I’m not understanding the HR/BIA stat. How can you have more than one home run per ball hit in the air?

Eye-based: he’s throwing his fastball faster with a better feel for the strike zone and his curve ball with more snap.

Expect more of the same high quality stuff with less sterling results as luck catches up and he faces better lineups outside the NL West.

He is a better Zito. Maybe even a consistent quality starter.

I hope the “new Zito” is the real Zito, but even with his great starts, I think the league’s eventually going to come back and bite him in the ass.

- Ground outs to air outs ratio is 1.26, after never having gone above .96 in a season and averaging 0.79
- Ground balls/fly ball ratio is 0.75 compared to 0.65 over his career.
- Double play percentage in 2009 is 17% versus 10% over his career.
- Extra Base Hits percentage is 5.0. Early in his career it hovered a little over 5%, then popped into the 7-8% range for 2004-2008.

Although I bet 3 of the above regress to their means as the sample size expands, this does suggest that so far, more balls are being hit weakly on the ground.

My broader guess is that his control/confidence throwing strikes has improved, batters have gone expecting to get ahead in counts easily, fallen behind and shortened up their swing to protect the plate.

I expect a similar write up on Patrick Marleau… due tomorrow.

In all seriousness though, Zito has looked much better over his last three starts. As long as he keeps the walks low, he should continue to be a decent 4th starter. I’d happily support that.

As I recall, that’s a big part of Cliff Lee’s success last year. I’m not comparing Zito to Lee directly, just saying there’s a recent example of a far more drastic shift in those categories.

Do I know what that means? No.

There was an article in the past month or two, I believe on Baseball Prospectus, that went through pitchers who had sudden spikes in groundball rates. The article was done in response to Cliff Lee’s renaissance last year, which was largely groundball/BB related.

If I find it I’ll let you know, but I think the conclusion was that these things are sometimes sustainable, but often not.

HERE IS some ZIto FB Velocity data I extracted a couple weeks back

I believe his low AVE FB for the year so far is 85.86

He said after Zito’s last start that he thought he was finishing his pitches better (follow through, I’d imagine) resulting in better late movement on his pitches especially the fast ball. My eyes agree.

I enjoyed it greatly.

What I would note is that you cannot really use DIPS stats with Zito, as he’s probably one of the exceptions to the rule. As Tom Tippett showed in his analysis (should still be on Diamond Mind’s website) of DIPS, there are pitchers who don’t comply with DIPS theory and crafty lefthanders are one category (he found a number of different categories that don’t fit DIPS, like knuckle-ballers too).

The key there, for me, to place him in that category is that his career BABIP is significantly below that of the .300 mean most pitchers regress to. That has been the formula for his success in his career, despite the high walk rate, subpar strikeout rate (since first seasons), and being a Flyball pitcher (which usually means more HR). And Tom Tango showed that for BABIP to be shown to be statistically significantly lower than the .300 mean, it would take 7 years worth of data as a starter, which Zito now has.

Thus, to me, FIP is not a useful stat to show for him, and it is not informative to try to include in analysis any DIPS concepts, when trying to understand Zito.

The comment about his infield flies probably points out what has been his competitive advantage previously: batters mostly weakly pop up his curveball, resulting in less hits, less power. His HR/FB is low – 10% is the mean pitchers regress to and he was regularly below that in Oakland – and got lower once he got to SF, where homers not tattooed by BLB stay in the park. His career batting line by opposing hitters is a ridiculous .237/.318/.374/.692 with 137 ISO, 32.0% XBH%, and 0.93 HR/9; for comparison, the NL in 2008, pitchers had .263/.333/.417/.750 with 154 ISO, 34.0% XBH%, and 1.02 HR/9. Therein lies Zito’s effectiveness during his career, and remember, those numbers were made worse by pitching in SF so far.

I think the canary in the mine is his strikeout rate. When he is going good, at least during his career, he’s striking out batters at a good rate. He’s been doing that since mid-2008 season and that coincides with his improved velocity.

And given his penchant for second half surges, I have theorized that this might be perhaps related, again, to his velocity, that as his arm tires as it gets deeper into the season, that somehow creates better separation between his fastball and his breaking pitches, particularly his curve. If so, then perhaps he benefited from the longer spring training this season. I wonder what other people think could be the reason for this late season surge.

Well what can i say…
i just love his way of pitching…i always loved it before he was a Giant.
I really hope he gets some wins…he’s pitching great and he’s not been lucky with runs support.
Also…and this may not interest everyone..he seems to be a very smart person also out of the baseball field.
I have complete trust in him, and i never was angry at him even in his past 2 season.
I hope fans will show him their support…..if he goes back to his pitching…he’s sure more than a 4th spot starter, and will be pivotal for Giants’ season.

I’d love to see ChadBradfordWannabe do a film breakdown of Zito’s delivery this year vs. last. By eye, I think he’s got more of a 3/4 arm slot than last year, which I recall last year’s THT article mentioning.

It’s all a clever trick to try to get me to get my hopes up.

It won’t work though.

He is YEAH BABY!!!!!!!!!

This thread is definitely going to jinx him tonight.

Well, he had another fine outing last night. It’s more and more difficult not to believe.

This would be a pretty remarkable resurgence if it’s for real.

When your stuff changes you need to have better command. He seems to have added a slider/slurve. I’m not sure if it’s a hard curve or a slider, but it has a much different sight line than his slow 12/6 job. I’m sure the the fangraphs stuff is interesting. I’ll have to check that out, but I’d be really interested to see something that charts location. I’d bet he’s hitting the corners better and making fewer mistakes over the plate this year.

I noticed that his sucking percentage is way down and his good:crap ratio is also improved.

“I can’t stop thinking about him…sigh…<3”