Pitchers Learning to Make Better Breaking Pitches with Technology

[BillTre]

Major League Baseball (MLB) pitchers are learning how to make breaking pitches better with technological assists. Strikeouts are frequently attributed to increased speed of fast balls, but it seems that there are more strikeouts from breaking pitches. Pitches that are thrown to curve (like curve balls and sliders), making them more difficult to hit, are called breaking pitches.

I have always liked the application of physics to throwing baseballs, especially since I read Ted William's The Science of Hitting when I was young. This is an interesting application of that.

This 538 article describes how, in the last two years or so, pitchers have been able drastically increase the amount their sliders and curves.

This is data from the pitch-tracking era (since 2008), a period defined by new data gathering technology that can measure these things.
They have done this by understanding what they want to do physically with the ball and then using high tech analysis for immediate feedback on their technique.
It has to do with getting the ball to spin more with a optimally aligned axis of spin.

The article also has a great link to a Veritasium video on the Magnus effect which can cause thrown balls to curve.

 

[berkeman]

Very interesting, thanks for posting that! It looks like pitchers over the past couple of years have been emphasizing horizontal movement more than vertical movement. I wonder why... It seems like vertical drop would do a better job of making the batter's swing miss the ball...

 

[BillTre]

In my mind (and based a lot on Ted William's book) a lot of successful hitting depends on seeing what the pitched ball does vs. what you are expecting it to do.

Everything happens very quickly (a second or less is my guess), and a decent picture will have several different kinds of pitches he could throw. The more one kind of pitch deviates from the trajectory of other pitches in the pitcher's repertoire, the more the batter will have to correct (very quickly) to hitting the ball in another area of the strike zone.
There are also speed differences between different pitches that can result in misses.
I you look at the little video in the tweet in the article, it compares the trajectories of five different kinds of pitches.

I would expect accentuating these differences would would make pitches harder to hit.
Pitchers try to not telegraph (through their pitching motions) which pitch they are throwing. Batters try to find things they can pick up (earlier is better then later in the delivery motion) in the pitcher's delivery so they can tell what kind of trajectory to expect from the pitch.
Ted Williams was known for figuring out out patterns different pitchers would use in pitch choice.

 

[256bits]

Same ball in 2018 as in 2008?? Stitching??

 

[BillTre]

Certainly could affect how much the ball breaks.
An increase in homers maybe a couple of years ago has been attributed to differences in the ball. People thought the ball was different then, and also measured it. In some way it got changed back.
Perhaps those changes affected how much the ball breaks.
Here's a couple of articles on that from 2017 (#1, #2) on those ball changes, after which, as i undrstand, things were "changed back" and the ball is lke it was. That's about the time of the chnag in the breaking pitches.
But, I still think its the training. Techniques have changed, and there may be other explanations, such as: they are spinning balls faster now (more RPMs) and can increase RPM by using tacky substances on their hands, to change grip interaction with the ball, during release.