Yuki Matsui: Start 3

Yuki Matsui made his third start of the season on Wednesday April 16th, facing 26 batters in five innings and 101 pitches, giving up three runs, while striking out four and walking six against the Softbank Hawks. Like usual, let's start with the graphs and start with his velocity chart.

Unlike the last two starts, Matsui's velocity peaked in the middle of the outing instead of around the first of the outing. His slowest pitch overall was a curveball early in the outing. His fastball velocity dropped a little toward the end until his last start. Here are his average pitch velocities from the outing:

At least compared to his first start, his fastball velocity is down over a full kilometer, and his change is down about two kilometers. His slider and curveballs were actually faster though. Whether or not that is a classification error or not is tough to say.




Here is a pie chart that shows his pitch selection:

We still see a relatively low fastball usage, and it has actually been decreasing compared to his other two starts. He really fell in love with his slider in this particular start.

Again, Yuki Matsui struggled to throw pitches in the zone, as this chart shows:

 Since he struggled again to throw pitches in the strike zone, let's see where he located his pitches:

Once again, Matsui was very heavy to the glove side and low. Armside and high was his second favorite spot. He kept the ball out of the very middle of the plate though, even though he still gave up five hits.

Here are the results of each of Matsui's pitches broken into a pie chart:

His whiff percentage was pretty impressive, though his called strike percentage wasn't. To get a better look at pitch results, let's bring the velocity chart back up but instead of labelling each pitch with pitch type, let's label them with the results.

When he was throwing his hardest in the middle of the outing, he was throwing balls, which probably means that he was overthrowing. His breaking balls at the end of the game were also almost all balls, except for the one whiff. He got a couple of called strikes with early breaking balls, just like the early fastballs.

Here are the pitch locations for the balls put in play off Matsui:

As you can tell, things were pretty balanced, but his increase in pitches thrown arm side and high seemed to hurt him, as that is the location where most of the balls were put in play.

Here are the pitch types that were put in play off Matsui:

Not surprisingly, a plurality of them were fastballs, but his slider and change had higher percentages of contact than pitches thrown, meaning they were more hittable than the curve and fastball in this start.

For comparison, here are the pitch types that Matsui got whiffs with:

The slider was a risk-reward pitch for him in the outing as he gave up more contact than he should have with it, but it got him half of his whiffs.