In terms of pitch mix, they have one key thing in common as well. Adam McCalvy wrote an interesting story on Thursday about the changeups that each pitcher throws. This piece made me want to scrutinize the issue further. Just how similar are the cambios that Anderson and Davies employ? Will the latter excel with his, like the former has already done?

Let’s begin with the characteristics of the pitches themselves. Anderson has used his changeup 22.1 percent of the time in his career, while Davies called upon his changeup for 24.9 percent of his pitches in his brief 2015 tryout. In terms of velocity, Anderson (82.2 mph) beats Davies (78.7 mph) significantly. Raw velocity doesn’t mean much, though, when talking changeups. Since Davies has a slower arsenal across the board than Anderson does, they have about the same amount of distance between their fastballs and changeups: Anderson throws his heater 10.1 mph faster, while Davies’s four-seamer travels 10.6 mph above his changeup. The average pitcher has about a nine-mph fastball-changeup differential, and because a larger gap is better, as long as the arm speed and arm slot are similar, this bodes well for both Anderson and Davies.

When it comes to movement, a difference begins to emerge. Anderson’s changeup has sunk an average of 9.9 inches, while running 6.6 inches. In 2015, its vertical and horizontal movement each ranked ninth among the 91 starters with at least 200 pitches, so it really distinguished itself with its bite. Davies’s changeup, by contrast, tallied an average drop of 8.7 inches and run of 4.4 inches; if he had qualified, those would have ranked 29th and 55th, respectively. Not only did it travel slower, it had more mediocre movement in both directions.

Granted, horizontal and vertical movement can only tell a partial story. Davies’s changeup may not move as much, but its deception is superb. Coming out of his hand, it looks exactly like his fastball, which means the amount of movement needed to make the pitch effective is lessened. We can see this in terms of swinging strikes — often considered the definitive pitch-quality metric — because Davies actually wins out. Hitters whiffed at his changeup 27.6 percent of the time; they’ve swung and missed for only 19.1 percent of Anderson’s cambios. Davies didn’t net quite as many strikes (64.2 percent) as Anderson has netted (69.0 percent), but the whiff advantage makes up for that.

It should also be noted that Davies took a very distinct approach with his changeup during his 2015 cup of coffee. More than every other pitch in his repertoire, he buried it:

A total of 62.7 percent of Davies’s changeups went to the lower-fifth of the zone — nearly double the 33.6 percent rate of his other offerings. When hitters didn’t flail helplessly at it, they put it on the ground, giving the pitch a 66.7 percent ground-ball rate. That no contact/weak contact combination made the changeup a blessing for Davies last season.

Anderson also targeted a different area with his changeup — he shifted the whole thing to the left:

There’s a slight downward trend here: 33.2 percent of Anderson’s changeups fell below the strike zone, compared with just 22.2 percent of his other pitches. It’s nowhere near the same amount as Davies, though. Anderson’s offering has much more horizontal movement on it than Davies’s does, which may mean that he slides it horizontally. Whatever the cause, Anderson’s pitch has a great deal of value, but it still seems to lag behind Davies’s.

Two final differences emerge between the two pitches, regarding their situational usage. Davies utilized his changeup far more often against righties than Anderson has, and he’s relied on it more heavily with two strikes. In other words, it’s his out-pitch.

Changeups can carry reverse platoon splits, so pounding same-handed batters with them presents some risk. Likewise, a pitcher will generally reserve his best pitch for the putaway opportunities. Despite his inexperience, Davies seems to trust his changeup immensely, and the results bear that out. While Anderson has some faith in his, his play might improve if he leaned on it a bit more.

In the 2016 Brewers prospect writeup, BP gave Davies’s changeup a future grade of 70, meaning it could become elite someday. Should it maintain its 2015 production, it’ll certainly rank among the game’s best pitches. Anderson has a superb cambio as well, but his younger counterpart appears to have him beat. As the two continue to pick each other’s brains in camp, maybe Anderson will reach Davies’s level — and maybe Davies will get even better. One elite pitch does not a top starter make; for these hurlers, though, the changeup can be a ticket to a regular job.

