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Post by moonstone2 on Mar 26, 2015 16:01:46 GMT -5
Well your criticism would be more fair had I said that it was a long-standing idea held "by" the sabermetric community as opposed to "in". Probably a better wording would have been using "by some" or "by a few"....but in any case. The Red Sox did actually ironically try this with Duquette and ended up with Charlie Zink and Jarred Fernandez. Charlie Zink threw the knuckleball when they drafted him. El Tiante was his coach at SCAD (by the way, in hindsight, wtf was Tiant doing as SCAD's baseball coach, of all places?) and tipped them off. I don't know about Jared Fernandez because he's before my time, but it looks like he always threw it as well. I was actually wondering about that and I found the article below....apparently he didn't throw it at SCAD but started throwing it after he signed with the Red Sox. Zink referring to 2002, the year he signed with the Red Sox. lancasteronline.com/sports/lancaster-knuckleballer-zink-never-listened-to-the-naysayers/article_524b218e-2bc2-50b5-8306-d5ed8636ef25.html?mode=jqmFernandez was a former high school linebacker who switched to the knuckler in his second pro-season reds.enquirer.com/2001/09/23/red_fernandez_floats.html
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Post by wcsoxfan on Mar 26, 2015 16:11:26 GMT -5
I dream of a pitcher like Pedro who can also throw a knuckleball for strikes. His fastball would look like it was 120 mph. Jason Isringhausen's Knuckle-Curve was a bit like a knuckleball (much less spin than a regular curve). Closest comp i can think of. I think it would be difficult to throw a true knuckle-ball with the same arm action as a high velocity fastball - so the hitter would know which was coming. Wakefield would occasionally throw a fastball, but he had a very short/quick delivery which likely took a lot off the fastball (but 75 or 80 doesn't make much of a difference to the hitter if he knows its coming) but added some deception. Not sure how deceptive Dickey's or the other knucklers fastball v knuckleball delivery is. I agree that it would be pretty awesome if say - Aroldis Chapman - threw a knuckleball. But I imagine it becomes more difficult to prevent rotation at higher speeds. Roided Gagne was pretty nasty with that ~65 mph curveball and 95 mph fastball. I imagine it may be similar to this.
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Post by Steve Henley on Mar 26, 2015 16:15:53 GMT -5
John Barnes is another guy the Sox took a flier on, although he decided to make the switch from outfielder to knuckleballer the season before he signed with the Sox. EDIT: The Sox have had several knuckleballers over the years, but I honestly think it was more due to Tim Wakefield than a belief that any of them were potential major league regulars (Wright and Zink being the exceptions). When one of your starting pitchers is a knuckleballer it's better for your minor league catchers to have some knuckleball experience before getting thrown into the fire as a major league call-up.
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Post by moonstone2 on Mar 26, 2015 16:29:56 GMT -5
I dream of a pitcher like Pedro who can also throw a knuckleball for strikes. His fastball would look like it was 120 mph. I would bet you that Pedro probably threw a knuckleball on the side at some point, everyone does, and he could have probably thrown it for strikes, because well....he was Pedro Martinez. It's one thing, to tell a kid who has no chance of making it to live out his dream by trying out a knuckleball, it's quite another to tell one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived to start throwing a knuckleball in games, even as a rarely used secondary pitch is quite another. There's no reason for a successful pitcher to force the issue either. The presence of Wakefield as both a player and instructor has absolutely had an influence. It was Duquette however, who hired the Niekros both in the 90s and at Baltimore,who has been the biggest practitioner of the strategy try to transform organizational players who showed some promise throwing the knuckler on the side, like Fernandez, Barnes, and Zink into major league caliber talent. Fernandez actually pre-dates Wakefield. To bring this back to the thread topic.....the question is why it is that there have been so few pitchers who established themselves in the majors with a knuckleball, and if it's really true that when a knuckleball is thrown properly the quality of the hitter is irrelevant. Personally I think these two ideas are at odds with one another and I will try to discuss more tomorrow. And as a reminder to all, if you don't like my posts, use the block button up top and to the right. Requests to "quit digging" because you didn't like my explanation of a certain point are not productive and don't move the conversation forward. Regards.
