I love stats. I acknowledge their flaws, and I certainly don't believe they tell you everything there is to know about baseball (does anyone actually?), but they really are just a lot of fun to pore over. Thanks to countless intrepid folks who have contributed the ways and means for distributing and disseminating baseball statistics, we have the tools available to learn far more about the game and its players than we ever have before.

One ridiculously useful site for baseball statistics (among other things) is FanGraphs, which is where all of the stats for this article (as well as the WPA graphs in my daily recaps) were extracted from. I wanted to take some time to look at the Mets' pitchers, their pitch velocities and pitch selection from 2008, so let's do just that.

Fastballs

The fastball is almost every pitcher's bread-and-butter. Better than 85% of pitchers threw fastballs at least half the time. Almost 11% threw their heater three-quarters of the time or more. Three guys threw 90% fastballs, though only one -- Tampa Bay's Grant Balfour (91.3%) did so over a significant number of innings. Eddie Kunz threw a higher percentage of fastballs than anyone else in baseball (92.3%), but he only threw a total of 55 pitches.

So folks throw a lot of fastballs. But how fast do they throw 'em? Here are the average fastball speeds for Mets pitchers this season.

It shouldn't be surprising that relievers dominate the top of this list. They come into a game for an inning at a time -- if that -- and can really air it out because they know they've only got 20 or so pitches before they hit the showers. Whereas starting pitchers have to pace themselves, relievers don't have to show such restraint. Anyone watching Mets games the last two months of the season has seen that Brian Stokes throws gas, and this chart corroborates that observation.

Mike Pelfrey had the fastest average heater among Mets starting pitchers at 92.7 MPH; Pedro Martinez had the slowest at 87.7. If that looks a little low, consider that his average fastball in limited action in 2007 was 86.2 MPH, so 87.7 is a clear improvement.

Of some concern is Johan Santana's average heater speed of 91.2. He was at 91.7 in 2007 with the Twins, and while a half-mile per hour doesn't seem like much now, it's definitely something worth keeping an eye on as he adds years to his ledger and mileage to his arm. His slider speed dropped (84.9 to 83.5) as did his changeup (81.9 to 80.0). The good news is that the disparity in speed between his fastball and changeup actually increased, though the velocity dip across the board is hardly encouraging. Whether that had anything to do with the deterioration in his strikeout rate (9.66 to 7.91 per nine innings) is not yet clear.

For those curious types, the fastest average fastball belonged to Joel Zumaya at 97.5 MPH. The slowest belonged to Tim Wakefield (72.9), though the slowest non-knuckleballer was Chad Bradford at 79.6. The slowest non-knuckler, non-sidearmer was Jamie Moyer for the fiftieth consecutive season at 81.2 MPH. The average big league fastball was thrown at 90.5 MPH.

Pitch Types

Let's move on from pitch speed and on to pitch selection. Here is the breakdown of pitch type for all Mets pitchers this season, sorted by highest fastball frequency.

(FB=fastball, SL=slider, CB=curveball, CH=changeup, CT=cutter)

One thing that jumps out immediately is that the Mets have a lot of pitchers who all sport basically the same arsenal: Fastball, slider, changeup. Jon Niese, Brian Stokes and Pedro Martinez preferred the curveball to the slider, and Niese and Martinez threw some cutters, but otherwise everyone threw the same three types of pitch. I'm a little surprised that the Mets lacked a single pitcher who throws a split-fingered fastball. Approximately one in eight (11.7%) big league pitchers threw at least 1% splitters in 2008; none threw them for the Mets. The splitter can wreak havoc on a pitcher's elbow, and who's to say that Rick Peterson didn't have a hand in steering the Mets away from that sort of injury risk. We know he was a mechanics freak, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that he advised the Mets to avoid pitchers who featured a splitter.

Quick Hits

• Jose Contreras led all qualified starters with splitters accounting for 24.6% of his pitches.
• Taylor Buchholz threw more curveballs than anyone else (34.9%).
• Tom Glavine threw 43.2% changeups, more than anyone else.
• The Cubs' Mike Wuertz threw 60.8% sliders, again, more than anyone else.
• Four pitchers were regular knuckleballers: Wakefield, Charlie Zink (Red Sox), Charlie Haeger (Padres) and R.A. Dickey (Rangers).
• Two others threw at least one knuckleball: Josh Banks (Padres) and Ryan Franklin (Cardinals), though the latter threw them so infrequently (.4%) that they were probably changeups or curveballs that were simply mis-categorized.
• The Angels' Darren O'Day threw 2.5% of his 671 pitches for pitch-outs.
• C.C. Sabathia threw more pitches overall than any other big leaguer: 3,814. NL Cy Young candidate Tim Lincecum was second at 3,682, and Sabathia's fellow free agent-to-be A.J. Burnett threw 3,650. Johan Santana was fifth with 3,598 pitches tossed.

Free Movie night again and we saw WALL-E, and it was really pretty great. It was funny and sad, charming and poignant. The social commentary (yes, social commentary) was scathing and unlike anything I've seen in a would-be children's movie. Once again, Pixar outdid themselves in the animation department, as the film is visually stunning and there are times when it is easy to forget that you're watching an animated film. Wholeheartedly recommended, just make sure you don't sit behind a giantess with theater seat A.D.D like I did.

Mike Pelfrey: Stud? Okay, so calling the Giants' offense mediocre would be like calling the K-T extinction event a minor impediment to Cretaceous life forms, but Pelfrey still had to go out there and pitch a ballgame. He did, and it was the best damned game he's pitched this year. Seven innings, three hits, five whiffs, no walks. The outing pushes Pelfrey's 2008 innings total over the century mark, during which he has allowed exactly four homeruns and none since May 21. That's nine starts and 51.2 innings without a longball, which is just awesome. His ERA drops to 3.93, which puts him in the Top 25 among NL starters, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. That would make him something like an average #2 starter, if we say the Top 16 are the #1s. His ERA is 2.61 over his last eight starts. We're only talking about ERA here, but it's still pretty remarkable.

Conversely, Tim Lincecum had his worst game of the season, allowing more hits (nine) than in any other game this season, and allowing as many as four runs for just the third time (once was five runs in five innings, the other was four runs in seven innings, so this was worse than the latter). The four strikeouts were the third-fewest of the season, and the two homeruns allowed were the most he has allowed in as few as six innings pitched. He has arguably been the best pitcher in the National League this year and the Mets made him look slightly below average, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Perhaps as important as anything, the win improves the Mets' record in games during which we're at Free Movie Night to 5-0 (that'd be Iron Man, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Indy, Wanted and now WALL-E). Considering that the Mets have won roughly half of their total games played, the odds of them winning all of those five games was one in thirty-two. I'm not superstitious and I don't believe in curses, but I *do* believe in free movies and Mets wins, so I'm gonna keep on doing one and keep on asking my voodoo doll during our weekly séance/ritualistic human sacrifice that the other follow accordingly.

Big winners: Mike Pelfrey, +31.6% WPA, Carlos Beltran, +24.6% WPA
Big losers: Damion Easley, -6.8% WPA
Teh aw3s0mest play: Beltran first inning bomb (not clutch), +20.5% WPA
Teh sux0rest play: Easley DP in third, -6.0% WPA
Total pitcher WPA: +32.4%
Total batter WPA: +17.6%

Game Thread Roll Call

Nice job by JoshNY; his effort in the game thread embiggens us all.