Having a Clue: Understanding Your Command Profile

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Having a Clue: Understanding your Command Profile

Every year, thousands of pitchers around the country go into their competition blind. No understanding of how their pitches truly move, no understanding of what shapes they have that play against what type of hitters, and no understanding of what their most accurate pitch is or where their misses are.

Modern baseball training is starting to understand how important it is to measure pitch shapes and which shapes play well against other hitters, but the understanding of command is lacking significantly behind. Pitchers just go off vibes a lot of the time, and while that's better than no strategy, it's pretty much no strategy when you get higher and higher in the world of professional and college baseball.

While a ton of pitchers are still competing off vibes, some pitchers are being equipped with information that gives them an edge over the hitter. You see it in every level, pitchers are learning their arsenals and finally catching up to the cutting edge. However, less pitchers have a complete, all encompassing strategy that allows them to have the most behind them in every scenario.

For years, I went into my games going off of how I felt, with little to no basing on reality. “Idk coach, that pitch just felt good pregame”. Do not get me wrong, the feel for the game is absolutely important and necessary, but for players who don't have the experience necessary to have a high level “feel” you need something else. Getting to play based on “feel” is earned, and you likely don't have the experience or knack for knowing what is really going on. You might be a great player, but there is something that you just have to experience in order to really have a true “feel” for the game.

Building A Command Profile:

This is something that takes time and intention. You can't just think about it, you need to have a process and a way to intake verifiable data from games, bullpens and any live outing you can find data for. This goes much further than how you merely perform in the bullpen, or how you performed in your first outing, it takes a massive sample to really be able to decide with any form of confidence that you are doing the absolute right thing.

In Zone Rate:

There's a few different ways that you can accomplish this, one of which being taking all of your in game data and bullpens and calculating in-zone rate for all your pitches. If it's 3-2 and the bases are loaded, what pitch do you want to throw? Probably the one that has the highest chance of being a strike. Having a knowledge base of what pitches you land in the zone the most often is super important for understanding what pitches are necessary. This goes beyond extreme examples and comes back to the basic points of the game.

Knowing what pitches you get in the zone the most gives you the best chance to win 0-0 and 1-1 counts. These two counts reflect the two most important counts in baseball, having huge ramifications for the rest of the at bat if they flip in either person's favor. Being able to throw the ball over the plate is incredibly simple, but vital. The ones who do it are almost always better than the ones who don’t. Being ahead consistently puts the pressure on the hitter, and doing so makes it easy on the pitcher. Prioritizing filling up the zone may seem old school, but it's backed by every piece of data out there, and the simple things in the game are the ones that generally pay off the best.

What if it's 3-2 with the bases loaded and you are up by 4 and their best hitter is up to bat?

Expected Value:

Maybe this switches the strategy a little bit. It's simple to think that you should simply throw the ball that has the best chance of being a strike, but it's also important to know which pitch has the highest overall value. If you land a nasty sweeper in the zone 55% of the time, but you land your really bad cutter in the zone 70% of the time (exaggerated numbers), these pitches will have entirely different result profiles. The chance of giving up a homerun on your worst pitch and giving up 4 runs is way higher than the chance of it happening with your sweeper, so it might be worth throwing even if you walk him. It's not about being right every time, it's about finding out what strategy gives you the best chance at the best outcome.

This is where having a miss profile of your pitches comes into account. If you throw 500 pitches over the course of 2 months, then it's much more likely that you have a reasonable dataset to understand where each pitch of yours goes when you're trying to execute. The dispersion of your pitches is equally as important as how often you throw them in the zone.

If your dispersion is right down the middle but slightly higher in zone %, it might not be a more valuable pitch to throw a lot even if you lower your walk rate.If your dispersion is huge, but your pitch is elite, you still might not have good enough command of it to warrant throwing it a majority of the time.

Its way deeper than ball/strike, the hot zones of your misses can be cross references with the hot zones of the hitters you are facing, cross referenced with the counts, and then you have to take into account previous at bats, tendencies and what the hitters strategy is that day.

Conclusion:

You'll likely never have enough information to really make a completely informed decision, but you can certainly attain the most informed strategy possible if you take the time to look into everything. Information can be a weapon, but for something like this, it takes much more time and effort than simply throwing your pitches in a stuff+ calculator. Thankfully, the more work you have to put in to take advantage usually means you also have a longer time before it comes all the way around.

Competitive advantages in the game don't last long, so you should probably jump on it.

John