Welcome to the Show: Meet Corinne Landrey
This week, FanGraphs welcomed Corinne Landrey as the newest addition to the writing team. She made her debut on the site yesterday by investigating Cole Hamels's changeup, and today the newsletter talks to her about her first FG piece and her baseball background.
- One of the patterns your article shows for Hamels is that he's been using his fourseamer less and less each year, enough so that when his changeup was really working this April, he was actually turning to that more than he was his regular fastball. If—or when—he gets the feel back for the changeup, how do you think we might see his proportion of pitches change?
That's a really good question because I think the answer is found in what was left out of the post. The usage chart I included was limited to his four-seamer, changeup, and cutter for clarity, but there are two other pitches in his arsenal: a sinker and a curve. His curve usage has been relatively consistent throughout his career, but the sinker is a pitch he added later in his career and has been relying on more heavily over the past three seasons. As his sinker usage has increased, his four-seam usage has decreased. So his overall fastball usage is relatively consistent, he's just throwing two different types now.
But to answer your more direct question, I think the cutter is the pitch that was getting extra usage when he wasn't using his changeup as regularly. As he returns to the changeup at a higher frequency, I'd expect the cutter usage to dip back down. (Which, coincidentally or not, is what happened in his start against the Indians yesterday.)
- How and when did you start baseball writing?
As someone who grew up in the '90s, I was a relative latecomer to sabermetrics. When I began to uncover the world of rational, mathematically rooted baseball analysis in 2010, I was instantly hooked. Baseball and math were two of my earliest loves and a field that combined the two felt heaven-sent. In 2012, a career change left me with the time necessary to begin expanding my involvement with and understanding of sabermetrics through my own writing. Prior to the 2014 season, I was fortunate enough to be asked to join the writing staff of the sabermetric-leaning Phillies blog, Crashburn Alley, and I've been actively writing about baseball ever since.
I hate to reject Jeff's premise, but I don't know that I can choose between pitching, hitting, and fielding; although, I was definitely a hitting dork as a kid. I do identify as a particular brand of baseball dork, though: an oddities dork. I'm an absolute sucker for streaks, rare feats, obscure records... basically any facts that will show up in a Jayson Stark column.
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