Pretty interesting that he thinks with the help of pitch f/x he can transform himself from a flyball to groundball pitcher.

Is anybody else doing this kind of stuff?

Yeah, very interesting listen. One wonders what a player with better tools would be able to do if he had the same analytical mindset that Bannister has. It certainly appears to have worked for him so far this year.

His peripherals are better than they were in his first good year. Looks like he's had a solid rebound season that should keep him in the league for a while. Good for him.

Cowboy Popup, I'm not sure that "rebound season" is the appropriate phrase to use. Bannister knew he was super lucky with BABIP in 2007 and he knew that it wasn't sustainable. He made some adjustments to try to be more of a power pitcher in 2008 by throwing lots of four-seam fastballs and it failed pretty miserably. He did up his K/9 rate but the BB/9 rate went up as well and the HR/9 skyrocketed. After failing again this season, he decided to completely rebuild himself as a pitcher because he had come to the conclusion that the "old" Brian Bannister wasn't good enough, no matter how many adjustments he makes. He no longer throws the four-seam fastball and he now throws a ridiculous amount of cutters along with a "fast" changeup that has good movement. So I don't think rebound season works because it's a completely new Bannister we're seeing this season.

Something that I'm curious to know is when Bannister says there isn't another right-handed pitcher that throws a cutter 70% of the time. (Although he does latter mention Esteban Loaiza. But maybe Loaiza never threw that many cutters??? I obviously don't know.) I'm assuming Bannister knows what he's talking about but is his current strategy really that unique.

I know that Bannister probably takes the analytical side of pitching to a level not typically seen on the diamond but you'd have to figure with so many AAAA pitchers that weren't willing to give up on the dream that one or two (or more) would have resulted in trying a similar strategy to what Bannister is doing here.

Brian Bannister for player-GM of the Royals.

Kinda weird that the GM can be so anti-modern statistical, while one of its players is doing his damnest to figure it out.

Christopher Rose,

Here's a list of percentages of cutters thrown by pitchers this year.

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=y&type=4&season=2009&month=0

For some reason, Bannister's cutter percentage is 0.1% this year, while his fastball percentage is at 59.7%, which tells me that even fangraphs has difficultly telling the pitches apart.

But among right handers who use the cutter as a main part of their pitches: Chad Billingsley, Roy Halladay, Scott Feldman, Nick Blackburn, Dan Haren, and Carlos Zambrano.

While its true that some of these guys, like Billingsley, Halladay, Haren, and Zambrano can reach much higher velocities with their fastballs over their cutters. A guy like Billingsley from my personal viewpoint seemed to have fallen in love with the cutter so much that people thought he was only could throw around 90-91 at the start of the season, and just recently flashed a higher velocity fastball.

I've heard suggestions that there's a certain RH reliever who throws a lot of cutters ... :-)

Thanks Tripon, sort of knew the data was out there but I wasn't sure where to find it. In the interview, Bannister indicates he throws the cutter 2-3 mph less than his fastball so it would make sense that fangraphs might not be able to distinguish between the two.

(And Bannister made reference to Mariano .... but he said that there isn't any right-handed *starter* that is throwing such a high percentage of cutters.)