Sometimes, a pitcher will mess around with a different grip or a different arm slot in practice and see what happens. He’ll judge it by the movement he sees, the way it feels coming out of his hand, and how the player on the other end responds. It’s harmless experimentation, and if it works, terrific, because variety is the spice of life, and the spice of pitching.
Brian Bannister Is The Future Of Pitching
Brian Bannister isn’t most pitchers, though. Brian Bannister is a stathead hero. How does Brian Bannister experiment?
I’ll throw pitches in a game every now and then in a low key, low-leverage situation where nobody in the world is paying attention to what I’m doing; I’ll try a new grip, throw it. After the game, [I] check it to see what it registered on the pitch f/x, see if it was better or worse, and I’ll work off of that.
Pitch f/x is a system set up in every stadium that tracks the velocity, movement, and location of every pitch thrown in every game. It’s a tool put to extensive use by professional analysts and amateur bloggers, but it generally isn’t the domain of actual pitchers. Few have admitted to using it to analyze their own performances, and I’m pretty sure Bannister was the first. This is just the latest in a series of statements by Bannister that have warmed the hearts of statheads the world around.
It’s a creative, ingenious thing to do, and the sort of thing that, from Bannister, might not even come as a surprise. “Oh, of course he does that. Why wouldn’t he?” Attached, please find an image of Bannister, who just last night defeated the distinctly non-stat-oriented LAnaheim Angels.
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