Was Manny Corpas Doctoring The Ball?
After my first article on Hardball Times reader Tom who blogs here emailed me saying that some TBS camera caught Manny Corpas pouring Gatorade on his jersey before coming in to pitch and then kept reaching for that spot when he was on the mound. Was Corpas wetting the ball in effect throwing a spit ball? Tom wanted me to look into it so I downloaded the 13 pitches Corpas threw and ran them through my algorithms correcting for everything but home stand calibration corrections. I didn't use those corrections because only one game has been played in the series and it is hard to tell from that how what the PITCHf/x calibration really was. These corrections are very small anyway so they most likely wouldn't make a difference. Here is Corpas' player card for full details.
Anyway, I decided to overlay Corpas' regular season data as well to see if his pitches yesterday were doing anything different from the regular season. Because it is only 13 pitches be warned, we have an incredibly tiny sample here.
It does appear that Corpas was throwing his Slider a little more often than he did in the regular season but because we saw Francis do a similar thing that appears to be the Rockies game plan. As far as to whether the ball was breaking any differently it doesn't appear to be. If you look closely you might see that Corpas was getting less vertical movement then normal but overall it appears well within the range that he can pitch. We saw the Francis was trying to keep the ball down as well and it could be those were Corpas' instructions as well. His speed was pretty much right in line with his norms as well. His Fastball was a tick above 93 MPH and his Slider was a tick above 78 MPH. So if Corpas was doctoring the ball, it doesn't look like it had any effect.
posted by Josh Kalk @ 2:20 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
That could still be doctoring- I don't think you're going to see a huge jump in movement from whatever he did, but rather pitches that moved well more consistently. Unless I'm reading that, doesn't it show down/away movement on his fastball than the majority of his pitches (and some of his best sliders)? Like you said, wayyyy to small of a sample size to really get a good idea.
It is hard to tell if Corpas really is that consistent during each outing but inconsistent outing to outing or just if he was very consistent this outing. Your absolutely correct though that this doesn't mean he wasn't doctoring the ball. I guess I should have been more clear on that in the actual article. And yes, he was getting good downward movement on both of his pitches but he has gotten that movement before. Though maybe he was doctoring the ball those times too :)
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