At the end of last season, we completely rebuilt the Scores section of FanGraphs from the ground up. During the offseason, we continued that effort by redesigning the supporting pages, including new Box Scores, Game Graphs, Game Stats, and Play Logs. Those updates were meant to make it easier to explore and understand everything that happens during the game, from the first game to the last.
Today, we’re excited to introduce a new addition to that tool suite: Pitcher Game Cards, which can be found in Game Graphs.
Pitcher Game Cards are designed to provide a detailed, game-level summary of every pitcher that appears in a game. While traditional box scores can tell you what happened, Pitcher game cards help explain How made possible by combining game results, voice usage, motion profiles, and pitch quality metrics into a single view.
For each pitcher, the card begins with the results of the title: innings pitched, hits allowed, earned runs, walks, strikeouts, home runs allowed, pitch count, swinging strikes, batters allowed, and balls hit. Those numbers provide a quick snapshot of the output before the rest of the card goes into the details of the arsenal that produced those results.
The Pitch Usage section breaks down how often each pitch was thrown, and shows usage against right-handed and left-handed hitters. This allows users to quickly identify game plans, team adjustments, and voice preferences that may not be visible in the box score alone.
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Next to the usage breakdown is a movement chart showing the position of each pitch. By plotting the movement horizontally and vertically, the chart gives a quick sense of how a pitcher separates his offering and how each pitch fits within his overall arsenal. The chart also compares each pitch’s movement in a game against the season’s movement profile, making it easy to spot pitches that are moving differently than usual.
For users looking for more detail, Pitcher Game Cards also include an expandable Pitch view. This layout shows every pitch thrown during a game, and can be sorted by both batter and pitch type, making it easy to see how a pitcher hit different batters with different offerings. Hovering over each voice reveals more information about that voice, giving more context to the output. On desktop, the view expands next to the card, while on mobile devices it appears below it:
The Pitch Arsenal table provides an in-depth look at every pitch thrown during a game. In addition to average speed, users can see the local claim rate, rush rate, and swing claim rate for each offer. Velocity differences from season averages are also displayed, making it easy to identify outliers where a pitcher has gained or lost velocity relative to his normal baseline.
Pitcher game cards also feature pitch quality metrics from the Stuff+ model and FanGraphs’ PitchingBot system. Users can switch between these two views, showing Stuff+, Location+, and Pitching+, or PitchingBot’s Stuff, Command, and Total Distances. Because PitchingBot’s metrics are available live during games, Pitcher Game Cards can provide improved pitch evaluation in real-time, while Stuff+’s metrics are populated the next morning once post-game processing is complete.
The result is a tool that can answer many questions at a glance. Why did the pitcher produce so many strikeouts? Which pitch was responsible for producing swings and misses? Was the speed of the game faster compared to previous outings? Did the pitcher succeed because of superior material, superior command, or both? Rather than searching through multiple pages and leaderboards, users can find those answers in one card.
Pitcher Game Cards are available directly within the Game Graphs for all pitchers appearing in the game. FanGraphs members can download the cards and copy them as an image. Whether you’re a fantasy manager checking recent performance, an analyst looking for deeper context, or just a fan interested in understanding what happened on the mound, Pitcher Game Cards provide a quick and comprehensive way to evaluate a pitcher’s outing.
As with all of our Scores tools, we will continue to refine and improve the Pitcher game cards over time. We hope they will be valuable additions to your game day experience, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.
