Pitch tracking has been around for over a decade and given baseball fans tremendous insight on their favorite hurlers around the league. For the first time ever, we could see how much Tim Lincecum’s splitter fell off the table or why Roy Halladay’s cutter was arguably the most dominant pitch in the game.
But there’s always been a flaw with pitch movement metrics. They put every player’s pitches in a vacuum; that is, they don’t account for release point, velocity, and gravity. Those are two crucial components in how much a pitch moves. A 90-mph slider will not have as much vertical movement as an 83-mph slider because gravity will have less time to act on it.