I was watching yesterday’s Tigers/Indians game, and during a lull in the action, the two announcers began talking about Cody Anderson and his progress this season. At one point they noted that the Tribe pitching coach, Mickey Callaway, has said Anderson possesses all the skills necessary to pitch successfully in the ML, but he hasn’t learned how to pitch yet.
As proof Callaway offered this example. During an interview after one of his starts, he told reports he’d thrown a lot of quality pitches, but the hitters managed to put some of them into play at inopportune times. Callaway said that showed a lot of immaturity on Anderson’s part for not understanding what a quality pitch was, and until he accepted that, he would have a lot of trouble pitching in the ML.
Now y’all know me. As soon as I heard that I wanted to know how those people were defining a quality pitch, so I beat the WWW bushes trying to find out. I found this right away, and I was wondering if any of those involved in the discussion up to this point had any clue about it’s existence. See ====> http://www.baseballamerica.com...ses-clarity-day-one/
I also found this. See ====> http://www.qopbaseball.com/ and it led me to this. See ====> http://sports.yahoo.com/news/i...tches-020842981.html
Those who know me will understand why that last article was one I’ll likely refer to often in the future since it’s one of the few I’ve seen that puts velocity into perspective with movement and location as what makes a pitch good.
From there I found https://qopbaseball.wordpress.com/author/jarvisg/ and in it another thing I found very interesting indeed because it graphically showed the relationship of V/M/L. See ====> https://qopbaseball.files.word.../2015/04/slide07.jpg
Here’s the breakdown of the different presentations at the SABR Analytics Conference. In it is the description of the QOP presentation. http://sabr.org/latest/2015-sa...search-presentations
That led me to http://www.beyondtheboxscore.c...erence-presentations where the analysis of the presentation started, which in turn led to http://tangotiger.com/index.ph...ty-of-pitch#comments where some of the best Sabermatricians commented on the presentation.
Here’s the actual paper. http://baseball.physics.illino...n2011_Chance05-1.pdf
The one thing I find more notable than the others, is how the SABER “experts” pick apart the metric and how the data it used was gathered, but none imply in the slightest that it was something that shouldn’t have been done. In effect, the metric challenges the idea that velocity is king and that other factors, movement and location do have a tremendous effect on a pitch’s quality if not it’s success.
Here’s some other articles about QOP.
http://news.nationalpost.com/s...entify-hidden-talent
http://chance.amstat.org/2015/02/response/
