Michael Pineda by Pitch F/X

(We’re going to look at some splits, too!)

didn’t pitch as well in the second half of 2011 as he did in the first half of 2011. It wasn’t as bad as the narrative made it sound, though, and MJR did a nice job of breaking that down here. Mike touched on the results numbers, so for a second, I’m going to look at the process numbers.

Pineda’s July (6.75) and August (4.70) weren’t great at all, but one good thing happened in both of those months. In June, Pineda’s ground ball percentage bottomed out at 26.5%. In July, though, it shot all the way up to 40.6%. The upward trend continued in August as he turned in a season high GB% of 46.8%. It fell to 45.3% in September, but that isn’t a huge drop. One of the biggest issues we may have with Pineda is his lack of grounders, but as the season wound down last year, he was busy ramping up the grounders. Hopefully, pitching coach Larry Rothschild can help Pineda keep the mid-40′s GB rates up.

Still, those numbers are grounded in results. Let’s take a look at the ultimate process data, Pitch F/X. I broke Pineda down into two time periods: the beginning of the season to 7/15 and 7/17 to the end of the season. Here are the gamelogs from B-R for those time periods:

The biggest difference I see in the two categories is that of fastball usage. From the first period to the second period, Pineda’s fastball usage dropped from 53.2% to 47.7%. Conversely, his slider usage jumped up from 30.7% to 34.7%. Both pitches (1.9% and 3.1% respectively) saw drops in strike percentage. The most glaring difference in his slider was the whiff rate. In the first selection, Pineda got swings and misses on 20.3% of the sliders he through. From July 16th onward, however, that number dropped to 15.8%. It appears that hitters learned to lay off of his slider and they were no longer chasing what they had before.

Unfortunately, since last year was Pineda’s rookie year, there is nothing to compare this data to. We’ll have to watch closely this year to see how Pineda develops his arsenal, which is still mostly fastball/slider. I’m going to inspect him a little more closely with pitch f/x as the week goes on to break him down in an advanced scouting type of way. What does he throw when? What does he throw to whom? Etc. Tune in as the week goes along.