A couple days back Maddog inspired a post about Ted Lilly's disappearing curveball. And I don't mean "wow that fell off the table" - I mean "wow, did he stop throwing it?"
Here's a refresher.
As you can see (click to enlarge if you can't see it) the curve was a rarity in his first four starts. The Official Ted Lilly Fan Club wonders if it is due to counts/pitch selection. Since he's falling behind, maybe he's simply not in the right counts to throw it. Certainly a good question, one I still have to answer. But, a quick check did show a tendency to throw the curve more when ahead (shocker). I'll get to that later.
Today, Lilly mixed in a few more curves. Ten of them, actually, for 9.3% (corrected) of his pitches captured by Gameday. A recovery, as one should expect (hope), from his last start, but still would've been an anomaly in his 2007 starts (July to September).
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Ted Lilly Curveballs - Follow-up #1
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3 comments:
From watching the game, Ten curves seems low, but not entirely surprising - maybe its just because we were looking for the Lilly Hammer, we thought he threw it more.
Noticed that Hank White called the game today instead of Soto. Is it also possible that the amount of curves he throws is correlated to the catcher?
Clearly, Ted has the ability to shake off the signs, but sometimes pitchers just go with what their catcher asks for... especially guys that are searching for some confidence in their stuff or with catchers that have credibility (i.e. not Koyie Hill or Rob Bowen)
Soto was catching his last start when he only threw 4 curves. That was a consideration we briefly discussed last week. I'm sure Henry is good enough behind the plate that he could catch 85 curves if Lilly wanted to throw them.
I'm hoping it has to do with count as you mentioned on your site because the other alternative just isn't fun to think about.
OTLFC - The "slider" is a breaking ball that goes straight down, but has no hump to it. A lot of those "curves" are really sliders. The curves have a hump in them and come out of his hand higher than the sliders.
He looks fine - plenty'o'break
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