Ryan Dempster's PITCHf/x Data from AT&T Park

Ryan Dempster still has no road wins since his return to the rotation. Dempster faced off against Kevin Correia, and left the game with a 5-2 lead, but Carlos Marmol couldn't hold the lead. Mike Fontenot's homer gave Marmol the win.

He was yielding fly balls on a cool night in San Francisco, which worked out well, as you might expect. He had a lot of trouble throwing the strikes with the fastball, and getting ahead of hitters, but was able to use the slider to get ahead to some righties.

cfx	L	R	mph	pfx_x	pfx_z	deg	rpm	B:CS	corner%	Sw%	Whiff%	SwOZ%	TaIZ%	HR%	NKS	G:AO
FA	32	20	91.4	-4.0	7.9	207	1,176	2.7	9.62	36.54	15.79	14.81	33.33	0.0	0.400	0.1
FS	8	2	83.2	-4.3	2.9	235	632	3.0	0.00	60.00	33.33	33.33	28.57	10.0	2.000	0.0
SL	11	18	84.2	3.3	0.1	174	419	1.0	13.79	44.83	46.15	45.00	38.46	0.0	0.333	1.0
	51	40	88.2	-1.7	4.9	200	875	1.9	9.89	41.76	28.95	28.00	34.00	1.1	0.600	0.2

		#	FA	FS	SL
L	first	14	71.4	0.0	28.6
L	ahead	15	66.7	13.3	20.0
L	behind	12	41.7	33.3	25.0
L	even	10	70.0	20.0	10.0

		#	FA	FS	SL
R	first	10	50.0	0.0	50.0
R	ahead	11	36.4	18.2	45.5
R	behind	16	68.8	0.0	31.3
R	even	2	0.0	0.0	100.0
R	full	1	0.0	0.0	100.0

The flight paths really show how good a pitch that splitter is.

Ryan didn't throw the ball too hard, as usual, and he topped out at 92.9 (twice). He was able to miss bats by getting guys to chase pitches out of the zone. Here are plate locations for all 11 whiffs.



Bowker's home run was off a splitter, of all things. It was up and over the plate, though.



The ball Bowker hit was a foot higher than the splitters shown above in the Whiffs. There were only two other splitters that Ryan left up like that, one was fouled off, the other taken for a strike.



Looking at this chart shows how good Ryan's command was with the splitter. The 3:1 B:CS ratio isn't very meaningful in this context.