10 MLB Pitchers 2015-2019

Baseball is an extremely data-rich sport. Because of the less-continuous nature of the game, data is able to be collected at close to every point during the game, making it an extremely useful sport for analysis. In baseball, the game is split into innings. There are usually nine innings, each of which is split into a top and bottom. In the top of the inning, the home team is pitching (throwing the baseball) and the away team is batting (attempting to hit the thrown baseball with their bat); they switch for the bottom of the inning. Teams can score points during their turn batting. The goal is to get players around the field (around 3 bases) and back to home base (where they bat from). At the most basic level, players are separated into two categories: pitchers and batters. This data set only deals with pitchers. These players are responsible for throwing the pitches that the batter must hit to advance around the field. The pitchers included in this data set are 10 standout pitchers from the last decade: Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Chris Sale, Madison Bumgarner, Cole Hamels, Zack Greinke, David Price, Jacob deGrom, and Jon Lester. To avoid problems resulting from the shortened 2020 season (due to Covid) as well as any seasons that certain pitchers missed due to injury (for example, Justin Verlander in 2021), this data set is from the 2015-2019 seasons. For these years, the pitchers each threw over 2000 pitches/season, providing ample data.