Baseball Pitch Sketches

A peek at some of the sketches and scribbles that led to the creation of the Baseball Pitch Diagrams.

baseball pitch sketches

baseball pitch sketches
baseball pitch sketches

I initially set out to capture the speed, break, and movement of the pitches in a single diagram for each pitch, showing the trajectory from the catcher’s perspective. As I got further along in the process, some pitches become harder to identify, because I had trouble distinguishing movement and break (splitter and forkball were particularly difficult to render). Movement being the general direction the ball is moving and break being a sudden shift in direction. This led me to add small profile views that help make the difference in break more apparent. It can still be quite subtle.

From the previous post, here is the final work including all twelve pitch diagrams:

Baseball Pitches
149 kb – PDF

Comments

9 Older Comments

  1. Interesting stuff, thanks for posting it. Can I ask why you ended up using rectangles for the 3×3 grid, instead of the perfect squares in the sketches? (I might be exposing my baseball ignorance with this question)

    -onur
    › http://www.tuningslide.com

     

  2. The strike zone in baseball is taller than it is wide, how much depends on the height and stance of the batter. In the sketches I drew the strike zone square only because of convenience, the graph paper I was using had a squared grid.

    Illustration of the Strike Zone

     

  4. It’s a shame the drawings of the people never make it in the final version, I’d like to see them vectorised ;)