Have you ever wondered why certain pitchers perform significantly different despite being current at the same velocity? While movement is probably the biggest reason why. You're probably wondering how do I maximize both the velocity and movement of my pitch? Well, first you've got to understand the basics of pitch movement. In this video, we're going to provide an introduction to movement and look at the types of spin involved in the pitch. This is going to just be a precursor to our pitch type series. So understand, this is intended for a new audience. We'll also be sure to link some additional reading below for those who really want to get a head up on their continued education. [00:00:31][31.6]

[00:00:32] The most intuitive place to start when it comes to movement is going to be looking at Spin rate at the big league level. There's historically been a Trackman and now a Hawk-Eye ball tracking unit. [00:00:40][8.6]

[00:00:41] That's going to show the spin of the ball, the velocity, the induced vertical break and the horizontal break, among many other pitch metrics. [00:00:48][7.2]

[00:00:49] The first pitch metric we're going to contextualize here is just going to be Spin rate or RPMs, which is short for revolutions per minute. This measures how much the ball is spinning and is the sum of the transfers or useful spin and gyroscopic spin. [00:01:01][12.5]

[00:01:02] 2021 The following pitch types had these Spin rate averages the forcing. [00:01:06][4.1]

[00:01:06] Fastball 2275 RPMs. [00:01:09][2.2]

[00:01:10] Sinker 2125 RPMs. [00:01:12][2.2]

[00:01:13] The Cutter 2375 RPMs. [00:01:15][2.5]

[00:01:16] Slider 2425. [00:01:17][0.7]

[00:01:18] The curveball had the highest raw Spin rate at 2500 RPMs.

And finally, lumping the changeup and splitter together, the pitch averaged 1700 RPMs over the 2021 season. It is immediately apparent that breaking balls have higher spin rates than their Fastball and Changeup counterparts.

The relationship persist when pitchers throw a fastball that has some inadvertent or intentional cut on it. The Spin rate of that pitch will generally go up relative to if the pitcher were completely behind the ball. And additional piece of context to take into account is that the harder a pitcher throws their fastball, the more the Spin rate will climb.

As a result, many further contextualize this into a spin velocity ratio. To get a feel for how impressive the Spin rate is relative to that pitcher's Fastball velocity at the big league level. The average spin to Velo ratio was about 24 and a half for a four seam fastball and just under 23 for a sinker.

Let's next get into the different types of spin prior to contextualizing spin efficiency or active spin percentage.

Making up Transverse or useful spin are the following backspin top spin. Inside Spin. Simply put, when holding velocity equal, the more back spin a pitcher applies to a baseball, the more the pitch will fight gravity, resulting in a pitch that drops less as it makes its way towards the plate. The more backspin a pitch has, the more induced vertical break or Kerry you'll have on a break chart. This is most prominent in the four seam fastball.

Top spin has the exact opposite effect, most prominent in the Curveball tops and result in the pitch breaking downward. The more topspin a pitch has, the more depth or downward vertical break it'll have on a break chart. Side spin contributes to the lateral movement of the pitch. Obviously this can go either in the arm side direction, such as a sinker, a changeup, or to the glove side direction. Most prominent in a sweeper and a lot of curveballs from right handed pitchers perspective a pitch with positive horizontal break wheel plot on the arm side or right of a break chart. A pitch with negative horizontal break will plot on the glove side or left of a break chart.

Finally, we have gyro spin or bullet spin. Without going too far down the rabbit hole. Gyroscopic spin does not contribute to the Magnus force at all. Whereas the three types of spin mentioned previously do gyro spin is far and away the most prominent type of spin in a league average slider. Let's next talk about actual spin, also known as useful spin or spin efficiency. We already know that a pitch has a raw Spin rate this number is immediately agnostic towards whether or not the spin is transverse or gyroscopic.

If we go to baseball's Advanced Leaderboards page, we can actually objectify what percentage of a pitcher spin is active or gyroscopic. Here were the active spin numbers for our six main pitch types.

Four seam fastball on average had a 90% active spin sinker, 87% active spin. The cutter came in at 46%. The average slider had the lowest average active spin at 37%.

The curveball that all breaking pitches by a good margin at 69%, Changeups had the highest active spin ratio at 92%. Spotters, on the other hand, had an active spin average of 80% across the league. If you've ever used a Rapsodo in pitching or developing a pitch, this number is going to show up as the spin efficiency. Unfortunately, there's no public data available on what proportion of the spin was backspin side spin or top spin. Simply those three combined and the gyroscopic spin though it can be inferred off of seasoned averages, pitchers with a higher active spin percentage will have a higher proportion of spin induced movement on their baseballs. This is going to lead to more movement on average.

Again, there's another component known as Seam Shifted Wake, where the gyroscopic spin turns into active spin after release. But we're really not going to go too far into that topic in this video. Just know that on average, a pitch with more active spin is going to have more. No movement than a pitch with less active spin. To hammer this point home twins reliever Caleb Theodore had an active spin percentage of just 38% on a slider this season. Remember, the league average is 37%. However, his slider moved on average 15 inches to the glove side. The big league average was six inches. That's something, you know, that a lot of that gyroscopic spin that's being created in this pitch is turning into side spin after it leaves his hand.

