Dana Eveland Comparison

After that lengthy breakdown of his last start, I'd like to do a little comparison of his start last night (5-5-08) and his previous one of 4-30-08 that i broke down in my last post. I intend to see if there are any differences that made him more effective or if it was just luck. After all my hard work of breaking down innings, 2 days later Dan Brooks made it a lot easier by using an innings filter at his web based tool located here. Until I have my database fully loaded and get my graphing tools on-line, I will refer to Dan Brooks' graphs, since they are incredibly detailed and what my main goal was.

Last breakdown by inning from his start on 4-30-08 can be seen here.

Last night, Eveland was unbelievable. His release point was noticeably different, sitting at 2 feet horizontally. Comparison with the 4-30 game first.



If you go a little further, you will find that his trouble innings in his first start can with a release point closer to the 1' horizontal mark.

Second thing we looked at was pitch location. Again the 4-30 start is listed first.



He was also more effective in keeping his pitches lower in the zone and not as wild. He didn't have as many pitches that were a foot or outside of the zone, so he was able to keep the hitters off balance a little more so than previously. In particular he had much better command of his curveball keeping it out of the middle of the zone.

Here we looked at was the break of the pitches.



Looking at this it doesn't appear like there is much difference initially, but if you look closer you will see that he had more clustering of his pitches than before. Therefore he had a better idea/touch on the pitch about how far it would break or not break. This is incredibly important when trying to hit the corners or keep it low in the zone. If a pitcher is more comfortable just throwing the ball and knowing that it will stay down, he is less prone to be wild by trying to aim it.

Lastly, something that i didn't look at before that I thought of earlier today was the pitch speed.



While the axis aren't the same you can see roughly that his latest start he changed speed better. Changing speeds, hitting spots, releasing it more consistently and a better control of the break leads to very effective pitching.

So now onto the analysis of whether or not he is/was injured and the severity. The easy way would be to look at his stat line and clearly say that he's not, in this instance that's true. That's not always the case though and that's why I specifically chose the graphs above to determine whether or not he was still injured.

Usually the process will sort of entail the opposite of what we just did above. We'll usually be looking for whether a pitcher is injured and thus comparing his last start to previous "healthy" starts. Every once in a while though it's good to analyze a known bad game vs a known good game back to back to see if we can learn anything.

Fantasy wise, I like to make my decisions based on fact rather than assumptions or feelings. Looking at the graphs above, I can clearly see that he's not effected by the "injury" and is in fact healthy at this point. I will continue to monitor him and compare his next few starts to these starts and see where we stand.

Evidence based practice in medicine is basing your decisions on researched and proven data/scenarios. I feel that in terms of health, fantasy baseball players need to take the same approach. Look at the evidence we had and have now. Previously, he had good control, excellent break, etc and then he had a bad game possibly due to injury in which the wheels fell off. The next game he threw a great game and rebounded back to previous levels, showing none of the "signs and symptoms" of an injured player.

Therefore my recommendation is to continue pitching Dana Eveland in all formats especially when he is at home.