Willie Bloomquist's Wrigley Field Dinger

Arizona Diamondback Willie Bloomquist rocketed a leadoff home run off of Chicago Cubs starter Randy Wells yesterday afternoon.  It was only the 14th HR in Bloomquist's major league career; in fact, he has more triples in his career (15) than home runs.

Taking a look at Bloomquist's slugging percentage heat map, we see that while he doesn't generate a lot of power, he does hit inside pitches well.

Willie Bloomquist 2008-10 (Click to enlarge)

Randy Wells threw Bloomquist a 2-1 cutter that came up and in, usually a very tough location for a batter to turn on.  However, Bloomquist deposited it into the left field bleacher seats at Wrigley.

Willie Bloomquist vs. Randy Wells (Top 1st, 4/4/11) (Click to enlarge)

The home run traveled 379 feet.  In 2010, Bloomquist, then a Kansas City Royal, hit a game winning home run off a 92 MPH fastball from Detroit Tigers' Alfredo Figaro, which traveled 385 feet and landed in an almost identical location in the left field seats, albeit in Comerica Park.  Where was that pitch located?

Willie Bloomquist vs. Alfredo Figaro (Top 12th, 8/25/2010) (Click to enlarge)

Bloomquist isn't a home run threat by any means.  But pitchers should probably avoid that upper inside portion of the zone to keep it that way.

Marmol's Strikeouts

Carlos Marmol struck out all three batters he faced Saturday as he earned his first save of the season for the Cubs.  Among pitchers with 1000 batters faced since the start of the 2008 season, Marmol strikes out the highest percentage of batters, and it's not even close for second place.  The following table shows the top 20:

Pitcher	Plate App	K Per PA	BB Per PA	BABIP
Carlos Marmol	1026	0.339	0.154	0.238
Tim Lincecum	2905	0.277	0.083	0.301
Brandon Morrow	1207	0.262	0.119	0.300
Rich Harden	1655	0.26	0.117	0.277
Yovani Gallardo	1751	0.247	0.106	0.304
Ryan Madson	1010	0.246	0.067	0.311
Clayton Kershaw	2113	0.245	0.111	0.288
Jonathan Sanchez	2330	0.244	0.116	0.286
Max Scherzer	1778	0.239	0.087	0.307
Edinson Volquez	1369	0.237	0.12	0.296
Jake Peavy	1569	0.235	0.081	0.282
Justin Verlander	2812	0.234	0.08	0.303
Dan Haren	2811	0.232	0.047	0.298
Jon Lester	2740	0.231	0.081	0.298
Jorge De La Rosa	1882	0.231	0.106	0.308
Josh Johnson	1989	0.23	0.068	0.303
Javier Vazquez	2469	0.229	0.069	0.296
Joba Chamberlain	1479	0.229	0.095	0.323
Ricky Nolasco	2318	0.228	0.051	0.302
Zack Greinke	2685	0.226	0.06	0.308



The stats that really make Marmol interesting, however, are his high walk rate and his extremely low BABIP rate.  He walks batters 15.4% of the time, while the major league rate is 9.4%.  The walks don't hurt him however, since batters only hit .238 when they put the ball in play, while the major league average stands at .302.

The idea behind BABIP is that once a ball is put in play, the pitcher doesn't have much control over what happens.  The results of these batted balls should be random and dependent on the strength of the defense.  If you look at this group of high strikeout pitchers, the top 20 in K per PA since the start of the 2008 season, very few of them post a BABIP well over the league average.  It seems the same quality that make contact with the baseball difficult also leads to balls in play that are easier to field.  If a batter has difficulty making contact in the first place, he should have difficulty squaring up the ball in general.

Note that Marmol's BABIP probably isn't as good as shown here.  As a pitcher with both a high walk and strikeout rate, the balls in play against him represent a small sample size.  As time goes on, I suspect his BABIP will regress toward the league mean, but as long as his K rate remains high, he's likely to beat the MLB average.

Slow Silva

Carlos Silva pitched himself off the Cubs roster.  Carlos is an interesting pitcher, as he gets poor results despite showing great control.  His main problem was that his fastball got hammered, with opponents hitting .400 against that pitch.  The explanation shows that he might have depended too much on his control.

You can see his control in this heat map of his pitch frequency:

Carlos Silva, pitch frequency, 2008-2010.Now look at the plot in terms of release velocity:

Carlos Silva release velocity, 2008-2010.When Carlos throws fast, his pitches miss the strike zone.  So batters get strikes that are in the mid 80s in general.  If we take this plot down to just his fastballs:

Carlos Silva, fastball release velocity, 2008-2010.The same thing happens. His fastest pitches are out of the strike zone.  Most major league batters can hit a fastball, and all of them can hit a slower one in the strike zone.  Carlos looks like he took velocity off his pitches to get strikes, but they were strikes batters could handle easily.