Dunne v. Thomas Pitches at 2011 CWS

During the 2011 CWS, SportVision tracked the pitches thrown by all the pitchers. If you want to read about how it is done, look here: Sportvision: Baseball If you watch MLB, you see this in almost every game.

Attached are two pitching charts for Chelsea Thomas from Missouri and Kelsea Dunne from Alabama. These charts are all the pitches for the two pitchers for the CWS.

The charts are as follows:

The Y-axis is labeled pfxz. The Y-axis shows the vertical break of the pitch. The X-axis, labeled pfxx, shows the horizontal break of the pitch. The units are in inches. The colored dots represent each pitch. The color of the dot indicates speed. So, a 70 MPH pitch is red. A 50 MPH pitch is shown in blue.

The break is calculated as follows:

The first two or three points of a pitch are tracked. The velocity and direction of the pitch are determined from those points. A final position is calculated assuming that the ball has zero spin. The actual position of the ball at the plate is determined. The difference between the final position and the actual position is the "break."

A fastball with no spin has 0 horizontal break and 0 vertical break.

Obviously, a ball with no spin will drop due to gravity. So, the drop of the ball due to gravity is not reflected in the break. If a pitch has a 5 inch break down it will fall an additional 26 inches or so (depending upon the speed of the pitch and the distance of the release from the plate).



The clusters on both charts are pretty obvious and show the difference between the two pitchers.

Obviously, Dunne had a very good riseball. The average break of her riseball appears to be 13 or 14 inches. For her offspeed pitch, she was throwing a drop. She also threw some curve balls and a number of fastballs. She also gets some screw action on her riseball and fastball.

Thomas gets a lot of drop on her pitches. It is interesting that her 70 MPH pitches are all dropping. She gets about 5 inches of movement on a rise, which is minor in comparison to Dunne. Thomas is getting some curve ball break on her pitches.

The other chart shows the speed of Thomas v. Dunne. Thomas' pitchers are in the top chart. You can see Thomas basically throws at two speeds--fast and slow. Dunne, on the other hand, has four speeds.

On average, Thomas throws about 5 MPH faster than Dunne. Dunne, on the other hand, has much more ball movement.

These charts break down the location of the pitch horizontally and then vertically. The charts entitled "pfxx" are for horizontal movement of a pitch. The X-axis (the bottom axis) is for pitching speeds. The Y-axis (the vertical axis) is for horizontal break. Similarly, the charts entitled "pfxz" is for vertical break.

The dark blobs in the graph are individual pitches. So, in the HORIZONTAL BREAK-THOMAS graph, most pitches are in the 65-70 MPH range, with a horizontal break from -2 to 9 inches. On the VERTICAL BREAK-THOMAS, she throws a lot of off-speed and full speed drops with a great deal of break--10 to 15 inches. But, she has very little in the way of upward break. She is trying to throw a rise, but she is largely unsuccessful. It looks like she gets screw break on a few pitches. I'm not sure what she or her coach says she throws, but it she throws drops and curves, and changes speeds.

Dunne is a whole different kind of pitcher. She moves the ball all over the place and changes speed. She throws a curve, a rise with a 15 inch break, an offspeed with a 15 inch down break, a change with an 8 inch horizontal break. She is really a wonderful pitcher.

There is not an article that goes with these. Perhaps there will be, but right now I'm just looking at the data. I'm trying to get the same charts for Escobedo and the Baylor pitcher.

Ray

Hi Ray,

Do you have a link to the raw data you are presenting? I appologize if you presented it in a different post and that I would have overlooked it.

Thanks!
Michel

sluggers, this is great stuff. I was at the World Cup in Oklahoma City. I can say that the only effective USA pitcher there was Jordan Taylor of Michigan. Whitney Canion of Baylor did well, but pitched against lesser competition (Czech Republic and Great Britain). Thomas got beat by Canada. Thomas did throw hard. Here are the stat lines for Taylor and Thomas.

12.0 10 4 2 2 16, 8.0 7 7 3 5 9

I wasn't impressed by any of these girls. I saw a lot of speed, but little variation of speed and movement. The USA offense was more impressive. The defense was rather flawed in particular at 3rd and 2nd. Taylor Hoagland from Univ. of Texas played a lot of 2nd base and some 3rd. She was much quicker than Janae Leles (very slow) of Arizona but was a little out of control. She was much quicker, but she is young. Stacey May Johnson (Iowa) played short and was very stable. Kaitlin Cochran, Hoagland, Arieto (1B), and Johnson all hit well.

The big weakness was pitching! A footnote here about radar guns. I trust the guns at the WCWS more than at Oklahoma City. I never saw any pitch register 70mph on the OKC gun. I saw change-ups register 67mph, and 65mph pitches register 38mph. I saw 67 and 68 a lot. I saw very few change-ups attempted by the USA team, and probably less than any other team. Both individual Japanese pitchers threw more change-ups than the entire US team. It appears to me by your chart that Chelsea Thomas has nothing off-speed? The only girl who seemed to hit her corners consistently was Jordan Taylor.

...Thank You Sluggers....you just hit a Home run for my IT problemmmm...IE workz....Thankz Again

ttt

Your first chart showing pitching speed shows the girl with four pitch speeds(Dunne) topping out at 74mph and several pitches in the 70's. Thats a suprise. It shows her average is less than Thomas but she threw alot more pitches over 70mph than Thomas did. Interesting.

tmolina said:

Your first chart showing pitching speed shows the girl with four pitch speeds(Dunne) topping out at 74mph and several pitches in the 70's. Thats a suprise. It shows her average is less than Thomas but she threw alot more pitches over 70mph than Thomas did. Interesting.

Click to expand...

Are you sure you had the correct chart open? Dunne is on the bottom, and 70+ is in red. Green is about 60mph.

tmolina: These are all the pitches thrown by Dunne and Thomas over all the CWS games. So, the speed difference is the difference between "cruising speed" (what a pitcher can consistently throw over a game) and "one time max" (what a pitcher can throw every once in a while). So, Dunne has a higher one time max but Thomas has a higher cruising speed.

These are the speed at release, so they tend to be higher than the speed registered by a radar gun.