Welcome to Baseball VMI

Posted: 2021-07-22 07:26:15 (ET)    [ 6497 views ]

For those of you who have only recently become members, we welcome you to our platform.  Members are rapidly discovering VMI (Visual Memory Index). 

Coming soon...... I'm going to switch from Hitter Focus to Pitcher Issues concerning the VMI of the hitters he faces.

As an introduction, the following should help you along the way to discovering the data mine which exists only in VMI's website.  Those who have not discovered it yet are typically those who don't understand what a hitter sees from the batter's box as well as they imagine. 

The air density causes the pitches to move a little more or a little less than yesterday's game for every team in the league.  The pitches are subject to being pushed in the direction of the spin, but players are accustomed to the norm in the league, that is; the travel of pitches with movement nearing the point of entry into the strike zone.  When players are "zoned in" it means they have been playing in a similar environment (venue at similar elevation, temperature and humidity) for a series or two.   So, the travel and trajectory of the pitches become quite familiar, even though a challenge due to various strike zone placement and various pitchers and pitch-types.  Then, upon traveling to a differing environment, the pitches can appear to dive, hop and dart like nothing they have seen lately.  It is the base amount of movement that the air allows that the players must adjust to before they can achieve their averages against several pitchers. 

Velocity is the key for pitchers.  The four-seamer is the speed king of all pitches and this is where some analysts do not come to the realization that hitting the fastball is not simply hand-eye coordination.  Or, put a more thorough way, hand coordination (muscle memory) is dependent on what the eye sees, and the memory of where that pitch (as seen in its first 40 feet of travel) will be when it crosses the plate after about 54 feet of travel. 

So, Baseball VMI uses the 4-seam 95 mph fastball to create the gauge you will find within VMI.  Each fastball has lift on it.  Lift is caused by the air holding the ball up as it tries to fall to the ground due to gravity.  In the 95 mph range, the spin of the protruded threads, which are whipping against the air in a backward rotation and angled due to the typical release and arm-angle of a pitcher, cause the pitch to rise (or lift) a little above a slower pitch trajectory and tail-off horizontally a little more as well. By using this visual of the hitter, to identify how much additional lift and tail-off he will be adjusting to today and tomorrow, we have been able to create a gauge that allows us to apply actual performance statistics to the amount of adjustment for every team in the league.  

We call it VMI....

What you will begin to understand is that the VMI gauges lift on the fastball in inches compared to the recent norm for this team of hitters.  A VMI of +7.00 or -(minus) 7.00 equals approximately 1 full inch of lesser or additional movement on a 95 mph fastball.  If a team is not used to this amount of additional movement, the VMI will be negative.  If this team is accustomed to more movement than the air will allow today, then the VMI will be plus numbers.  So, a -7.00 will tell you the hitter must adjust his swing to a higher level than he is first aware, so the question becomes, how long (or how many pitches experienced) will it take to fully adjust.  The VMI and the data attached on our reports answers those questions for each team and individual hitter. 

There is no other source for the data that is presented in VMI reports in terms of hits achieved by hitters as a percentage of strikes thrown by pitchers.  Good luck and welcome.

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