Chris Young on the Road - My First Stand

Note: That stuff you can get from fangraphs. How to get detailed pitchfx data: http://fastballs.wordpress.com/2007/08/23/how-to-build-a-pitch-database/

Well, here's yesterday's bet in partial data form. Something happened to Chris Young last year besides getting horrifically slammed in the face with a ball. Fastball velocity is down, and it's persisting. It also has less horizontal movement. Probably as a fairly direct consequence, his line drive percentage jumped to 24.9%, which likely also involved a little bit of bad luck. BABIP is used to eliminate luck using GD/FB/LD rates, but luck still exists in the breakdown of those rate stats themselves. Anyway, the drop from 90 to 87/86 is significant, very significant. He ran ridiculously hot last year to end the season with respectable stats (check the eBABIP). He is also an extreme fly ball pitcher in San Diego - AND ran very hot with HRs there.

If I had to guess, the marked increase in the use of his changeup (20% this year) is probably directly related to the speed issues with his fastball. Obviously, a good change improves your fastball, but this change - whatever he's done different - has no horizontal movement, it's gone. It's also only 8 mph slower than his fastball, and the speed gap between a change and a fastball is very important. Obviously the guy still has a unique release point, being 6'10 and throwing over the top, so he's not Barry Zito - but I'm also of the opinion that nearly all the weighted-means and comparable projections are optimistic, and expect more or less last year's performance, which was lucky to be as average as it was. Game lines (like last night), imo, are reflecting the common projections.

Of course Young pitched decent last night, but avoided a couple high run expectation situations. Anyway, this might be slightly psychotic, but I'm going to betting against the market close with Chris Young on the road for the near future. Maybe at home too, but he's perfected the deep fly ball out there, so I'm a little wary that hitters aren't crushing 440 foot bombs too often, and hit a lot of HRs via the 340 foot variety. I'm a huge believer in market equity, but I think it's possible to pick your spots from time to time, especially early in the year, so long as you aren't betting half the games per day at close. MLB's more efficient than CBB, but see my post regarding early year equity/efficient close on that subject.