more interesting and obscure stats like first pitch strike rate or infield fly percentage.
As awesome as all of those non-conventional stats are, though, my favorites are the pitch values. Recorded as wFB/C, for example, they essentially rate the effectiveness of a pitcher’s specific pitch per 100 pitches thrown (thats the “/C” part). Here are the leaders and laggers for 2011 for each pitch Fangraphs tracks (minimum 50 innings pitched).
Fastball
Best: Cory Leubke, SD (2.75)
Worst: Sean O’Sullivan, KC (-3.71)
You’d think that the best fastballs in the league would belong to the preeminent starters the game has to offer. That’s not necessarily the case. Check out the top 10 so far this season:
- Cory Leubke, SD (2.75)
- Jonny Venters, ATL (2.27)
- Ryan Vogelsong, SF (1.92)
- Jonny Cueto, CIN (1.81)
- Erik Bedard, SEA (1.80)
- Justin Verlander, DET (1.78)
- Tyler Clippard, WAS (1.78)
- Jered Weaver, LAA (1.74)
- Alfredo Aceves, BOS (1.73)
- Jair Jurrjens, ATL (1.70)
Cutter
Best: Josh Beckett, BOS (3.06)
Worst: Ryan Vogelsong (-4.45)
Beckett began featuring the cutter more prominently last season, throwing it 15.3 percent of the time. Prior to 2010 he had thrown it just 5.1 percent of the time in 2009, 2.1 percent of the time in 2008 and never more than 0.2 percent of the time in any other year. It was a pitch Beckett really worked on last year and into this year, however it took until this season for him to really master it. As a result he’s taken his game to a level we’ve never seen before a la Cole Hamels. Hamels introduced a cutter to his repertoire in 2009 but, like Beckett, it only rated as an average offering. This year Hamels’ cutter rates as well above average and he’s gone from a pitcher with a mid-3.00s FIP to a pitcher with a mid-2.00s FIP and Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee‘s co-co-ace.
Vogelsong mixes in his cutter 11.3 percent of the time, about half as much as his curveball and just as much as his change-up. Both of those pitches rate as above average. His cutter is the worst in the league.
Slider
Best: Jonny Venters, ATL (4.96)
Worst: Jeff Niemann (-6.59)
Ricky Romero had a lower wSL/C than Niemann (that’s what these numbers are if you’ve been confused this whole time), but he only throws his slider 1.4 percent of the time. Fangraphs records Romero as having thrown 1,959 pitches this season, which equates to just 27 sliders. That’s not a very large sample size, so I removed it from the rankings. Niemann throws his slider 9.6 percent of the time. Perhaps he should throw it less.
Curveball
Best: Tim Hudson, ATL (3.84)
Worst: Mike Pelfrey, NYM (-5.79)
For his career, Hudson’s curveball is slightly below average (-0.70), which makes it very interesting that he’s displaying a career-best curve this season. Charlie Morton has the second best curveball this year (3.39). Morton’s slider and changeup also rate as above average, and it’s the first year he’s had more than one pitch rate in the black. Are you surprised he’s having a career year?
On the other end of the spectrum, Pelfrey, Ted Lilly and Jon Lester have the three worst curves this season for all pitchers that throw it on a somewhat regular basis. I almost excluded Pelfrey from this list because he throws the hook just 4.7 percent of the time, but that works out to 90 curveballs thrown this season and his wCB/C (-5.79) is a lot worse than either Lilly’s (-3.29) or Lester’s (-3.08).
Change-up
Best: Felix Hernandez (3.86)
Worst: Gavin Floyd (-4.90)
Jorge de la Rosa had the best change-up on the season (4.32), but he’s out for the rest of the year so I didn’t think it was fit he remain atop the list. Kyle McClellan checked in at number two (4.24), but he only throws it 9.6 percent of the time whereas Hernandez throws it 20.4 percent of the time. Interestingly, Clippard’s change-up rates as the fourth best in the league (3.59), which gives him the fourth best change-up and the seventh-best fastball. It shouldn’t be shocking he was an All-Star this season with a 1.82 ERA and a .147 OBA. He combines to throw those pitches 85.6 percent of the time with fantastic results.
There were a lot of pitchers in the running for “worst change-up” but in the end I decided Floyd had the best combination of poor results and pitch frequency. Brett Myers and C.J. Wilson also had terrible change-up ratings, but they weren’t quite as bad as Floyd’s even though they threw it slightly more often.
