The analytics revolution has brought a wealth of new buzzwords into the pitching lexicon. Teams latch onto certain terms, and public-facing analysts repeat them. The terms are often helpful and illuminating, but their ubiquity stems from the need for those who are deeply involved in pitching analysis to communicate in a shared language, and to recognize when they're talking to another person who's been initiated.
As a result, the jargon of the moment can be a bit opaque to people outside either front offices, the coaching profession, or the endeavor of pitching analysis. Many fans struggle to keep up, because front offices have no incentive to slow down and explain things more accessibly, and public baseball analysts have every incentive to make sure everyone knows how smart they are as they go about making their points.
Let's try to break down those barriers to entry a bit. The Derek Falvey Pitching Pipeline, to the extent that it's a real project and not just a Twins Twitter meme, is centered on a patterned acquisition of scouting and player development. At the Society for American Baseball Research's annual convention in Minneapolis in August, several members of the front office took the stage to do a panel discussion about the use of advanced data, and one theme was the way they seek out pitchers.
"We don't try to change fastball shapes. We hone in on that, because fastball shape is like a fingerprint," said team pitching guru Joshua Kalk. The implication there is that fastball shape is hard--maybe even impossible--to change, whereas velocity, mechanical efficiency, and breaking-ball shape are much more malleable. Thus, the Twins wait into the middle rounds of drafts and seek out pitchers with a suitable fastball shape, then go to work on improving their velocity and their secondary offerings with their player-development group.
But that skips over two vital questions: What, exactly, is fastball shape? And which one do the Twins like?
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