Can a pitcher be good at tunneling while maintaining elite movement?
“Is getting the run on the two-seamer and the drop on the curveball more beneficial than having all my fastballs and curveballs look the same coming out?” he wondered back in 2015. “How do you weight those, what’s more important? Who knows?”
Since that talk, Bauer has added more run to his sinker and more drop to his curveball, and currently ranks in the bottom 20 percent by PPR, so maybe he’s answered that question for himself at least. Maybe deception doesn’t matter as much when you’re showing the most drop in your career, good for the fourth-best drop in baseball.
Best Pitches of 2018: Who has the best curveball in baseball? by Eno Sarris
This passage alludes to a choice pitchers and coaches have when deciding on a pitcher’s developmental approach. Above, Trevor Bauer frames focusing development on tunneling and focusing on maximum movement as mutually exclusive. But are high movement pitches and effective tunneling mutually exclusive, or is Bauer preaching a false dichotomy?
This study will use tunneling data from BaseballProspectus.com and will use pitch movement data from Fangraphs from the first half of the season.
The methodology here is simple. We’re going to see who has good movement (either horizontal or vertical) on one of their pitch types. We’ll define “good movement” as having more than one standard deviation of movement above league average. Then we’ll see which of these pitchers are “good tunnelers,” meaning their pitches are usually closer to each other than average at the decision point and they have lots of movement after the decision point (above average PrePlateMax on BP).
To get the data, we need to find pitchers who were both qualified for the ERA title at the all star break and pitchers who had at least 500 observations in the BP tunneling database. 35 pitchers appeared on both lists.
After hours of spreadsheet manipulation and learning how to use IF, AND, and OR functions along with the STANDARDIZE and STDEV.P functions, let’s just skip to the results:
7 of the 35 pitchers appeared on neither of the lists, 23 pitchers had “good” movement on at least one of their pitch types, and 16 pitchers had good tunneling metrics. 11 belonged to both groups. These pitchers were Blake Snell, Chris Sale, David Price, Gio Gonzalez, J.A. Happ, Jacob deGrom, James Paxton, Kevin Gausman, Luis Severino, Mike Foltynewicz, and Tyler Mahle.
The number of pitchers appearing in this loosely defined category of pitchers with good movement and good tunneling metrics refutes Bauer’s assertion that pitchers cannot be good at both of these skills. Perhaps there is a trade-off when trying to develop pitchers, but these results suggest that these two skills are more or less independent.
