Think about Baseball

Danny Young New York Mets pitcher Danny Young’s Baseball Savant movement profile is as follows. He throws a sinker and a sweeper with significant horizontal movement from a low arm angle. He’s a pitcher with an interesting pitch mix. It’s clear that he confuses hitters more with differences in horizontal movement between pitches rather than vertical movement. Horizontal vs. Vertical Movement Differences This gave me an idea. I looked into which pitchers have the greatest differences in horizontal movement and which in vertical movement when pairing their pitches two by two. As previously seen, Danny Young falls into the former category. The image above shows the movement profile of Cubs pitcher Caleb Thielbar in 2020. Unlike Danny Young mentioned earlier, he features a four-seam fastball and curveball combination from a high arm angle. He falls into the latter category, characterized by a large difference in vertical movement. Based on data from 2020 to 2025 for pitchers who faced at l...

 The legendary Major League pitcher Warren Spahn once said, “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” This statement perfectly captures the essence of both pitching and hitting. A pitch that disrupts a batter’s timing is one that is difficult to react to. So, what kind of pitches are hard to react to? It could be an extremely fast pitch, or a very slow one. But more importantly, it could be a pitch that’s difficult to predict. In this article, I use entropy to simply calculate the randomness of Major League pitchers. Method 1 Here’s how I calculated randomness: I calculated the entropy of each pitcher’s pitch usage rates by pitch type. Then, I normalized each pitcher’s entropy score between 0 and 1 to obtain a “pitch usage entropy score.” The more pitch types a pitcher uses, and the more evenly they’re distributed, the higher this score becomes. I selected every pair of pitch types a pitcher throws (for  n  pitch types, there are nC2 combinations), calculated the...