Playin' with numbers

The current popular philosophy as far as I can is 1st pitch strikes are very important. More and more coaches are looking very closely at that stat.

A lot of the pitchers bat and they know the pitcher is trying to get that 1st pitch over, so you know they're lookin' to hack. My guess is, the other batters ain't stupid either! They know real quick if a pitcher is throwing strikes, and if he is, they have to be hacking if that 1st pitch is in they're zone!

As for knowing the opposition, be it the batter or pitcher, that's really tough to do until you get to where you see the same kids over and over, like in HS or a league. Other than that, its really tough to remember what a kid did when you've only seen him once or twice.

Its much easier for batters to remember pitchers than vice versa. Even if they've only see the pitcher once or twice, they've probably seen about 100 pitches and that should give them some idea, Much tougher to remember batters tendencies. You may have seen him, but it was a different pitcher throwing and that means what you can do with the information is next to nothing.

I think the numbers I posted before are probably still a bit skewed. Those totals reflect about 50 different pitchers and very few of them really had a good 2nd pitch they could throw for a strike. I'm going to guess that as the players get better, the numbers will move just as if I had numbers for younger players, they would move a different way.

The other thing I've been playing with is whether or not the a pitch was delivered ahead, even or behind in the count. Go to http://infosports.com/scorekeeper/ and look at Pitching on Counts - Individuals and Pitching on Counts - Opponents.

Those are the numbers for the pitchers on the team we went to Tucson with and their opponents. I'll bet without me telling you, you will be able to make a pretty fair guess on which pitchers were the most successful.

The big thing with all of this stuff is that no single stat can possibly tell the whole story. You really need to look at a lot more. To get a better idea take a look at the links. Pitching Stats and Pitching Stuff on that same site.

The thing with stats is, you have to look at a lot of them before the real picture starts to show up.