Stuff

We saw earlier that Nelson took the cake in terms of velocity, while Pena’s movement paced the team. On the other end of the spectrum, there was no such divide — one pitch had both the lowest velocity z-score and the lowest total movement z-score:

For a curveball, below-average vertical movement isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the average such pitch already moves negative. Indeed, the fact that Fiers led all starters in curveball drop last season would seem to work in his favor.

Of course, all the dive in the world won’t count for anything if the pitch has no velocity. Only Jered Weaver, Mark Buehrle, and Julio Teheran threw their curveballs slower in 2015, and it showed. Fiers’s curve went for strikes just 43.0 percent of the time in Milwaukee, and when he put it in the zone, hitters such as Tyler Moore made him pay:

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Those kinds of dingers made Fiers’s curve worth -1.61 runs below average on a rate basis. The Brewers will miss Fiers overall in 2016, but I for one am glad that his curveball will stay with the Astros.

Run Values

Interestingly enough, though, Fiers’s curve didn’t finish last when it came to Linear Weights. Another starter, who remains on the team, held that distinction:

Peralta’s 2015 regression fell squarely on the shoulders of his sinker, which traveled nearly a mile and a half slower than it did in 2014. That meant the pitch often resulted in this sort of treatment, courtesy here of Curtis Granderson:

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But a run value alone doesn’t really do Peralta justice. For his case, we’ll look at something else.

TAv

Using the same samples from the velocity and whiff rate z-scores, I found the average and standard deviation for each pitch’s resulting TAv. These created TAv z-scores, to better reflect how hard batters hit an offering. They certainly clobbered Peralta’s heater:

How bad was this? The next-worst pitch, Tyler Cravy’s four-seamer, had a TAv 1.75 standard deviations over the mean. Only Vidal Nuno and Sean O’Sullivan allowed opponents to abuse them more than this. Let’s throw in another GIF of this atrocity, for good measure:

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I discussed Peralta’s meltdown in December, noting that the movement of his pitches actually improved in 2015. Let’s hope for his sake that he regains his velocity, because if he doesn’t, the 2016 campaign will bring more of the same kind of pain.

Whiffs

When it comes to swinging strikes, things get complicated. Unlike Fiers’s curveball and Peralta’s four-seamer, this pitch actually held its own in 2015:

Blazek didn’t earn many whiffs with the curveball, yet it still gave him 1.99 runs above an average pitch (per 100 appearances). That’s because it accrued its strikes a different way:

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Matt Carpenter and his fellow batters took the curveball for a called strike 30.7 percent of the time, an incredible amount. An exercise like this has limits, as Blazek demonstrates — no one metric can really capture all the value of a pitch.

That isn’t to say, however, that Peralta’s four-seamer didn’t struggle, or that Fiers performed well with his curveball. We can pretty conclusively deem one of those two the worst Brewers pitch of 2015. Hopefully, 2016 will bring more pitches like the ones we saw on Thursday (although, if the team continues this rebuild, we won’t witness great pitching for a few years).

Click here for a complete spreadsheet of all 39 pitches.

Beyond that, pitchers make a better target for sabermetricians, as we can quantify so many elements of their game. Thanks to PITCHf/x, we can now look at pitch usage, velocity, movement, release points, locations — and, most importantly, individual result breakdowns for each offering. This can lead us down any number of analytic rabbit holes, which is where our story begins.

Because we still have a few weeks until baseball returns, I’ve decided to pass the time by constructing arbitrary “best-of” lists. Most of them wouldn’t appeal to any sane person, but I feel that many fans of the Brew Crew would like to know the answer to this question. Of the many pitches we had the pleasure of viewing last season, which stood out above the rest? A question that broad doesn’t have one right answer, but it’s an entertaining exercise regardless.

To accomplish it, I looked at pitches that appeared at least 200 times, isolating myself to those that occurred when the player was in Milwaukee. (In other words, this won’t include Mike Fiers’s time in Houston or Jonathan Broxton’s work for St. Louis.) This gave me a sample of 39 pitches to work with:

Whose quiver contained the deadliest arrow? Well, we can look at the issue a few different ways, each of which has its own merit. I’ll run through them all, with fun GIFs and full explanations, then return with a final summary.

