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Around SBN: Missouri Survives Scare, Louisville And Marquette Roll

Jeff Francis - Hurt but Not Showing It?

Jeff Francis is not only out of the WBC, he may go under the knife and miss some serious playing time.  Without going into gory details, I took a quick look at Francis' PITCHf/x numbers to see if there's anything jumping out.

Here's pitch speed at 55 ft. from the plate (sMPH) and at the front edge of home (eMPH), without park/weather adjustments.

Francisqd01_medium

The game on the far left is from April 2007.  After the big gap, you have a game from July '07, and then a lot of games from August, September and October to round out the season, and playoffs. In the middle, after another small gap, is 2008.  The gap before the final block of games is from Francis' DL stint. 

While it looks like Francis lost a bit of velocity at the high end before going on the DL, the end speed picture doesn't match - and those numbers are more reliable from park to park*,  In any case, he looks to have recovered after the DL visit, if anything was lost to begin with.

* I'm testing my park/data correction method.  Some tests have gone very well, some not so much.

Another place to look is pitch height.  The only thing I can sniff out of this graph is the lack of curves in the dirt in 2008.  The solid line is the ground the dashed lines are strike zone references.

Francisqd02_medium

Rockie fans, any suggestions on where else to look - where did you see Francis struggle that may be related to the shoulder injury?

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Release point?

He could’ve changed release points because of pain, trying to avoid whatever movement that hurts him. Just a wild guess, I didn’t watch many of Francis’ games.

But it’s strange you can’t see any sign of his injury… Although trying to get anything from big ‘clouds’ of data is kinda hard if you don’t filter things out. Have you tried to analyse only his Coors starts?

by Kaneda on Feb 6, 2009 12:04 PM EST reply actions  

Yep, just with these two graphs

Release points are a good suggestion. I dig into this more deeply over the next day or two – so I’m still looking for tips/suggestions like this one. Thanks

by Harry Pavlidis on Feb 6, 2009 3:40 PM EST up reply actions  

Chris Neault @ THT had a post on Francis today
Last year, manager Clint Hurdle said, "He’s been suffering from an inconsistent arm slot since Opening Day…I don’t think he’s felt the inflammation since then, but it’s become more a part of the problem." Unless Francis had been trying to alter his arm slot intentionally, you can figure that something was causing him to do so

More here

by Harry Pavlidis on Feb 6, 2009 9:43 PM EST reply actions  

Arm slot

The arm slot was brought up in the local media at multiple times throughout the season.

As a fan he didn’t seem to have the same curveball (break or command) that he normally does and his control was off.

by MADness on Feb 8, 2009 12:44 PM EST reply actions  

Thanks

If there is an arm slot issue, that will alter the curveball. When Barry Zito messes around with his arm slot, you can see the difference.

by Harry Pavlidis on Feb 8, 2009 3:52 PM EST up reply actions  

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