This athlete has a high spin-rate, so we were trying to increase his spin efficiency to maximize his vertical break. I’ll give you an example of an in-house athlete adjusting spin efficiency. The main reason for increasing spin efficiency is to allow for more MOVEMENT. This is true for both vertical and horizontal movement. Look at it this way, as fastball spin efficiency decreases, the total amount of “true spin” impacting the baseball decreases, which in turn decreases movement. When looking at fastballs, spin efficiency can tell a coach/athlete how the fastball is coming out at release. There seems to be a big misinterpretation of spin efficiency in the baseball world. There will always be other factors at play (which we will discuss further down) but it seems that the increase in spin rate elevated his fastball to another level. This is just one example of how optimizing the fastball can pay huge dividends to overall performance. Batting average against fastball dropped over 100 points from 0.269 to 0.166.Strikeouts during season with fastballs increased from 87 to 178.If we look at that from a performance standpoint: That jump took him from a below-average Bauer Unit to an above-average one at 26.06. That is almost double in 2 years! Fastball increased by 1.2mph to 97.1mph in that same time frame but the big jump came in his spin rate, which is now averaging at 2530rpm. His whiff rate in 2019 was 37.5% on fastballs. So that would make since why Gerrit Cole threw with such high velocity but didn’t get many swing and misses.įast-forward 2 years and some time with the Astros and everything has changed. Anything below 24 (league average) would indicate less swing and misses on fastballs and that a pitcher should work down in the zone to induce groundballs. Bauer Units can also tell us if a pitcher will be more inclined to get swing and misses on their fastball. That would be a Bauer Unit of 22.46.īauer Units were discussed in Part 1 of the Pitch Design series and indicate whether a pitcher should pitch up or down in the zone based off their score. During his final season with the Pirates in 2017, he averaged a 95.9mph fastball with a spin rate of 2154rpm. During his time with the Pirates, he never produced a whiff rate above 20% on his fastball even though it was consistently above 95mph, which was well above league average. Let’s look at the 2019 Cy Young winner, Gerrit Cole, and see how an increase in spin rate paid massive dividends to overall performance. *Note-Left Handed Pitchers would still be at 12:00 for over the top, ¾ slot would be more 10:30, and side-arm at 9:00. The closer to 12:00, the more the ball will use backspin and defy gravity. You can look at is as a clock, with a right-handed pitcher throwing over the top being 12:00, ¾ slot would be more 1:30, and side-arm at 3:00. Spin axis tells us what direction the spin is traveling from a pitcher’s point of view. Anything less than that would be considered cutting the ball and not a true fastball. The goal is to get the fastball to at least 95% spin efficiency.Spin efficiency tells us the amount of total spin being used to generate movement. The only correlation to be seen across the board is that as the pitcher increases velocity, spin rate will increase as well. For the most part, it seems raw spin rate is pretty individualized. Spin rate is the total spin imparted on the baseball by the pitcher. Spin rate, spin efficiency, and spin axis all play vital roles in optimizing the fastball, so we’ll do a quick little overview before diving into each one independently. Every other pitch will inevitably play off the fastball and the better your fastball is, the better the other pitches will play. Prioritizing fastball optimization will always be the first thing we attack during the pitch design process. For Part 2, we will dive into optimizing a pitcher’s fastball. During Part 1, we discussed the basics of pitch design.
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