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Post by charliezink16 on Mar 26, 2015 16:36:18 GMT -5
For the record Charlie Zink, the boss, dabbled with the pitch before Boston signed him, but only converted to a full-time knuckleballer months into his Boston tenure.
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Post by moonstone2 on Mar 26, 2015 16:39:37 GMT -5
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Mar 27, 2015 0:05:51 GMT -5
I do believe that among the flaws in Eric's argument is that he is underestimating the innate ability required to be a successful knucleball pitcher in the majors I'm not underestimating how hard it as at all to be a successful knuckleball pitcher. It's incredibly hard, because the pitch is in fact incredibly hard to throw consistently well. Let's call a knuckler that fails to break properly a "hanging knuckler." Compare it a curve. A good MLB pitcher can easily go an entire game without hanging a curveball, which is to say throwing one with very little rotation, so that it fails to break much at all. If he's hanging more than a few per game, that's bad. Even an expert knuckler will hang his pitch five or ten times per game, by throwing it with too much spin and hence having it not change direction at random. We watched an absolute master, Tim Wakefield, throw it for years, and we got to see what the results were like when he hung it much less often: his first 17 starts in 1995, where he had a 1.65 ERA. But in his prime (ages 34 to 41) he had an ERA+ of just 111. How could the pitch have become more difficult to throw? They didn't change the baseball. Well, the way you phrased this leads me to wonder whether you're not making the distinction between "a knuckleball" = "knuckleballs in general" and "a knuckleball" = "one specific pitch." The assertion that everyone from a Little Leaguer up to superhuman hitters will have the same success hitting a single, specific, properly thrown knuckleball requires no response whatsoever, because it is patently true. The pitch will change direction, randomly, after the batter has already committed to his swing path. It cannot be hit except by luck. Period, end of story. How many times do I have to say that? A hanging knuckler can be hit very hard and will of course be hit harder, more often, by better hitters than lesser ones. So, for, what, the seventh time? Eighth? A knuckleball pitcher's MLB ERA to AAA ratio is pretty much a function of his percentage of hanging knucklers. The non-hangers get hit equally hard at both levels. The hangers get hit considerably harder in MLB. A AAA knuckleballer's percentage of non-hanging knucklers is going to pretty well be measured by his overall success there. The lower his AAA ERA, the fewer hanging knucklers he threw, and hence, the less you can expect his ERA to rise after a promotion to MLB. You have yet to present any sort of argument against this (and for good reason, because it follows directly from the physics of the pitch). They are completely not odds with one another. The success of the pitcher is a function of his percentage of properly thrown ones. It's incredibly hard to throw it properly often enough to have any MLB success. The reason why we're excited about Wright is that he seems to have done so for nearly two straight years. It appears to be not unusual for guys to find the magic touch for a couple of months, and as a result have a single good or very good season in the minors. But sustained success by knuckleball prospects, like Wright has had, has been very rare.
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Post by moonstone2 on Mar 27, 2015 12:22:48 GMT -5
Eric- Let me say first that I have really enjoyed researching this and reading about the history of the knuckleball and how some of the ones that made the majors got started, the physics of the pitch...etc. One of the more interesting things I learned is that apparently EVERYONE, who plays professional baseball fools around with a knuckleball at some point when playing catch or throwing on the side. You might remember that Wade Boggs was rumored to have a great one. I wouldn't have learned all this had you not stated your view so I thank you for that even though I disagree. Right I understand that this is the crux of your argument. Basically you are arguing that had we superimposed what Steven Wright did last year in the major leagues a model of the difference between major and minor league fielding independent performance, would be the performance on "improperly" thrown knuckleballs and the performance on non-knuckleball pitches. I don't agree with this at all. In fact I think the evidence shows just the opposite. The quality of the opponent clearly matters. The idea is supported by a circular logic death spiral similar to the "good pitching beats good hitting" argument. All differences in the effectiveness of knuckleballers can be explained by the percentage of "properly" thrown ones, so therefor if there is a difference the percentage of properly thrown ones must be less. x is true so y is true, y is true so x must be true. But there are no agreed upon assumptions for x or y! Your premise requires the assumption of a binary outcome. Either a knuckleball is "properly" thrown, or it isn't. But not all knuckleballs are the same. There can be a material difference between the speed and movement of each pitcher's knuckleball. Dickey for his part throws two knuckleballs at different speeds which move at different rates and travel at different speeds. But that only matters if the speed, and movement of the pitch are statistically significant variables. R.A. Dickey is the only successful knuckleballer to debut since the advent of pitch fx so there is a book's worth of stuff