Brad Bergesen Versus Other Groundball Pitchers

I've been playing around with the Pitch/FX database all weekend - and there will be a post using it to look at Jeremy Guthrie on Monday - but for now I thought I'd just put this graph up. It shows a distribution of the pitch* height for various groundball pitchers from the past two years, including Brad Bergesen, Brandon Webb, Derek Lowe, Roy Halladay, and Aaron Cook. The red lines going across give a rough idea of the top and bottom of the strike-zone. The vertical axis has the height of the pitch, and the horizontal axis has the frequency of pitches thrown at various heights (as a percent of total pitches). * Includes all pitches, and not just sinkers/two-seamers.

As you can see, Bergy does a pretty nice job keeping the ball down in the zone. He's not quite Derek Lowe, but he compares well - at least in this regard - to some of the better groundball pitchers in the game. More graph-tastic action tomorrow.