AFL PitchFX Pt. 2: Sam Demel and Mickey Storey

Hope everyone had a great turkey weekend (even if turkey wasn’t your dead animal of choice). Today I’m going to cover two more of the pitchers we sent to the Arizona Fall League.

Sam Demel (RHP) - 2007 3rd Round, Texas Christian University

PitchFX caught only 2.2 innings of work from Demel, on three separate occasions. He has a two-seam fastball that averages around 92-93 mph with good lateral movement, tailing inside to right-handed hitters by nine inches. He also throws a mediocre mid-80’s changeup that doesn’t tail as much, unfortunately. It looks like Demel spent the AFL experimenting with his slider. On 10/17, he featured an 85-mph slider with plenty of lateral movement. On 10/29, he slowed it down to 82-mph, and sacrificed some of the lateral movement for more sink, making it more of a slurvey hybrid pitch. I have PitchFX data for his appearance on 11/19, but he didn’t throw a single slider. Definitely would have been nice to see if he ended up settling on any particular movement. Here’s his movement chart. It’s kind of a mess, but I’ve read scouting reports that say that he’s comfortable adding or subtracting from his pitches. If that’s the case, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he knows what he’s doing with this spread out pitch distribution. This is a league to try new pitch movements and styles, but if he's not generating this kind of graph on purpose in the regular season, it's worrying.

Mickey Storey (RHP) - 2008 31st Round, Florida Atlantic University

And now we come to the deception artist that is Mickey Storey. I’m just going to post his movement chart first, allowing you guys to, er, soak in the mediocrity.

He’s definitely not a guy who will wow you with his raw stuff, but when you have his control, you don’t need to. His fastball is an 88-89 mph affair that ranges from an acceptable amount of tailing action to being as straight as an arrow. I do like his changeup quite a bit because it comes in looking like his fastball, except that it’s 15-mph slower and drops 10 inches lower. He didn’t throw the changeup much, though, preferring to dismantle hitters with his 72-mph curveball. Storey’s curve doesn’t have very much drop, but it has a decent amount of lateral motion, coming into left-handed hitters. His stuff really isn’t all that great, but I can’t argue with his obscene 12.4 K/9 and ridiculous 8.88 K/BB in 2009, with time spent everywhere from low-A to AAA. PitchFX doesn't do a good job of showing how good a pitcher’s control is, and in some way or another, smoke and mirrors or not, Mickey Storey’s getting it done.

Odds and Ends

• Here's two more graphs for Demel, showing velocity against lateral and vertical movement, respectively. And the same for Storey (lateral, vertical).
• It looks like these two guys weren't fiddling with their mechanics. Everything looks nice and tight as far as release points go.
• Well, it turns out that spin graph I created earlier was entirely useless. Somewhere along the line, I screwed up a calculation. Now, with the right math, the polar spin angle vs. spin rate graph is entirely identical to the movement graph, giving me precisely no new information for a whole lot more work.
  
• Note to self: Excel works in radians, not degrees.
• In the the last part to this AFL PitchFX series, I'll touch on the last of the four pitchers we sent to Arizona, Justin Friend. I'll also figure out something to analyze about everybody's favorite incendiary topic: Grant Desme.