Two things:
Can you add color coding to the charts as to what pitches were strikes, balls, foul balls or hits?

It would be nice to see a Jamie Moyer chart

can’t believe I’m saying this, but Feierabend needs to learn from Jarrod Washburn.

Is this really likely? There are eight men fighting for five jobs next year, really six fighting for three (I assume Felix, Bedard and Morrow are pretty much locks). If I’m Feierabend, the man they call the Bus isn’t someone I’d trust to teach me anything.

Moyer is the obvious example of this phenomenon because he’s the most extreme. As Dave’s fond of pointing out: There’s nobody in the last twenty years or so who’s been quite like him. You’re not supposed to be able to get major leaguers out with an 82 MPH fastball.

In it, Orel Hershiser talks about really having 9 or 10 pitches, because he threw his curve (among others) at many different speeds.

Same grip, same arm action, but different speeds based on what he thought would work best at that particular time.

If a hitter is sitting on a particular pitch, and the pitcher throws that pitch at a little different speed than the batter expects, it becomes a different pitch.

Moyer does this a lot. His change-up can come in at varying speeds, so that even if the hitter is sitting on it, he doesn’t expect it to be that exact speed, and his timing is off.

If a guy’s guessing (90 MPH fastball) and he’s wrong, might he still be able to hit the 84 MPH mildly curving curve whereas he’d miss the 78 MPH one?

I thought that differentiation between your pitches was generally an advantage.

I dunno if I’m positing that clearly or not. Hitter is guessing a pitch will be in the 85 box. From Wash being subtle, he gets an 82 (different box, but 3mph different). From Feier, he gets an 80 (different box, but 5mph different).

Does that seem reasonable? Yes, Washburn is mixing more and his spread is all over the place, but the difference doesn’t SEEM like as much (and often isn’t).

Edit: PS, are y’all having problems with your RSS feed? This post never did come up in my feed…

However, I do think we’ve seen enough pitchers succeed for long periods of time with highly questionable stuff to realize that there’s certainly an element of game theory that can overcome a lack of pure talent. Moyer is the obvious example that is always cited, but he’s definitely not the only one – we’ve seen a lot of pitchers get hitters out simply by changing speeds and throwing strikes.

I think Feierabend would benefit from being less predictable. Right now, a hitter can basically focus on three narrow boxes that differentiate the velocity and movement of a pitch that leaves Feierabend’s hand – adding in a few more boxes to make their decision harder seems unlikely to be a bad thing.