Statistically Speaking: Fast: Tales of the changeup: an analysis of Johan Santana

You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever...not with the latest amazing analysis from Mike Fast to tide you over!

I looked at the 11 home-run balls off Santana for which we have PITCHf/x data, and I couldn’t detect any useful patterns. They were mostly hit off pitches up and over the plate, but that doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Looking at the HitTracker data, he wasn’t burned by many short home runs barely sneaking over the fence, so he wasn’t unlucky in that regard, at least. This may be a topic for further investigation or possibly just the result of Santana being a fly ball pitcher and getting a little unlucky with how hard the hitters hit 33 of those fly balls in 2007.

Santana obviously has an outstanding changeup and a strong fastball, but you probably knew that already. What I didn’t know was how infrequently he uses the changeup against lefties or most of the other nuances of his pitching strategy. Unless you’re Joe Mauer or Mike Redmond (in which case, Hi!), hopefully you feel like you know the best pitcher in baseball a little better than you did before.

If you’re an employee of a Mr. Steinbrenner or a Mr. Henry gathering information for a future trade, by all means feel free to contact to me regarding where to send that check for my services. :)