PITCH TUNNELING. In his comment here about the new analytical tools that Moneyball is bringing to baseball, Nick referred to “pitch tunneling”, which is a way of measuring an aspect of a pitcher’s deception. I was unfamiliar with the term, but Google found this article by Dan Blewitt in the Hardball Times, which gives a very good explanation.
“The idea is that two different pitches fly down the same trajectory long enough to look nearly identical through the point when a hitter must decide whether, or not, to swing. If pitches thrown back to back travel down this same “tunnel” long enough, a hitter won’t be able to tell them apart until it’s too late.” After the tunnel point, the two pitches would take different paths—a fastball might arrive high in the strike zone while a curve ball might break and land low and out of the strike zone.
At Baseball Prospectus, Jeff Long, Jonathan Judge and Harry Pavlidis have identified the “tunnel point” as 23.8 feet before home plate.