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Daniel Bard has the second-highest walk rate in the American League. Joe Blanton has the fourth-lowest walk rate in the National League. Both of them pitched yesterday, and both of them found the strike zone about as often as expected. Here's what that looked like, courtesy of Brooks Baseball's pitch plots:

Bard:

Blanton:

The control stats for Blanton: six innings, one walk, 73 percent strikes. For Bard: 1 2/3 innings, six walks, two hit by pitches, 44 percent strikes. Here's a complete list of the pitchers who had walked at least six batters and hit at least two in an outing of two innings or less before Bard:

You might have noticed that one pitch from Bard was so far outside it missed not only the strike zone, but the strike zone â€‹plot​. Here's where that pitch (to Edwin Encarnacion) was:

 

And here's where Bard's final pitch of the afternoon (also to Encarnacion) was:

Finally, here's the acrobatic dance of pain Encarnacion did a split second later, which looked a little like a soccer scoring celebration. Sometimes it's even less fun to face a pitcher with control problems than it is to play behind one.

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rawagman
6/04
I don`t know if this is the right place to mention it, but I have always found the brooksbaseball charts to be very hard to read in the sense that I cannot easily distinguish all of the colour gradiants within the plot (I am not colourblind).
In play, no outs, and in play, runs seems to be the same colour. Also, I would hazard that the plot points are so small as to make the colours almost bleed, from a visual perspective.
bornyank1
6/04
I relayed your feedback to Dan and Harry.
Leg4206
6/04
Mr. Thorburn has talked about watching where the mitt is set and the location of the resulting pitch. Without the mitt location data, final pitch location (certainly for most fastballs) is data lacking context.
bornyank1
6/04
True, but I can tell you that the target was not outside the strike zone for over half of Bard's pitches. When your pitch plot looks like that, you're missing the target. A lot.
Leg4206
6/04
That's true, I was just musing about the plots in general