Next up, we'll discuss spin direction. There are two spin directions that are directly reported from baseball savant. The inferred spin direction simply looks at what the spin direction was out of the hand, meaning no other forces were acting on the ball. What would we expect the spin direction of that ball to be as it gets to the plate? The observed spin direction tracks the movement of the pitch and just reports back what the direction of movement was and is indifferent to how the ball reached its destination. As we get through our pitch type series, we'll provide more context for how these two differ. But for the context of this video, we're going to simply keep ourselves concerned with the observed spin direction on a clock, a pitch with pure back spin. We'll have a spin direction of 12:00, opposite of that top spin. A pitch that had pure topspin would have a spin direction of 6:00. Side spin from a right hander that went to the arm side and purely had just side spin would be at 3:00. Pitches rarely hit these extreme spin directions and generally fall somewhere in the middle. For example, most forcing fastballs come in at around 1245 to a 115 spin direction, meaning they have a bounce of backspin and side spin involved with the pitch. A pitch with a spin direction of 130 would have equal parts vertical and horizontal break. A 730 curveball would have equal parts downward vertical break in horizontal break, meaning topspin and side spin, hence the name slur.

Let's look at 2021 spin direction averages by pitch type for fastballs. We can see that sinkers have a higher proportion of side spin on average, whereas the four seamer is equipped with primarily backspin. What stands out with the changeup is that its spin direction is fairly close to that of the singer. It's generally easier to create separation off of a forcing relative to a sinker. We'll break this down in more detail when we break down the changeup in a future video. Cutters on average have a higher proportion of backspin relative to side spin, as their spin direction of 1110 on average is closer to 12:00 than 9:00. Though gyroscopic spin is still primarily the main spin involved in the offering. The average slider primarily has gyroscopic spin, but on average compare the close to seeing their useful spin consist mostly upside spin. Again, the average curveball actually has very similar amounts of top spin inside spin. The average spin direction comes to around 715. We wrap things up with our final section pitch movement with our context of Spin rate active spin and gyroscopic spin.

We're ready to jump into what is ultimately the meat and potatoes of pitch quality induced vertical break and horizontal break to begin. These are short form movement values, which means it's agnostic towards gravity and other environmental factors, such as drag or air resistance. The movement values are relative to a ball with no movement or spin. A pitch was 16 inches a vertical break doesn't actually move upward, but it does fight gravity better than a pitch with 13 inches of vertical break at the equivalent velocity. Human beings are currently not capable of throwing a pitch with enough velocity or movement to effectively get it to rise. But they're capable of getting hitters to swing underneath their fastballs by throwing pitches that effectively rise relative to the hitter's expectations. This calculation is taken from when the pitcher releases the ball and looks at the movement up until it crosses the plate. The biggest correlation towards creating total movement on a pitch, as we've already discussed, is looking at the total amount of transverse or useful spin on a pitch. Again, there's two ways to do this create a ton of raw spin, but probably more importantly, create a lot of transverse spin or be efficient with that spin. As an example, let's look at Luis Castillo's slider against Sonny Grace. Here's what this would look like on a break chart. Castillo's slider essentially mimics a pitch with no movement in the short form, though it will still drop and deviate from his fastball due to gravity and the fact that it has no backspin on it. Meanwhile, Grace has an incredible amount of glove side movement on it. As a matter of fact, only Kyle Crick averaged more than 20 inches of horizontal break on his slider over the course of the entire 2021 season. As you progress with pitch movement, you note that pitches deviate so much in how they move that they're liberal. Classifications of Slider, Curveball and Cutter simply don't provide the necessary context for what the pitch looks like. As we dig into the Individual Pitch series, we'll classify these pitches off their movement metrics rather than what the pitcher classifies it at. In this case, we'd consider Grace Slider a sweeper in Castillo's a gyro slider. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can basically read the spin direction off of a break chart as well. We can visually tell from the break chart that the pitch sunny grace through consists mostly of side spin. And thus when we close to 9:00, let's take a look at league average pitch movement by pitch type for the 2021 season. The average right handed four seam fastball had 16 and a half inches of vertical break and seven and a half inches of horizontal break for sinkers. You can almost flip the horizontal and vertical averages from the four seamer to get league average movement, though the pitch has a bit more lift on average at nine and a half inches. On average, the changeup has five and a half inches of carry. Once again, we can see it hovering closer to the sinker. Though it distinguishes itself from the four seamer on the break chart cutters have a higher active spin percentage than sliders on average. However, that spin is mainly put towards backspin, meaning the pitch won't create as much depth as a slider. The pitch came in with an average of eight inches a vertical break and three inches of glove side action. Sliders vary widely in their shape and have an average of about an inch and a half of carry and nearly seven inches of sweep. Finally, the average curveball has just about equal parts downward vertical break and equal parts side spin is only pitch that averages negative vertical break with 11 inches on average and ten inches of glove side horizontal break. In a separate video, we'll go down the rabbit hole of looking at each of these pitches independently and further contextualizing their unique movement along with how to throw the pitches. While there's still much more to movement such as Seam Shift and Wake, or the effects of gyro spin turning into active spin. As a journey to the plate, this video focused on discussing the basics of movement.