Stuff

When evaluating the quality of a pitcher, we can focus, broadly speaking, on two things: the process (think cFIP) or the results (think DRA). The same general logic applies to the pitches themselves. We’ll begin with a few metrics that will tell us how well the pitches theoretically should have performed in 2015; from there, we’ll then move to the measures of how well they actually performed.

For a pitch to blow away the opponent, it generally has to have either velocity or movement. We’ll thus begin our journey with these two categories. For this, I used the BP PITCHf/x leaderboards to find pitchers (separating starters and relievers) with 200 of each pitch type in 2015. I then found the average and standard deviations of each sample, from which I constructed velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement z-scores for all 39 offerings.

The pitch with the most power behind it might seem familiar:

Nelson’s curveball, which ranked above Sonny Gray and Jacob deGrom in terms of velocity, left hitters such as Aramis Ramirez guessing:

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For movement, I took the sum of vertical and horizontal z-scores, to get a rough measure of overall bite. Although the top offering here might not be your first guess, it certainly deserved its spot:

Pena’s four-seam fastball didn’t have much heat, but man, could it dance. Watch how it rises and tails away from Kyle Schwarber:

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Nelson saw more action than Pena did in 2015, which may explain why his curveball feels more familiar. Still, each of these offerings stood out in its own regard. As the Brewers experiment with their rotation in 2016, we’ll probably see a lot more of both the heater and the curve.

Run Values

With that said, velocity and movement alone don’t make a pitch. A better line of thinking would look at the actual production of a pitch, and for that, we have a unique metric.

Pitch Type Linear Weights measure the count changes by each pitch, as well as the result when the offering ends a plate appearance, and expresses it as runs above or below average. This metric generally achieves its goal, and its selection for top Brewers pitch (on a per-100 pitch scale) probably wouldn’t get too much blowback:

Rodriguez won this contest by a wide margin — Michael Blazek’s curveball came in second, at 1.99 runs above average. Darin Ruf would probably agree with that verdict:

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This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Rodriguez’s cambio made his 2015 resurrection possible. In fact, the changeup was worth more (by this metric) on a rate basis than any other pitch, of any kind, in all of baseball. Taking note of that a few months back, Mark Simon crowned it the best pitch in the majors. Sadly, K-Rod will pitch in Detroit this season, so this changeup will no longer work in Milwaukee’s favor.

Whiff rate

But we shouldn’t stop there, because Linear Weights aren’t perfect. Aside from the fact that they don’t necessarily reflect true talent (which we’ll discuss in due time), they treat all changes of count the same way. In the eyes of Linear Weights, a swinging strike to begin an at-bat is the same as a foul ball, since each puts the pitcher ahead 0-1. That doesn’t testify to the quality of the offering, though — whiffs are clearly better than fouls, meaning the best pitches will usually maximize the former.

For that reason, we’ll move to swinging-strike rate. Here, it’s important to take into account the different baselines, as each pitch fools hitters to different extents. To level the playing field, I created some more z-scores, using the averages and standard deviations of the whiff rates from the aforementioned velocity samples. As with the Linear Weights, the winner here won’t shock anyone:

Here, too, the leader dominated the competition: The runner-up — Neal Cott’s cutter and its 15.7 percent whiff rate— only topped the mean by 1.24 standard deviations. Based on this hilarious A.J. Pierzynski swing, I can’t argue with that:

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I covered Smith’s transcendent slider back in June, and although Smith himself faded a bit down the stretch, this pitch didn’t miss a beat. Unlike Rodriguez, Smith should stick around, so this glorious breaking ball will continue dominating for the Brewers.

In the end, Nelson’s curveball, Pena’s four-seamer, Rodriguez’s changeup, and Smith’s slider disrupted plenty of hitters last year. These standout offerings gave us something to look forward to in an otherwise dismal campaign. (On that note: Later in the week, I’ll use this methodology to find the worst Brewers pitches of the 2015 season. Until then, we’ll simply have these masterpieces to keep us warm.)