JAMMED EYELIDS

Introduction For those familiar with the integration of technology in today's game, you have probably heard of the term "pitch design" before. Pitch design has become somewhat of a blanket term used to describe the pitch development processes that range from tweaking an existing pitch in an effort to increase its effectiveness to the introduction of an entirely new pitch to a pitcher's arsenal.  There has been some controversy on the semantics of the term that has centered around the idea of whether a completely "new pitch" can actually be created. This is not the idea that the term is supposed to evoke. To some degree, any type of manipulation that a pitcher imparts on a pitch creates a movement profile that has likely been thrown by someone, somewhere, at some point in time at least once, if not millions of times, before. But to "design" a pitch in the sense that most of us use "pitch design," it is simply the process of attempti...

The other day, I came across a Pitcher List  article  by Michael Augustine that talked about Bauer Units and how the concept can have real world application with samples of MLB pitchers. First, a quick review of  Bauer Units . BU = spin rate (RPM) / velocity (MPH) This normalizes the effect of spin on a fastball relative to velocity for comparison among pitchers. The league average Bauer Units is 24. The higher the Bauer Units, the more "hop" or "rise" is perceived on a fastball, and the lower the Bauer Units, the more "sink" on a fastball. One of the players in Augustine's sample of pitchers with average Bauer Units was the Yankees' Luis Severino, who notched an average of 24.31 BUs on his 4-seam FB through August of 2018. The article went on to explain how, essentially, Severino had more success living  lower  in the zone but that it didn't mean much considering his OBA on FBs alone (.273) was not very impressive. What could have c...