Season-level baseball stats are the tried and true. They’re at the bottom of your screen every time a player steps into the box to bat or onto the mound to pitch, and they’re on the leaderboards that BBWAA members peruse when deciding whom to vote for at the end of each year. But splits are what really keep the engine going. They add context. They fill in dead air on the broadcast. They clarify trends and build narratives. When you think “splits” you probably think of platoon splits or monthly splits, all of which are great and on our Splits Leaderboards. But today I wanted to get even more granular, move off the main Splits Leaderboard page, and jump into Pitch-Type Splits.
There’s far more you’re able to do on this page than I could possibly cover in a reasonably sized post, so these highlights will just be a taste to whet your appetite.
Members-Only Features
- Members can export to Excel, while non-Members will have that button grayed out.
- The Pitch% column (i.e., what percentage of pitches thrown by a pitcher or seen by a batter are of the given pitch type) available to Members only. The column is hidden by default but there’s a checkbox at the top:
- On the Group By dropdown, the Career/Pitch Type selection is also for Members only:
The grouping by pitch type is necessary to separate different pitch types when selecting multiple pitch types. Here’s Jacob Misiorowski’s fastball and slider with the default grouping:
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And when grouping by pitch type:
The Pitch% column will use handedness as the denominator, so if you restrict to lefty pitchers only when looking at batters, it will be percentage of pitches seen from lefty pitchers.
Quick Splits
This is a great spot to start playing around, and you’ll automatically be tabbed between Batting and Pitching depending on which quick split is selected. The pitch types here are automatically mutually exclusive (e.g., selecting cutter will deselect four-seam fastballs), and each pitch type can be combined with a single handedness filter. Consider this Pitch-Type Splits 101, a micro-dose of all this page has to offer.
Split Parameters
These dropdowns represent Pitch-Type Splits 201, where filters can be combined into hundreds, if not thousands of possible leaderboards. Much like Burger King, you can have it your way. Want to look at sliders and curveballs from lefty pitchers to lefty hitters, grouped by batter, sorted by lowest chase rate? We got you:
Righty-on-righty changeups, forkballs, and splitters, sorted by who throws the ostensibly rare combo most often? There are buttons for that:
Timeframes
The leaderboards have data for the entire Statcast era, dating back to 2016, and the Date Range selectors — along with the Season option in the Group By dropdown at the top right — split different seasons into separate rows if you don’t want them combined. The Preset Timeframes dropdown has options for the last seven, 14, or 30 days, or the last one, two, or three calendar years.
All these features are but amuse-bouches for all that can be accomplished with the leaderboards, and as always, I encourage play and exploration. This tool is one of many at FanGraphs that gives plenty of power to the user, especially to our Members, thanks to the added Pitch% column and data export capability.