Joel and the Sinker

Derrick Goold recently told us about Joel Pineiro's recent conversion to sinker-ballism, as preached by the Prophet Duncan. With his new "toy", Pineiro has been burning some serious wormage. Looking at his pitch f/x data, he is trading some velocity for movement, but it is a good trade considering the results so far. Before we jump into things, I must preface: I am not a pitch f/x guru. Like with Pineiro and his sinker, graphing pitch f/x and learning pitch f/x is sort of like my new toy. If you see anything goofy or that you don't understand, point it out because I want to learn and know that I have a lot to learn about pitch f/x. I can't promise I'll respond to every comment, but trust me, feedback helps. 

One of the first things I noticed looking at his data is that his sinker comes in slower than average and often pitch f/x gets confused and classifies it as a change-up. According to his Fangraphs page, Joel has went from throwing change-ups 14% to 37% of the time, and we know from Goold's article that those classifications are not correct. Fangraphs also records that Pineiro has gone from throwing 2-seamers from 1.6% of the time to 11% of the time. I'm sure he's having two-seamers being classified as four-seamers as well. So all in all, I'd venture to say that he is  now throwing the two-seamer 60-65% of the time.  Here are a few different looks at Joel's last start against the Mets through the lens of pitch f/x.

First up is speed versus the all-important vertical movement. The cluster in the upper 80's is his new-found 2-seamer, below that and closest to the 0 and below is most likely his slider. The really "filthy" sinkers, as Kyle Lohse calls them, are the ones in the 0-5 zone. You're probably asking yourself...umm.. what are you trying to show me here? Let me try and explain this as best I know how. The "rise" of the ball is not actually saying the ball rose on the way to the plate. That is Physics 101.  The ball doesn't actually rise. Rather, it is how much less the ball fell than a ball thrown without spin. A sinker is just a fastball that drops more than an average fastball.

For reference, according to Mike Fast, an average sinker is 90 MPH and has 7.6 inch horizontal break and a 4.7 inch rise. The horizontal break is how the sinker tails into a RHB and on a four-seam pitch, that's about 5 inches. Now check out the movement Pineiro is generating on his two-seamer ---

Against the Mets at times he was generating over 10 inches of tailing action in on Mets right-handed hitters. Combine that with the sink and it is no wonder Pineiro held the Mets in check, leaving them to beat the ball into the ground.

Putting it all together:

The 80-84 MPH pitches on the left are probably actually change-ups, while sliders are the pitches in the middle of the graph. The 70-79 MPH pitches are curveballs. Check out the large cluster of red pitches towards the left that have near 0 in vertical movement. That is some serious sink, but they are coming in slower, probably because gravity has more time to do its thing than with faster pitches.

So is this new found weapon enough to make Pineiro a force to be reckoned with? We are talking about Jo-el here, so let's not get excited. The lack of whiffs is rather alarming, as he is striking out less than 3 batters per nine. You may not have to strikeout a lot of batters if your inducing ground balls, but looking at the graphs, his sinker is not quite in Chien-Ming Wang territory yet (the good version of Wang) in terms of movement, but for someone who just learned the pitch, he's showing a real aptitude. Hopefully we can re-dub him "Quemador de Gusano" in place of the Pinata.

(Hmm...why is it I can't figure out how to put accent marks in here? Oh, well.)