You’ve heard a version of this quote hundreds of times: “pitching is about keeping hitters off-balance.” That’s true. And one of the neat things about the era of tools like pitchf/x and Trackman is that now we have data that can help us understand exactly how pitchers do that. A key part of the puzzle is a concept you may or may not have heard of before: pitch tunneling.
The basic concepts are intuitive — you don’t need to be a stats guru to get it. Here’s Greg Maddux’s (brother of new Cardinal pitching coach Mike Maddux) summary of it:
“[My] main goal was to make all of my pitches look like a column of milk coming toward home plate.