about him on the web. The most interesting article is linked below and compares Dickey's pitch mix to previous seasons and against the other knuckleballer pitching at the time, Tim Wakefield. What the evidence in the article suggests, is that the variance in performance was due to the speed of the pitch, the use of the pitch, the existence of a second knuckleball. In short, Dickey performed better than Wakefield because he threw a better knuckleball not because he thew fewer "bad" knuckleballs. His improvement in 2012 was likely explained by the same factors. www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2010/8/27/1652512/mastering-the-knuckleball-part-2Actually they are. As you mentioned previously in your post though a knuckleball is difficult to throw properly. It hasn't become more difficult to throw. So this would explain why there are so few knuckleballers overall but not why there are fewer today than there were previously. As I have mentioned several times, Dickey is the only knuckleball pitcher to successfully crack a major league rotation on a multi-year basis in the past 20 years. The main change in the game has been an increase in the overall athletic talent in major league baseball. A corollary of Moore's Law that is often applied to species states that a species becomes stronger over time. This certainly applies to the species pool of major league baseball players. Though correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation I can think of no other confounding factor that has a change that would correlate with both the decrease in knuckleballers, and the increase in talent. Since it a knuckleball is just as hard to throw properly as it was before, you would expect there to be just as many knuckleballers breaking into rotations as there were in the sixties. You should probably see more as teams today are more open minded about winning strategies and more willing to try different strategies to win. A better explanation of this phenomenon is that the increase in talent weeded out those with inferior knuckleballs. To throw a better knuckleball as Dickey does now requires more natural athletic and pitching talent than it did previously. There are very few baseball players who possess this level of talent, very few have a real incentive to go out and improve their knuckleball. To tie this back to the thread. What does all this mean for Steven Wright? What the beyond the box score article above suggests is that the largest factor in the performance of a knuckleball is accuracy. Dickey's performance improved greatly when he threw a harder knuckleball that moved less. Wright throws a knuckleball that isn't as hard as Dickey's but is harder than many failed knuckleballers. If indeed Wright's performance is driven by a very high O Swing %, he will not be able to rely on this as he faces better hitting talent. In a short sample size, Wright in the majors threw the knuckleball for a called strike half as often as he threw it for a called ball. That's not going to get it done. This is the kind of thing that gets my dander up. Eric...there is no "we", It's just you. The most common response in this thread has been "I think he can be a back-end starter". At least one poster thinks he's worse than that. I have not read one post not written by you that I would characterize as "excited" by Steven Wright. I am not the only one who has questioned your belief that Wright has more upside than that. So cut that out. Your arguments key tenants have no basis and you have provided no evidence for their support. There is no evidence for your claim that player talent is a factor against properly thrown knuckleballs. Further there is no evidence for your claim that Wright's statistical prowress proves that he is throwing a properly thrown uninhabitable pitch more often than others. I also don't see how there can be any evidence showing that minor league statistics drive the major league performance as you have previously claimed given that only one has debuted and been successful in the past 20 years.
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Post by cologneredsox on Mar 27, 2015 13:14:00 GMT -5
Have been reading this debate for a while now. Aside from the fact that both of you make convincing claims, I have to disagree with the final statement of you, moonstone. Eric may be the most optimistic about wright (although mgoetze might like to have a word with you about that assumption), but he is by no means the only one who sees potential.
I think we should at least try him out as long as he's having success. Given gis sss stats in the majors, so far he seems to be doing just fine, doesn't he?
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Post by moonstone2 on Mar 27, 2015 14:28:45 GMT -5
Have been reading this debate for a while now. Aside from the fact that both of you make convincing claims, I have to disagree with the final statement of you, moonstone. Eric may be the most optimistic about wright (although mgoetze might like to have a word with you about that assumption), but he is by no means the only one who sees potential. I think we should at least try him out as long as he's having success. Given gis sss stats in the majors, so far he seems to be doing just fine, doesn't he? Oh I agree others have said they see potential....but I think it's clear he's the high man on that potential by far. I wouldn't characterize anyone else as "excited". He's making it sound like his opinion is shared by all to support his view and diminish mine. It's not the case, and even if it were, it's irrelevant. I don't think his major league statistics prove much at all. He's had two major league starts, one of which was a disaster and one of which only lasted five innings.
