The Cubbies acquired Ascanio for Bad Ohman and, in effect, Jacque Jones and the cash sent to Detroit.
He does throw very hard. Here's a look at this velocity by appearance - depending on how accurate the raw data is, he can top 96-97 mph
Here's a new arrangement of the data for a chart - Speed by Spin Direction, with Spin Rate as the bubble size
What I find interesting is the tiny dots, the slow spinners, don't vary so much in speed, but in spin direction. I think the direction borders on irrelevant at that rate (some physicist out there will have to figure out when that starts to happen).
For Out Of the Zone, I happily point you to the wonderful work of Josh Kalk.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Jose Ascanio
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Harry, you are definitely on the right track about the error in the spin direction being very large when the x-z spin rate is very small.
For some pitchers' sliders, which is what those pitches appear to be, this is because most of the spin is in the y-direction, around the direction of travel, like a football. So the baseball is still spinning very fast, but not in a direction that it affects the movement of the pitch. Thus, we can't measure the actual spin rate or the x-z component of the spin direction very well for these pitches.
As an aside, the knuckleball presents a similar, although slightly different, problem. Its spin rate is actually very small, such that its movement is affected by seam orientation much more than the Magnus force. The spin direction imputed by the formula for a knuckleball is a completely bogus construct.
Post a Comment