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The Cubs Have the Most Horizontal Pitch Movement in Baseball

Baseball Savant provides pitch movement leaderboards for each pitch type. As I was looking through the leaderboards for various pitch types, I noticed that several Cubs pitchers stand out in terms of negative horizontal movement compared to average. For instance, Justin Steele’s four-seamer gets the third most cutting movement in the league, and Marcus Stroman and Rowan Wick are also both within the top 20. Having recently read a North Side Bound article about cut-ride, I was curious to see if my observations had any statistical backing.

First, I downloaded a CSV from Baseball Savant of all pitchers a pitcher has thrown at least 50 times this season. I then imported that CSV into my local database and ran a query on it to see the average absolute value of pitch movement per team across both axes. Getting the absolute value is key here so that pitches with a lot of glove-side movement aren’t canceled out by those with a lot of arm-side movement.

The results show that the Cubs are the top team in terms of horizontal pitch movement, and sixth in vertical movement.

This is certainly not the most rigorous method of measuring pitching development on an organizational level. Notably, the query could be improved by using a weighted average, since this analysis didn’t take into account how often specific pitches were being thrown. It’s also not necessarily true that these rankings are correlated with pitching success. It does, however, back up the belief that the Cubs are prioritizing pitchers with outlier horizontal movement.

View the full spreadsheet here. I’ve included the (messy) SQL query I used to calculate these values below as well as a copy of the full table for posterity.

team_name avg_abs_vert_mov avg_abs_horz_mov diff_horz_rank diff_vert_rank avg_rank
Angels 1.9013 1.8727 30 28 29
Astros 2.2774 2.0830 23 15 19
Athletics 2.5662 2.7479 2 8 5
Blue Jays 2.0254 2.3211 14 26 20
Braves 3.0091 2.4782 6 1 3.5
Brewers 2.1029 2.0638 24 24 24
Cardinals 2.5212 2.2138 20 10 15
Cubs 2.5918 3.0148 1 6 3.5
D-backs 2.7515 1.9909 27 3 15
Dodgers 1.6211 2.2982 16 30 23
Giants 2.5911 2.0467 25 7 16
Guardians 2.3000 2.3055 15 14 14.5
Mariners 2.0596 2.4731 7 25 16
Marlins 2.7929 2.4321 9 2 5.5
Mets 2.2042 1.9014 29 19 24
Nationals 1.6721 2.2410 19 29 24
Orioles 2.2582 2.5582 3 16 9.5
Padres 2.2052 2.0414 26 18 22
Phillies 2.3324 2.1000 22 13 17.5
Pirates 2.1250 1.9897 28 23 25.5
Rangers 2.6000 2.3279 13 5 9
Rays 2.6778 2.3986 10 4 7
Red Sox 2.3465 2.1493 21 12 16.5
Reds 2.1771 2.5000 5 21 13
Rockies 1.9766 2.5297 4 27 15.5
Royals 2.2397 2.3735 11 17 14
Tigers 2.1972 2.2903 17 20 18.5
Twins 2.4500 2.2852 18 11 14.5
White Sox 2.1746 2.3299 12 22 17
Yankees 2.5431 2.4722 8 9 8.5 
SELECT
    team_name,
    avg(abs(diff_z::float)) avg_abs_diff_z,
    avg(abs(diff_x::float)) avg_abs_diff_x,
    dense_rank() OVER (ORDER BY avg(abs(diff_x::float)) DESC) AS diff_x_rnk,
    dense_rank() OVER (ORDER BY avg(abs(diff_z::float)) DESC) AS diff_z_rnk,
    (dense_rank() OVER (ORDER BY avg(abs(diff_x::float)) DESC) + dense_rank() OVER (ORDER BY avg(abs(diff_z::float)) DESC)) / 2.0 avg_rnk
FROM
    pitch_movement
GROUP BY
    team_name
ORDER BY
    avg_rnk ASC;