Tuesday night’s highly anticipated Lester-Shields matchup in the AL Wild Card game turned out to be a mere prelude to an insane extra-inning affair. Will tonight’s Kershaw-Wainwright duel live up to the hype?
The most vivid images of Clayton Kershaw’s historic season, one that will almost certainly land him the NL Cy Young Award and perhaps the NL MVP, were hitters repeatedly flailing and coming up empty against his off-speed pitches. Adam Wainwright's curve was also among the top pitches in the game.
In the corrected version of this season’s PVR rankings posted in the middle of the week, Kershaw’s slider just cracked the top ten, confirming the reservations of the doubters of the original (errant) list. The pitch ranked 10th with a 148 PVR — indicating that it was 48 percent better than the average major-league pitch.
While it fell below the sliders of Tyson Ross, Dellin Betances, and Francisco Liriano, it was very comparably dominant (the four pitches finished within three percent of each other in the rankings).Kershaw’s slider nearly doubled the league averages for three of the rate stats used to calculate the “non-hit score” component of PVR: it got hitters to swing and miss 46.9 percent of the time (league average: 28.9 percent), chase 52.8 percent of the time (average: 22.5 percent), and strike out 31 percent of the time when thrown with two strikes (avg.: 18.7 percent).
While Kershaw threw his slider a career-high 28.0 percent of the time, his curveball was also highly effective, coming in as the 40th-best pitch in the majors. Here’s his complete repertoire:
| rank | pitch type | PVR |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | slider | 148 |
| 40 | curveball | 136 |
| 238 | fastball | 115 |
What’s impressive about Wainwright’s curveball, which came it at number 11 in the rankings with a 147 PVR, is that it’s his only pitch in the top 100…
| rank | pitch type | PVR |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | curveball | 147 |
| 479 | fastball | 105 |
| 548 | slider | 103 |
| 1308 | splitter | 66 |
While Wainwright has obviously used his curve effectively this season, the Dodgers’ .407 slugging percentage against curveballs this season was the third-best mark in the majors, behind only the Rockies (.437) and Tigers (.420).
Jordan Wallach was a researcher at MLB Network in the summers of 2013 and 2014, where he worked on the channel's sabermetrically-slanted studio show, MLB Now. He is currently a sophomore at Stanford University, where he intends to study Chemical Engineering. He's on the Twitter if you need him.
