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May 3, 2007

Schrodinger's Bat

Hummingbirds and Sloths

by Dan Fox

"Baseball's poetic and lyrical celebrants are fond of pointing out that baseball is the only major team sport without a clock. What these people don't understand is that, until about 1945, baseball did a have clock. It was called the sun."
--Bill James in The New Historical Baseball Abstract

It's seemingly one of the oldest adages in the game–-if you're a pitcher you shouldn't waste time between pitches. Work quickly, and your defense will reward you by making more plays by virtue of staying alert and on its toes. You can find that particular piece of advice in nearly every instructional book and video on pitching, although often in the more nuanced form of "keeping a good tempo" on the mound. This wisdom came to mind after the quintessential example of a no-nonsense hurler, White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle, was on display in the major's most recent no-hitter. Reports of the game universally noted how Buerhle worked "fast and efficiently" in mowing down the Rangers.

After reading those words time and time again, I began to wonder just how true that advice is at the major league level. The result is that this week we'll take a small jaunt into the world of quick workers, slow workers, and the error rates of the defenses that play behind them.

Speed and Lethargy

The first hurdle is to identify just who are the speedy workers, and who are the dawdlers–-or to put it in other terms, which ones are the hummingbirds (a species of which, the blue-throated hummingbird, has a heartbeat of 1,260 beats per minute) and which are the sloths (who typically move at a speed of 6 to 12 inches per minute). By quick workers we mean pitchers who spend the least time between pitches (their overall tempo on the mound) and not pitchers who get rid of the ball the fastest (their tempo within their pitching motion), nor do we mean the guys who end up throwing the fewest pitches per inning and thereby have quick innings. It should also be noted that for the purposes of this study we're considering only starting pitchers who started 50 or more games in the major leagues since 1970.