Puzzles

A while back I enjoyed reading a Fangraphs piece from Ben Clemens highlighting Yainer Diaz.

Are there any patterns in the profiles or traits of major league pitchers that repeat performance with this KPI from one year to the next, that can help us better understand when a pitcher is more likely to repeat performance?

Looking to answer two questions regarding the relationships between Bat Speed, Squared-Up%, and batted ball outcomes (xwOBAcon)

I was interested in whether the newly released swing path metrics from Baseball Savant can help us better understand how adaptable a hitter is.

Carson Williams is a highly touted prospect in the Rays system with an interesting offensive profile who has been able to produce offensively during his minor league career despite running consistently high strikeout rates at every level. While the strikeout rates have been getting slightly better over time, should there be concern that the high swing-and-miss might prevent Williams from living up to his 60-grade Future Value projection (Fangraphs)?

About a month ago on an episode of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh noted that the ability to draw walks as a minor league player has diminishing value as that player gets promoted to the major league level because pitchers have much better strike-throwing ability.

Should we expect a dropoff in productive batted ball profiles, from an angles perspective, for minor league hitters when they make the jump to face major league pitching in their first full stint?

How often have we seen Major League hitters with a groundball-heavy batted ball profile make significant changes to their approach?

There’s been some interesting research done recently on pitcher release angles, horizontal and vertical (HRA and VRA), in quantifying a pitcher’s ability to locate their pitches well, as well as better explaining individual pitch performance.

Lately I’ve been thinking about hitters with platoon splits, and what factors are proving most influential in causing a hitter to struggle versus same-side pitching. Specifically, I wondered whether there were certain pitch shapes that platoon hitters struggled against more than others.

A couple of questions to follow-up from the most recent post…..

When reading another Fangraphs piece a while back highlighting Cole Ragans, I was intrigued by a note from Ben Clemens's analysis of Ragans's Changeup and the belief that it, despite no way to quantify it, was helping the rest of the arsenal. This led me to wondering how often pitches perform better relative to expectation as a result of effects from one "signature" pitch in an arsenal?