Mariano Rivera Highlights

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Wall St. Journal Daily fix, 3/12/09: "Mariano Rivera, who turns 40 this year, had perhaps the best season of his Hall of Fame career last season. The New York Yankees closer posted career-low marks in earned run average relative to the league average, walks per inning and walks plus hits per inning. And he did it all with one of the most predictable repertoires in baseball. ...

• “The fact that hitters can more or less time themselves to within a hundredth of a second of when to swing

• and still can’t do anything about Rivera’s pitches

speaks volumes,” Graham Goldbeck writes (in Beyond the Box Score). The secret appears to be Rivera’s excellent placement and the variety of movement on the ball, depending on how much spin he applies.

Because Rivera is so consistent with his pitch selection, he was a logical candidate for an analysis by Dan Turkenkopf, also on Beyond the Box Score, about the location of his pitches depending on the game situation. Turkenkopf uses a concept called leverage index, which measures how critical a given at-bat is to the game’s outcome (the index is higher in the late innings of a close game, lower in the early innings with a lopsided score).

• Conventional wisdom holds that pitchers throw more balls down the middle of the plate in unimportant situations than in critical ones.
  

• But there’s no strong effect for Rivera.
  

That could say more about his confidence in the movement of his cutter than it does about pitchers’ typical approach in low-leverage situations." by Carl Bialik