Is Craig Kimbrel Changing Up His Arsenal?
You gotta love a guy who isn’t satisfied just with being the best reliever on the planet. But something’s up with Craig Kimbrel on this first day of live BP. Here’s Fredi Gonzalez as quoted by David O’Brien on the subject.
"“Chris Johnson (another in the group that faced Kimbrel) told me he threw a couple of change-ups,” said Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez, who was watching pitchers on another field when Kimbrel threw. “He’s probably just playing with it. Add a third pitch if he has to. I don’t know how much he’ll use it when the games start.”"
So he’s throwing a change-up. Oh. My.
We already know how good Kimbrel is. If he manages to come up with 40 saves this season, Kimbrel will be the first ever to do 40+ in 5 straight seasons… never mind that they are his first 5 full seasons, period.
Whether Fredi thinks he’s just messing around or not, just the threat of another pitch type oughta scare the you-know-what out of National League hitters.
The Bag of Tricks
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Kimbrel’s pitch selection is actually pretty simple. A 96-97 mph fastball that occasionally gets gassed up to 98-99 mph, plus a breaking pitch at 84-86 mph. Whether you call it a slider or a curve (fangraphs has it both ways) matters little.
It’s a knee-buckler regardless.
Kimbrel throws the fastball around 70-73% of the time, with the slurve at 27-30%.
So let’s just speculate a bit here.
Suppose a change-up were to be introduced… maybe somewhere around 7-8% of the time. Something that looks like the fastball, but it perhaps 12-15 mph slower? How important is that distinction?
Math Lessons
A 98 mph fastball travels roughly 58 feet to the plate after being released (ballpark figure; used for comparison purposes only; we’ll go with averages here).
An object traveling at one mile per hour travels 5280 feet in 3600 seconds, or 1.466 feet per second.
- At 98 mph, that’s 143.67 feet per second
- At 85 mph, it’s 124.61 feet per second
- The differential is 13 mph, or 19.06 fps
Dividing that out – 58 / 143.67 – gives you a time to the plate of .4037 seconds for the fastball; similarly .4654 seconds for a changeup… and for his slurve, for that matter. It’s a differential of .06 seconds.
.06 seconds isn’t much time. In fact, you probably can’t start and stop a stopwatch that quickly. But in that fraction of a second, the baseball would travel 7.7 feet less for an 85 mph changeup than for Kimbrel’s 98 mph fastball. Put another way, when Kimbrel’s fastball reaches the front of the plate, a hypothetical changeup would have only traveled 50.3 feet. 7.7 feet still in front of the hitter’s lunging swing.
7.7 feet is a big difference. Especially when you’re expecting the express. Heck, even if the differential is only half that, it would work.
Does that little math bit give a little more understanding about why hitting a baseball is such a tough thing to do?
Craig Kimbrel might just be trying to make it even harder.