Examining Edwin Jackson's Success Through Pitchf/s

I made it no secret that I did not like the Edwin Jackson for Matt Joyce swap. To this point, I have been wrong as I thought Edwin Jackson was, at best, a back of the rotation starter. To say he's exceeded my expectations would be understating it. Jackson's been the Tigers second best starter behind the unreal start that Justin Verlander's gotten off to.

With the help of Harry Pavlidis, I've got the abilities to look at the average flight path of all of Edwin Jackson's pitches for 2008 and 2009.

Below, you will see Jackson's fastball (click all images to enlarge). What I've done is taken just all of the sinkers listed and re-coded them as fastballs and I'm incorporating any that may have been looked at as 2-seam fastballs in the gameday data along with the 4-seam fastballs. Here's views from both above (bird's eye) and first base.

His 2009 fastball, thus far, seems to be hitting home plate at about the same spot, but is leaving his hand a touch higher then in 2008. Also, his velocities are 94.11 mph and 94.42 in 2008 and 2009.

Now, on to his change-up. He hasn't thrown many of them this year, just 66 identified by Pitchf/x where as in 2008 he threw 234 of them.

This is the most separation on any of his pitches when compared to their previous years version. I am not certain why this is as the velocities were nearly identical (85.86 mph in 2008, 85.68 mph in 2009), so a slower velocity doesn't appear to be a factor. Like with his fastball, his change-up seems to be getting released from a touch higher than his 2008 version, and is also crossing the plate (the black line) at a touch below the 2008 version.

But, here's where I'm most interested. Examining Edwin Jackson's slider. Here's the graph:

Jackson's 2008 slider came in at an average of 86.02 mph while his 2009 slider's come in at 85.31 mph. So there's not a big difference in velocity. However, looking at the bird's eye view, you can see he's starting his slider now more towards the 3rd base side and it's finishing further towards the left-hand batting box meaning that he's getting more "sweeping" action on it. It is also diving further and, again, he's releasing his pitch higher, and it's diving down further by the time it reached the plate when compared to its 2008 version.

So, while the differences don't appear to large -- almost non-existent in velocity -- when you're trying to hit a round ball with a round bat when it's coming at no slower then 85 mph (at least, when you're facing Jackson, that is) I'm presume that any difference in the flight path would make a small bit of difference.

That said, I don't see a discernible difference in the flight paths of Edwin Jackson from 2008 versus the Tigers No. 2 starter version. So, that makes me wonder if the stats have anything to add. According to Fangraphs, his LD% against is just 16.3%. That will regress. League average is around 18-22% and his career is 19.4% -- possibly due to how straight of a fastball he's throwing. He is pounding the zone a bit more then he did in the past. In 2008 he threw 3056 pitches with 1874 going for strikes (61.32%) and in 2009 he's thrown 1131 pitches with 738 strikes (65.25%). He is getting about 2% more of his fly balls remaining on the infield than his past history, but that could be a result of (a bad trend) of giving up more fly balls this year then ever before.

Conclusion

When it's all said and done, I would expect his fly ball percentage to drop (with his infield fly ball percentage dropping a couple percent as well) while his line drive rate increases back to his career norms. On the whole, I don't find much that has changed from Jackson to suggest that his new strike out rate od 19.45% (K/Total Batters Faced) is a new trend over his career percentage of ~16%. In fact, the ZiPS projection update at Fangraphs has Jackson striking out 91 over the rest of the season with another 130 innings pitched. He's averaged 3.94 batters per inning over 74.1 IP this year. If we extrapolate that over 130 more innings that'd give us an approximate 513 more batters faced. He's projected at striking out just 91 more, and that would be a 17.7% strikeout rate and would make his 2009 total ~148 K's and 806 batters faced -- or 18.36% (and I'd bet on the under on this ... but I'm a cynic). And that's close to league average.

If this comes to fruition, that would still make him a better pitcher then I thought when we acquired him. Kudos to Dave Dombrowski (thus far).