BiP Charts - Duke
This will be the first of three Ball in Play (BiP) chart sets for Duke, Maholm, and Snell from the All-Star game thru their last start as of September 9, 2006. I will tie all the charts together over the next few days when I complete the 3-part series on Bats or Arms.
First, here is Duke's BiP by Zone chart (by Zone I mean, LF, CF, or RF zone):
Let's go over a few things on the above chart so you understand my poor graphing.
I broke the filed into 3 Zones and 3 Areas. Areas are labeled "A", "B", and "C". Example, Area B is between the red and blue lines and it represents all ground balls that passed thru the infield into the outfield within the corresponding zone.
Zone are labeled "LF", "CF", and "RF". I included "gap hits" into the corner outfield zones to make this simpler to read. The reason I did that is because there have been very few "gappers" hit off Duke. For example, if you broke the entire outfield into 5 simple plots and labeled them LF, LCF, CF, RCF, and RF, there was only 1 LCF gap shot and 6 RCF shots, but the RCF shots tended to be mostly on the RF side for the most part.
Now let's understand the data points. The entire LF Zone saw 47% of all balls in play off Duke. Of those 47% BiP in the LF Zone, 33% were hit to Area "A" as either liners or flyballs, and the offense gained 31 total bases from those BiP; 15% were grounders that went thru the infield; and 52% were handled as grounders, popups, or liners by the infield.
The only odd note on the chart is that the 43% above the pitcher's mound means Duke fielded 43% of the BiP in the CF zone in Area "C". For the record, there were 4 total BiP handled by the catcher and they will not be included on any of the charts.
One quick read is that 47% of all BiP off Duke vs. a right hand batter headed to the left side of the field. Now knowing, as you do, Duke's MO is to pitch away and down in the zone to righties, that's a lot of bat speed being exhibited by batters against Duke. BTW, that 47% is considerably higher than his 2005 stats. One reason that could be is because of the loss of velocity (-2 - 4 mph) Duke has had this year. Another reason this could be is because Duke is now pitching into right hand batters more than he did in 2005, trying to keep them off balanced.
Now here is Duke's BiP chart by Area:
Again, the Zones and Areas are the same. However, this chart tells us that, of all BiP hit off Duke, 40% were handled in Area A as flyballs or linedrives. Of those 40%, 39% were hit to each coroner and 22% to CF.
One quick read off this chart would tell you that 56% of all BiP that were hit on the ground that went thru the infield went thru the left side of the diamond. Conversely, only 20% went thru the right side. Small sample size alert, however. It also shows us that 52% of all BiP off Duke made it to the outfield, one way or another.
Another quick read is that 96 total bases were obtained from BiP past the infield from either grounders thru the infield or liners and flyballs to the outfield. That is just short of one total base for every ball in play off Duke during the time period. Is that good or bad? We'll show you after we get all three pitcher's charts up over the next few days.
One last note.. I did not provide left hand batter data against Duke because Duke only faced 10 left hand batters over the 11 games and their production yielded them only 11 total bases (3 from walks and 1 from a hit batter), they had 7 K's, and only 7 balls even left the infield. Simply put, there was very little to chart. Teams are loading up right hand batter lineups on Duke and I expect that to be the theme every time he takes the mound, for the most part.
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