Hey Siri, tell me how Trevor Williams can get more strikeouts this season. It wasn’t quite that easy, but I did ask my computer to consider all of the new Cubs starter’s Statcast from 2019-2020 in an attempt to predict slider whiffs.
Specifically, I fed it the following data:
- Vertical location (plate_z)
- Horizontal location (plate_x)
- Velocity
- Spin Rate
- Horizontal release point
- Vertical release point
- Horizontal movement (pfx_x)
- Vertical movement (pfx_z)
- Release extension
- Previous pitch
- Previous two pitches
- Pitch count
The computer figured out the most important numbers and identified cutoff points to classify a whiff, resulting in a tree-looking figure and an algorithm.