About Colby Lewis, Josh Reddick and The Catchers Interference

On Friday, Off The Bench published its first foray into the new Statcast data.  In that piece, which is made possible by baseball savant, I made note that Colby Lewis was the only player to induce (throw) multiple catcher interferences last year. I went on to publish the first ever heat map in Off The Bench history, but kept coming back to Colby Lewis and wondering what the hell happened on those two plays.  Of the 702,307 pitches thrown last year, only 31 (0.004%) ended with a catcher interference call. Why was Colby Lewis unfortunate enough to have it happen to him twice? And why were they on different pitches in the same quadrant of the strikezone?

I got so worked up that I used an exclamation point.  I have kept coming back to those two red dots.  It feels like a song is stuck in my head, but it’s really just some bizarre corner of my brain has developed a fascination with Colby Lewis’ 2015 catchers interferences.  I’m not sure what that says about me, or about you for reading about it. But to the interwebs I went in search of something to appease my admittedly odd appetite for interference information, armed with some data from baseball savant and Google.

What I knew:

1. (Diagram from the clicked link will show this feature)
2. May 22, bottom 4: Slade Heathcott reaches on catcher interference by Robinson Chirinos.    Slade Heathcott to 1st.  88.8 mph sinker *
3. Oct 5, top 2: David Murphy reaches on catcher interference by Robinson Chirinos.    David Murphy to 1st.  82.2 mph slider*

*I also knew all sorts of information such as spin rate, direction, home plate umpire, and the count, but let’s not consider the above a full list of things that I knew.

Slade Heathcott’s CI

Well, here’s something interesting right out of the shoot:

 

**To continue reading, see the full article here: About Colby Lewis, Josh Reddick and The Catchers Interference.  You should also check out our full site at offthebenchbaseball.com and our twitter @BlogOffTheBench