More fun with pitchFX

As promised here is the beginning of five players in five days. The only problem is I only have one request for a player so far. So that will take care of today but I need some more requests people. There has to be a player that you find interesting either a pitcher or a position player. Please add your requests to the bottom of this thread and tomorrow you will see some interesting plots on them. Ok with that on to Ryan Braun.

This plot should look pretty familiar. It is Ryan Braun's hit chart just like what I made for Fielder yesterday. The thing that really gripped me about this plot was the lack of hits up and away so I added some dividing lines to break the strikezone into quarters. It seems pretty clear to me that Braun is a low ball hitter with his happy zone coming low and in (remember he is a right handed batter so he is standing around -2). That got me wondering if Braun was swinging and missing at a lot of those high balls. So I made this plot.

This plot shows ever pitch that hit the catcher's glove when Braun was up to bat. You can see that there seems to be some extra called strikes that are out of the zone in and some balls that appear to be way too good not to be called strikes. This seems to be about what was found in this study. Anyway, back to Braun, it appears that he is most willing to expand his zone on balls off the plate and down a bit. Since he appears to be such a good low ball hitter this seems to make sense. The Cubs seemed to be giving him a steady dose of low and away with the off speed pitches and fastballs up (and somewhat in). It will be interesting to see if other teams start trying that. These plots seem to suggest that is where his weaknesses are.

That got me thinking that it would be interesting to compare Braun's chart to a known free swinger. Here is Geoff Jenkins' strike chart.

Jenkins really can't lay off the ball in the dirt. It appears that almost half of the balls thrown over the plate but down he swings at. Also notice how few balls in pitchers have thrown to Jenkins. The book on him clearly is away, away, away and down when you get two strikes. What about Fielder?

Same sort of plan by the pitchers. Keep the ball away from Fielder and low and away if you want him to swing. Here you can really see that the umpires are calling a lot of strikes on Fielder on balls that are off the plate. Hopefully, as he gets older he will start getting that called correctly. Unlike Braun, very few called balls are in Fielder's zone and most of them are inside. If you look very closely to this plot I have added two black plus signs (clicking on the plot will make it bigger and much easier to see). These are two pitches are called strikes from the game that Fielder got ejected by Wally Bell. Unfortunately, these aren't the pitches from his at bat in the 8th inning they are from earlier in the game. Why am I not showing you the at bat Fielder got ejected over? Because MLB has removed the pitchFX data for that at bat. Here is a link to the inning and you can see that every other at bat has pitchFX data but Fielders. That makes me think that the pitchFX data showed that the call was terrible and that Fielder was correct when he argued. We know Bell had called two strikes on balls that were clearly off the plate earlier in the game and it seems very possible that the "strike" that he rung Fielder up on was even further outside.