Ubaldo Jimenez came through with another excellent start for the Rockies tonight as they took the second game of the three game set with Washington. Tonight he allowed just three hits, two walks, and one run in seven strong innings after giving up just one run in seven innings against Pittsburgh on August 20th and no runs on one hit in San Diego on August 15th. In celebration of those facts, let’s take a quick look at his repertoire using data collected from the new PITCHf/x system installed at most ballparks this season and accompanying MLB.com’s Gameday system.

Jimenez is fun to watch because he has three quality pitches thrown at various speeds with good movement on each. His hard fastball, which he throws 62% of the time, is released at an average velocity greater than 96.7 mph (the tracking begins at 50 feet from the plate) and crosses the front of the plate at 88.6 mph. He throws his curveball at 75.5 mph with a lateral movement of 6.9 inches and a vertical movement of 4.4 inches (both values relative to a non spinning pitch thrown with the same initial velocity) making it a fairly flat curve with good horizontal movement. He throws the curveball about 16% of the time. And finally, his slider starts out at an average of 85 mph and moves about three inches less than the curveball laterally and sinks 5.5 inches less. He throws it about 13% of the time. This leaves 9% of his pitches as unclassified and these end up being, for the most part, get-me-over fastballs he typically throws between 85 and 90 miles per hour.

To get a visual for what his pitches look like I created the following graph using the PITCHf/x data that shows a sample of each pitch taken from tonight’s game. A fastball he released at 99.6 mph to Dmitri Young in the first inning is shown in red, a curveball he threw to Tim Redding in the fifth inning at 72.4 mph is shown in blue and a 87.6 mph slider he threw to Austin Kearns in the fourth inning is shown in green. As luck would have it all three pitches were called balls.

As is obvious from this plot he comes over the top more with his curveball than either the slider or fastball and the fastball, as you would imagine, stays higher in the zone than the slider since it doesn’t drop as much.

It’s also the case that since each ball in the plot represents the position of the pitch at hundredth of a second intervals, you can tell that the fastball (red) was thrown harder because there are fewer red balls on the way to the plate than there are green balls (slider) and fewer green balls than blue balls (curve).

Next, let’s take a look at the three pitches from the batter’s perspective.

This again highlights the different release points and indicates why each was called a ball. The curve (blue) was high, the fastball (red) was inside and the slider (green) was low and outside.

To get a feel for the lateral movement we’ll next take a look at the pitches from overhead.

You can detect a slight tail in the fastball (red) and the movement in to a left-handed hitter on both the slider (green) and curve (blue).

Finally, the pitches from the third baseman’s perspective.

Here we can see the vertical movement and getting a perspective on how the fastball doesn’t sink as much as the slider.

Coming into the season I wrote in Baseball Prospectus the following about Jimenez:

A stress fracture in Jimenez`s shoulder shelved him for most of 2004, but he appears to have put that well behind him. One result of the injury was a tendency to hook his arm behind him, pausing his delivery and exposing his grip. Jimenez corrected that problem last year and dominated the Texas League, earning a promotion to Triple-A in late June. He still needs to improve his command, but his mid-90s fastball and big curve are ready now. His progress was rewarded with a start on the final day of the 2006 season, and he should be back at Coors by midyear.

After being called up in early July he certainly has delivered so far in 2007. Hopefully that bodes well and we’ll see plenty more of his arsenal in the years to come.