Chicago's Power Closer

With Matt Thornton signing a new deal with the White Sox, it's likely he'll be the team's closer for the next few years.  Thornton is pure fastball-slider reliever.  He threw a fastball 87.4 percent of the time last season, using his slider mostly when ahead in the count.

Thornton gets a lot of velocity on his fastball, averaging 96.1 MPH last season, tops among all lefties.  But the pitch also moves quite a bit.  In 2010, his fastball averaged 5.7 feet per second of horizontal movement as it crossed the plate, good for 2nd among all lefties.

Thornton's only area of concern may be right handed batters.  While righties only produced a .271 wOBA against Thornton last year, they had a 72.2 percent contact rate against his fastball, about 10% higher than lefties.  Now that the league has seen his premier fastball, Thornton will have to start making adjustments in order to keep batters off their game.  Look for him to start mixing in the slider a bit more in the closer's role this season.

Strike Zone Luck

Franklin Guttierez posted a .337 wOBA in 2009, well above his .316 career mark.  He played as a 26 year old that season, so there was a good chance that entering his prime years, the improvement was real.  It turned out not to be the case, as his wOBA fell to .300 in 2010.  What happened.

The difference in the two years came from his hits (he walked more in the same number of at bats in 2010 compared to 2009).  His batting averaged dropped 38 points.  Note his hot zones in 2009:

Franklin Gutierrez, in play average, 2009.Note how his best zones for getting hits lie on the edges of the strike zone.  Normally, when pitches move away from the center of the zone, batters do worse, not better.  Not surprisingly, those edge advantages disappeared in 2010:

Franklin Gutierrez, in play average, 2010.Especially high in the strike zone, the areas where Gutierrez collected hits in 2009 turned into black holes in 2010.  Franklin did hit better in the heart of zone, but that represents an area pitchers tend to avoid:

Franklin Gutierrez, pitch frequency, 2009-2010.The Mariners outfielder got lucky on some bad pitches in 2009, making him look better than his career indicated.  The good news is that Franklin isn't as bad as his 2010 number either.  He does show good plate discipline, and at 28 years old should still be at his peak.  He just needs his luck to swing back to the positive side of the ledger.

Offspeed Contact with Cruz

In 2009, Nelson Cruz made contact on offspeed pitches only 53.7 percent.  Last season, he improved that number to 69.3 percent.  The increased contact resulted in an OPS increase of .079.

Nelson Cruz vs. Offspeed Pitches (click to enlarge)

Cruz's K-rate dropped 10.5 percent on soft pitches as a result of the increase in contact.  But as the increase in OPS indicates, the additional balls in plays were doing damage to opposing pitchers.  His OBP increased an additional .050 points as well.