How Halladay, Lincecum Get It Done

In case you haven’t heard, some folks are calling this the year of the pitcher. And the National League playoff will feature some of the best arms in the game, including Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, Tim Hudson, Aroldis Chapman and others.

Using Pitch f/x data — you can find out more about that here — we decided to take a look at these four hurlers and break down what makes them so nasty.

Halladay’s cutter

Halladay mixes and matches three effective pitches with movement: a mid-90s sinking two-seam fastball, a high-70s curveball and a low-90s cutter; he recently added a mid-80s changeup. Almost everything Halladay throws is a good pitch, but the cutter is his “out” pitch. He threw it more than 32 percent of the time this year — and got it for a strike more than 70 percent of the time.

To understand these graphs, think of them as a heat map. The “warmer” the color, the more often that’s where the ball is. It’s on a blue-red scale, where blue is “never” and red is “all the time.” So a yellow part of the plot would be a cluster of pitches in that specific area, while green is a smaller cluster.

Halladay’s cutter has a late, sharp sink to it, moving toward left-handed hitters and in the opposite direction of his sinker. With this type of movement, he uses the cutter more often against left-handed hitters, as the pitch gets in on their hands and is hard to drive. His new changeup gets batters to whiff more often, but the cutter puts the ball in play for easy groundouts.

Lincecum’s change

The Giants’ star is often complimented for the speed of his two-seam fastball given his height and weight — but Lincecum’s most deadly pitch is clearly the mid-80s changeup he throws 16.5 percent of the time against right-handed hitters and 25.8 percent of the time against left-handed hitters. Lincecum also has a high-70s curveball and a mid-80s slider that he mixes into his arsenal.

Lincecum gets right-handed hitters to whiff 25.4 percent of the time with his changeup, while left-handed hitters whiff 27.7 percent of the time on the same pitch both in and out of the strike zone. With both horizontal and vertical off-speed movement, Lincecum’s changeup is located slightly more inside to right-handed hitters than it is to left-handed hitters. It’s flat-out filthy.

Hudson’s sinker

Hudson throws two fastballs almost 70 percent of the time: a low-90s four-seam fastball and a high-80s, sinking two-seam fastball. On the other 30 percent of his pitches, Hudson mixes a variety of above-average off-speed pitches: a mid-70s curveball, a low-80s changeup and a mid-80s slider — and just for good measure, Hudson occasionally throws a mid-80s splitter and a high-80s cutter, allowing him to throw different pitches at different speeds that move in different directions. Hudson uses the slider against right-handed hitters and the splitter against left-handed hitters to induce swinging strikes. Nevertheless, the sinker is Hudson’s most used and most valuable pitch. He throws it more than 34 percent of the time to both righties and lefties.

Of the 472 outs by balls put in play Hudson recorded, 43.4 percent of them were due to the sinker. Hudson’s sinker moves toward right-handed hitters and away from left-handed hitters. It has the opposite effect of Halladay’s cutter, and he uses it more against righties to get in on their hands.

Chapman’s fastball

Chapman has thrown just 185 pitches this season, but the excitement is palpable whenever he shows up. His fastball was clocked at 105.1 mph earlier this year. That’s an insane speed for a ball to travel from a pitcher’s hand to a catcher’s mitt.

Because the above graph is harder to see at ESPN.com horizontal image widths, you can also open it at a bigger size, and in a new window, by clicking here.

Looking at the scatter plots above, we can see each fastball that Chapman threw, each of which is labeled by its speed and color-coded by pitch outcome. The 105.1 MPH fastball recorded on September 24 against Tony Gwynn Jr. is circled in red. In that particular at-bat (in which Gwynn struck out), he threw pitches at the following speeds: 102.6, 103.7, 102.5, 104.1, 105.1, 103.1, and 101.5 miles per hour. The plot on the right is a closer look at just the strike zone, showing numerous called strikes right down the middle of the plate. Bottom line: the guy throws straight gas. And it’s fun to watch.