Fangraphs

Fangraphs.

It's an interesting web site, to say the least. For some of us, it's a gourmand's delight; for others, probably too much to digest. But the peaks and valleys of each pitcher can certainly provide us with much food for thought.

I've already talked about Jose Contreras. The MPH on his fastball this year (90.3) actually seems higher than what I've seen on WGN when I caught him pitching early in the year in April, as well as what I've seen on the Yahoo gamecasts. Both accounts have him throwing in the mid 80s. The other thing I see that looks different (from what I've observed) is that Fangraphs shows him throwing his slider more than the observers at South Side Sox have believe he is. Like I've said, they point out that he's started throwing a cut fastball, which doesn't even appear on his graph.

Cliff Lee's numbers are a lot more consistent with what I've seen from him. His fastball, though, has far more variance pitch per pitch. I've seen him dial it up as high as 92 or 93 MPH, and as low as 86 MPH. What's interesting to me is that he's throwing his change a lot less, and some people believe that was his problem last year. If you've seen Lee pitch this year, he doesn't look like he's changed much, so this kind of subtle wrinkle in the numbers certainly helps.

Jesse Litsch is a pitcher who looks like a junkballer, and the Fangraphs data confirm this. Without even looking at the chart, I would have guessed that Litsch was throwing his slider more this year, and he is throwing it a lot more so far. It was quite the out pitch for him in 2007, and I believe it's the difference between making him a borderline 5th starter and a quality #4 guy.

These data are probably better at confirming what your eyes and your gut tell you when you watch a pitcher on the mound. One thing that's missing is how well a pitcher changes the speed of each pitch. I always remember Mariano Rivera when he debuted in 1995. He was throwing almost nothing but smoke, with a little rising action but not much else. At first he was hard to hit, but major league hitters will figure out how to time a straight fastball - even one as fast as Mariano's was - and hit it a long way when they catch up to it. It wasn't until Rivera perfected the cutter that he became the future Hall of Famer that we know and love today.

I always recommend using data like these, but also remembering that they aren't everything. You have to watch a pitcher work, see if he's working both sides of the plate, working the count, moving the game along, and other factors that make a pitcher a pitcher, and not just a gob of data on your computer screen.