Sunday, December 30, 2012

Collection of Minor League Velocity

Similar to what I have been doing with running times for position players, I wanted to start a velocity collection for pitchers in the minor leagues. I decided to use no players that have pitched in the Majors (as obviously you could just load their brooks baseball or FanGraphs page to get a more scientific view). This will not be scientific, but should be a useful and sortable list of minor league pitchers' velocity.

I wasn't sure whether or not I should include pitchers that have pitch f/x data due to spring training or AFL, but I decided to include them. I was sort of loose on RP/SP designations, but as a general rule I looked at how they have been used in the past couple of years more than their career (I mostly ignored projections of whether or not a pitcher will stick as a starter).

For pitchers that I hadn't written scouting reports myself on, I gathered data from a lot of different places, but Pirates Prospects, Orioles Nation, Red Sox Prospects, Perfect Game, and Baseball Prospect Nation were probably the biggest places. I figured that if there were 6 U.S. affiliates for each club, and if we assume every team uses 8 man bullpens (13 pitchers), then there are about 2340 minor league pitchers. Of course, we are taking out the ones that have pitched in the Majors at all, but we are probably still talking about 2000 different pitchers. I figured 500 was a good start and we will do some updates. I had to create ranges for the spreadsheet to sort right, so for pitchers I just had one velocity for, I just added and subtracted a MPH (for example, if all I have was 95, I changed it to 94-96). For pitchers' in which reports were not that specific (such as, "he throws in the low 90s"), I used this scale:
Low 90s= 90-93
Mid 90s= 94-96
Low to Mid 90s: 90-95
etc.
It is not scientific, but it should work. You should be able to download the spreadsheet by following the link (either click there or copy and paste the link below).

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_DUd_c_mKWrd0g2Y2NYbzlub1E

Again, it should be emphasized that this is not scientific by any means, this is just to create a place where you can see some estimated velocities for many minor leaguers. The mean was 90-94, which probably sounds about right considering MLB average is 91.7 MPH. Let me know in the comments or via email or twitter if there are any mistakes.

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