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wcp3
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Post by wcp3 on Mar 27, 2015 15:28:33 GMT -5
Way too much discussion going on right now about the worst pitcher in the system.
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Post by ramireja on Mar 27, 2015 16:11:10 GMT -5
Not enough discussion going on right now about the best pitcher in baseball. fixed
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Post by rjp313jr on Mar 27, 2015 17:16:11 GMT -5
There's not way that all properly thrown knuckleballs are the same. It's not like there's not middle ground.
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tedf
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Post by tedf on Mar 27, 2015 17:59:08 GMT -5
This is Wright's last option year, so I imagine he'll get a serious look. He has shown real improvement at Pawtucket thus I have every hope it will carry over to major league success.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Mar 28, 2015 2:55:09 GMT -5
Moonstone, I'm not going to quote your whole post, just clear up one point where I admit I haven't been clear.
Of course all knuckleballs exist on a continuum of quality. There's the perfect one with 1/4 rotation; as the number of rotations increase, you get less and less change in direction.
A perfectly thrown knuckleball, as I have stated many times, is unhittable except by luck. There is a wealth of evidence for that: all of the knuckleballs that have been thrown and that changed direction a great deal. Slowing down the video reveals the rotation. The results speak for themselves: they're almost all swings and misses. All of that is simple physics, anyway.
As the ball changes direction less and less severely, the quality of the opposing hitter begins to enter into the equation. By the time you've thrown a hanging knuckler that doesn't changes direction at all, the quality of the opposing hitter becomes hugely important.
However, the relationship of amount of directional change to results is not linear. There is a continuum from swings and misses to weak contact, but they all lead to outs. As long as the pitch changes direction sufficiently, it elicits weak contact at best. But there is then a tipping point in the amount of directional change where the pitch goes from being very hard to square up (hence the low BABIP) to being hit right on the screws.
So it can, in practice, be reduced to a binary outcome. All the crushed knuckleballs are ones that didn't change direction at all, because they rotated too much, and this, too, is backed up by all the footage of all the knuckleballs we have on video. I used to routinely replay Wakefield's knuckler in slo-mo and look at the rotation. I'm kind of guessing you've never done that.
Why are there fewer successful knuckleball pitchers? You've got an answer that's probably correct: MLB hitters are better. They can do more damage to the inevitable hangers. So, yes, it's always been hard to be a successful knuckleball pitcher, and it's quite probably getting harder. The margin or error is smaller because the hitters are better. The percentage of properly thrown knucklers, those with enough directional change to elicit at least weak contact, that you need to have in order to post a given ERA has gone up, because the improperly ones are being hit harder.
But all of that has nothing to do with the argument about the relationship of AAA to MLB knuckleball pitching, and how it varies with the quality of the pitcher.
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Post by jimed14 on Mar 28, 2015 8:14:06 GMT -5
Sickening.
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Post by brianthetaoist on Mar 28, 2015 9:46:17 GMT -5
I've long loved that gif ... especially the way the catcher closes his eyes as the ball gets close to him.
As for there being less knuckleball pitchers, I don't think we have any idea why that is. Biggest question: are there fewer knuckleball pitchers having success in the major leagues, or are there fewer in baseball overall? If it's the former, it's evidence (although not conclusive) of the idea that it's because hitters are better, if it's the latter, it's evidence of ... something else. I could come up with some theories ... like baseball development is more systematized than it used to be, so it has less room for the random quality of knuckleball pitchers who don't fit into the development process well. Or the development of traditional pitchers has gotten better, so the self-developed quality of knuckleball pitchers has gotten worse in a relative sense.
All of these theories (and more) make rational sense, and there's really no way to choose from any of them on the single data point of "fewer successful MLB knuckleball pitchers."
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Post by jimed14 on Mar 28, 2015 11:00:30 GMT -5
I imagine it used to be a lot easier to be a knuckleball pitcher when the strike zone was a lot bigger.
