Tommy Layne Grabbing Fangraphs' Attention

Fangraphs is so enchanted by rookie phenom Tommy Layne and his awesomeness and rugged good looks that they post not one, but two articles on the lefty hurler yesterday. The first story: Tom Layne Emerges From Bullpen, tells a bit about whiff artist's path through the minor leagues. As their name suggests, the article has graph in it. In this case it's graph of the location of all 148 of his pitches. It highlights which pitches were swinging strikes and whether they were against a righty or a lefty.

The second article is aptly titled Tom Layne and Release Points. This one, you guessed it, is based mainly on Tommy Layne's varying release points and it's got two animated gifs of Adrian Gonzalez swinging and missing plus a number of graphs illustrating Tommy's release points as well as a couple other pitchers that do the same thing. The idea was to illustrate how different his release points are and try to find a couple of pitchers to compare him to. You can read the article to see who they found, but the main idea is that this is a pretty rare thing to do when compared to current pitchers.

For more Fangraphs Padres pitcher rookie goodness, you can also take a look at an earlier article on Andrew Werner: Andrew Werner Was Pulling The String Last Night. This one focuses on how Werner achieved success through changing speeds. And yes, it has graphs.