At Brooks Baseball, we’ve built a repository where you can access almost any information about any pitcher’s pitches and be confident that the pitch types were identified correctly. For example, you can ask how many times batters swung and missed at a Stephen Strasburg changeup, how often batters hit Chris Sale’s slider for a groundball, or what the overall called-strike rate is for Felix Hernandez’s fastball.

But PITCHf/x databasing is still in its infancy. Pitching is not the sum of individual statistics about individual pitches any more than a piece of music is the sum of an individual set of notes. Pitching is a sequence of events—the previous pitch’s execution may be as germane to the outcome of the at-bat as the current pitch’s execution. We often hear about how a pitcher might go up in the zone with a high fastball to raise a batter’s eye level and then down in the zone with a curveball. None of that was captured in the maze of tables and charts already available.

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