If you are a Diamondback fan this morning, you could be wondering how Max Scherzer struggled so much against the Pirates Thursday night, a team that he dominated scarcely a week ago back in Arizona. How in the world, for example, did he give up a two-run single to Ronny Cedeno in the sixth inning? That hit knocked him out of the game and gave the Pirates a 4-3 lead (the D'backs would go on to win in 12 anyways). In 2009, it's easy enough to find a Web site like Brooks Baseball, look up Scherzer's start from last night, see the PitchFX data, and understand that Cedeno's hit actually came on a first-pitch slider that was low and away in the strike zone and took a nice piece of hitting by Cedeno to line it up the middle for the hit. This is something that baseball nerds like me have been doing for two years now. What's interesting is the story from Nick Piecoro in yesterday's Arizona Republic that reports that Scherzer is doing the same thing.
The whole story is a very interesting read about Scherzer's take on some of baseball's more advanced statistics and his use of PitchFX. It's not exactly par for the course for a pitcher to be so interested in advanced stats (though anyone that knows about Bryan Bannister knows it's not unique), but it's also something that I think we'll see more of in the coming days. With PitchFX cameras in every park, measuring the placement and break of every pitch, there's an enormous volume of information quickly available that can be accessed with a few clicks and keystrokes. A pitcher like Scherzer, who can read and understand the data, could get a huge boost to traditional scouting reports and film studies without spending much more time preparing.
Take Scherzer last night, for example. He could have very easily found the data from Yusmeiro Petit's near no-hitter against the Pittsburgh on Tuesday and seen what he did to keep Pirate hitters off balance. He could then compare that with what worked for him against the Pirates at the end of last month and see if there's anything he needed to add to his gameplan for Thursday night.
Of course, as Scherzer himself notes, all of this only takes a pitcher so far. Despite all of the data available on Arizona's four previous games against the Pirates, in which the D'Backs pitching held Pittsburgh to three runs, Scherzer gave up five runs in just 5 1/3 innings last night, partially because of the four walks he issued. No amount of study can help a guy if he doesn't throw strikes.