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Post by cologneredsox on Mar 28, 2015 12:14:59 GMT -5
Sickening. Wow. Just wow.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Mar 28, 2015 15:51:44 GMT -5
This general question, of course, is very easy to answer with pitch/fx. All you have to do is plot the "break" of each pitch versus the results. You can construct three or four graphs: one showing the break on swings and misses, one showing the break on outs in play excluding line drives, and one or two showing home runs, line drives, and deep fly ball XBH's. You can do that for Dickey's last year with the Mets versus his first in Toronto, and with Wakefield for 2008 versus 2010.
My predictions are two-fold. First, when you overlay the swing-and-miss graph and the hard-hit ball graph(s), you'll see that almost all the hard-hit balls are in the center and almost all of the balls at the periphery are swings and misses (there will be some swings and misses in the center, too, because hitters do that, and one reason to throw the knuckler at two different speeds is to increase the odds of getting away with a mistake. See below for a prediction about these centrally located swings and misses. Also, some of the balls that pitch/fx codes as having broken very little may be balls that broke twice in different directions, as in that gif.) Furthermore, when you overlay the appropriate graphs, the grey areas where swings and misses blend into and become outs in play, and outs in play blend into and become hard-hit balls, will be surprisingly small. (I do expect there to be one or perhaps two or more distinct anomalous areas where balls that appear to have moved sufficiently get hit hard. Those would be denser than other such areas, and would represent knucklers that moved with a smooth and predictable arc, rather than changing direction at random.)
Secondly, there will be very little difference in the pattern of the graphs between a good year and a bad year. The swings and misses in both years will be balls that moved a lot, and the hard-hit balls will be balls that moved very little. The difference in performance will be almost entirely because there were less of the former and more of the latter in a bad year.
Finally, I predict that one of these predictions will be a bit off, or missing an interesting tweak, and that it will be fairly easy to make sense of the difference in a way that will cast light on how the knuckleball works, without, however, undermining the basic thesis that it's the percentage of well-thrown knucklers that largely drives a knuckleball pitcher's hardness of contact allowed. (The part that's not driven by that is the ability to get away with mistakes by mixing in other pitches, changing speeds with the knuckler, changing eyes levels, etc. There may well be more such "got away with a hanger" pitches in a good year than a bad year.)
Moonstone, what would you expect these charts to look like? I frankly can't imagine an alternative, because I've never seen a guy hit a knuckleball hard that had moved a lot, and ever knuckler I've every seen that was hit hard hadn't moved nearly at all.
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Post by johnmark on Mar 28, 2015 15:54:52 GMT -5
Looking at today, I will stand by my statement earlier in this thread. Give me Brian Johnson before Wright if we are looking for starter #6.
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Post by rjp313jr on Mar 28, 2015 17:51:14 GMT -5
Eric, your problem is you are dismissing the middle ground of the pitch. You seem to be drawing the conclusion that a knuckler is either thrown perfectly or is a hanger. You do admit there is middle ground but gloss it over and don't take it into account for any of your analysis and this is where you are losing people. There is quite a bit of middle ground and knuckle ballers get hit just like anyone else not executing or not being "as good" as they are when perfect.
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Post by mgoetze on Mar 28, 2015 21:31:21 GMT -5
Looking at today, I will stand by my statement earlier in this thread. Give me Brian Johnson before Wright if we are looking for starter #6. 0.00 ERA not good enough for you, huh?
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Post by johnmark on Mar 28, 2015 21:39:35 GMT -5
Looking at today, I will stand by my statement earlier in this thread. Give me Brian Johnson before Wright if we are looking for starter #6. 0.00 ERA not good enough for you, huh? 0.00 with 5 runs. He is wild, will get hit. Minimal potential. errors happens, but pitchers need to pitch out of trouble. He didn't.
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Post by mgoetze on Mar 28, 2015 21:58:06 GMT -5
0.00 ERA not good enough for you, huh? 0.00 with 5 runs. He is wild, will get hit. Minimal potential. errors happens, but pitchers need to pitch out of trouble. He didn't. Dude, it's spring training. He was cruising (some of the pitches appeared a bit wild because there was a LOT of wind but he managed that very well) and then lost it a bit in a very long inning. It's all part of the normal process of getting stretched out. And even of those 5 runs that came after the E6, the last two could also have been prevented by a better shortstop than Bogaerts.
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