Poetry in Motion: A Preliminary Feasibility Study for Comparing MLB Pitchers

ABSTRACT: After attending the Major League Winter Meetings in Orlando, Florida (the largest gathering of baseball executives in the world), it was affirmed how valuable a pitcher is to a team. "Which pitcher will be worth the pay or hurt your pay?" This is a multimillion-dollar question asked every season by managers, teams and organizations in Major League Baseball. This is a question that has been mulled over in the past, present and will be a highly regarded question in the future in the baseball industry. While technology is still being developed to analyze and test pitchers for the future, what can be done in the meantime without the bells and whistles? The purpose and objective of my thesis paper is to try to identify a recipe that can be used by any baseball team to compare pitchers without the use of very advance and expensive technology. The arm motion of a pitcher is crucial as poor mechanics can lead to an injured pitcher or even surgery, forcing a team to dig deep elsewhere. For my paper, I chose pitchers I had video access to from the 2013 season that include Diamondbacks pitchers: Patrick Corbin, Wade Miley, Josh Collmenter and Joe Thatcher. Then I chose two players I would like to further analyze: a knuckleball pitcher, R.A. Dickey, and a fastball/curveball pitcher, Stephen Strasburg. The data collected includes: angles of arm in motion also known as the jerk, stride, angle velocity, height, weight, number of games started/played in 2013, percentage of pitches thrown in a season, number of pitches thrown in a season, innings pitched (IP) and earned run average (ERA). The data was put in a table to compare pitchers in the now or the future.