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Pitch out swing and miss8/30/2023 It’s a good comparative metric when comparing over a vast majority of pitchers, but it doesn’t account for factors such as the ballpark or the team the pitcher is on. That should come as no surprise, as ERA is a context-neutral statistic and sometimes doesn’t paint the full picture for a pitcher’s true run prevention skill. Ideally you want your model to have a high R-squared value, somewhere in the range of 0.7 or higher, so we can say that CSW% isn’t particularly too predictive of ERA in a linear regression model. In fact, the R-squared value for this plot stands at just 0.26. From the simple eye test, the dots on the plot are too scattered apart in the dataset to make a strong correlation with such a model. CSW%, a higher CSW% trends toward a lower ERA if you apply a linear regression model to this data. Just at first glance of this scatterplot of ERA vs. The most commonly sited metric for run prevention by pitchers is earned run average, or ERA, so we’ll see how it correlates with CSW%. With a decently-sized sample of pitchers from last season, we can take this Called Strike + Whiff metric and see if there is any correlation with run prevention. The highest CSW% of a Diamondbacks pitcher was Madison Bumgarner at 29.1%. Raisel Iglesias and Craig Kimbrel led baseball with a CSW% of 38.1% while Adam Plutko finished last at 23.1%. 354 of 358 (98.9%) pitchers all fell within three standard deviations, with the four outliers all being pitchers who finished above 37.0%. Out of a group of 358 pitchers, the average CSW Rate was 29.0% with a standard deviation of 2.67%. So in this exercise, I decided to chart all pitchers who faced a minimum of 200 batters in the 2021 season on a spreadsheet with their Called Strike + Whiff rate calculated based on the number of called strikes, swings and misses generated, and total number of pitches. I see it as a valuable metric to see if a pitcher has good stuff and is able to command it well against an opposing lineup. It’s a simple formula that takes a pitcher’s called strikes, swings and misses, and total pitches thrown to calculate the percentage of pitches that resulted in a called or swinging strike. The CSW statistic was created by former pitcher Nick Pollack in the 2018 season, three years after the Statcast era began in 2015. While his stat is not a true indication of a pitcher’s raw stuff, it does measure how well a pitcher can command it to get the hitter out. It’s also more valuable than a foul ball in a two-strike situation, where a called or swinging strike would end the at-bat while a foul ball prolongs it. What makes that outcome so valuable is that is a pitch in which the pitcher outright wins in his matchup against the hitter. When I look at pitcher performance, one new metric I look at is Called Strike + Whiff rate or the percentage of pitches thrown that result in a swinging or called strike.
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