Pitching styles

Lozza said:

I've added highlights from the last men's world championships. Neither pitcher closes.

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5-0: whatever it is, the "New Zealand style" of pitching didn't appear to be effective

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sluggers said:

Jojo, I'm not sure if I would call that "teaching".

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Jojo said:

He's the most expensive instructor around here. Charges hundreds of dollars up front and requires his instruction upon being on his teams--he runs an organization.
People think the more money someone charges the better they must be.

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FiveFrameSwing said:

I took the graph, expanded it, added horizontal lines, and extracted the numbers.

Non-expanded plot shown here (expanded plot didn't fit nicely into a post).

62.5
62
61
52
50
62
47
55
62
32
58
67
46
61
17.5
48
20
70
65
40
18
74
33
96

The average was 52.4 degrees ... which agrees with what was reported.

The median was 56.5 degrees.

IMO the median is more telling. Half of the pitchers had a hip rotation greater than 56.5 degrees at release, and half of the pitchers had a hip rotation less than 56.5 degrees at release.

Then I thought about this data being a merge of 'styles'. I took note that there were three pitchers with a hip angle of 20-degrees or less at release ... and questioned if these three girls might be using a different style and impacting the database.

So I recomputed the 'average' and 'median' from a subset of the data in which the 3 lowest hip angles were removed, and also in which the 3 highest hip angles were removed.

From this subset ...

The average was 53.5 degrees.

The median was 56.5 degrees.

Virtually the same answer ... and in fact the median is the same.

When you attempt to remove the extremes (in this case the lowest 3 values and highest 3 values), in an attempt to smooth out 'style' differences, the answer remains that the median hip angle was 56.5 degrees at ball release.

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kenkrause said:

In my opinion, drawing conclusions from this study can be misleading. It's a study of what WAS 15 years ago. At that time, most pitching instructors were teaching pitchers to slam the door closed. It was considered an essential element to creating speed. The fact that these pitchers were "only" 45-52 degrees closed could be a reaction to fighting against that teaching.

We have learned much about pitching since 1996, thanks in no small part to high-speed video. I would love to see this study repeated to see if the results are the same. If not, why not, and which way did they go?

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