clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Know your Rays: swinging at the breaking ball (Friday)

A very fun game.

Raymond James?
Raymond James?
USA TODAY Sports

Monday (Matt Joyce); Tuesday (David DeJesus, an Evan Longoria lookalike); Wednesday (Wil Myers)

Thursday: Yesterday, I showed you some graphs with a lot of blue. It's a player with a passive approach, who takes a lot of breaking balls. The majority of answers were right: it was Ben Zobrist. A few people made the reasonable conjecture that it was Ryan Hanigan.

Hanigan is actually a bit more aggressive against lefty breaking balls (shown below), but still a good guess.

0gbh2u69d7in9ggetlasbaule5452672lwm_medium

via www.baseballheatmaps.com

One person, dbullsfan made what I thought was an incredibly dumb answer. I was going to point at him and call him dumb, and just to see exactly how dumb he is, I looked up Loney's charts.

Ben Zobrist vs. lefty breaking balls:

0gbh2u69d7in9ggetlasbaule5450314lwm_medium

via www.baseballheatmaps.com

James Loney vs. lefty breaking balls:

0gbh2u69d7in9ggetlasbaule5425766lwm_medium

via www.baseballheatmaps.com

Ben Zobrist vs. righty breaking balls:

0gbh2u69d7in9ggetlasbaule5450314rwm_medium

via www.baseballheatmaps.com

James Loney vs. righty breaking balls:

0gbh2u69d7in9ggetlasbaule5425766rwm_medium

via www.baseballheatmaps.com

Seriously, what is going on? Those are almost exactly the same. Serious props to dbullsfan. This week is tough. Answers will be more concrete next week.

We're back into a 2-2 tie for our two previous winders, Andy Hellicksonstine and BeantownRaysFan.

------------------------------------------

Once again, these are swing/take heat maps from Jeff Zimmerman's site, www.baseballheatmaps.com. I'm including all curves, sliders, and knuckle curves (according to the MLBAM classifications) thrown since 2007, and comparing a player's swing tendencies to the league average swing tendencies, so a hot color means that the player swung more than average at a pitch in that location. A cool color means he swung less often than average.

Mystery Ray vs. lefty breaking balls:

0gbh2u69d7in9ggetlasbaule5446481lwm_medium

via www.baseballheatmaps.com

Mystery Ray vs. RHP breaking balls:

0gbh2u69d7in9ggetlasbaule5446481rwm_medium

via www.baseballheatmaps.com

Who is the mystery Ray?