A couple of weeks ago Baseball Savant released new leaderboards for spin direction based on measured movement from MLB’s new Hawk-Eye cameras. A day later, Cleveland traded some guy named Frankie and the direction of Shane Bieber’s spinning curveball suddenly seemed less important to write about.
Now that the dust has mostly settled on that trade, it feels like a good time to look at this new data set and perhaps understand another way to evaluate Cleveland’s stable of excellent pitchers.
So, let’s do that.
Unlike the radar-based TrackMan cameras used previously throughout major league stadiums, Hawk-Eye collects its data using extremely high-speed, high-quality video from a dozen cameras tragically placed around MLB stadiums.