Three of the greatest minds to ever grace this planet. Forman, as you (should) probably already know, is the guy behind Baseball-Reference, an absolutely indispensable website that blows Retrosheet and the late Who Wants To Sex Mutombo out of the water. Of course, I already thought that this morning, before I stumbled across Felix's page and noticed "Pitch Data Summary (Show or Hide)" in big letters below his career stat lines. And...well, let's just say I'm totally floored. I mean, I already knew these numbers existed after reading Matthew Carruth's article at THT a few weeks ago, but B-R compiled all the data from Retrosheet and made it easily accessible, to our collective benefit. Go ahead, check it out. Got the same stuff for hitters, too. All we're missing is a leaderboard for easy comparison between players and simpler correlation analysis.
A few samples:
Felix '06: 79% Cntc% (how often hitters made contact when swinging; includes fouls)
Santana '06: 74% Cntc%
Pineiro '06: 84% Cntc%
Putz '06: 69% Cntc%
Putz '06: 22% StI% (how often hitters put the ball in play after swinging)
Gagne '03: 56% Cntc%
Gagne '03: 18% StI%
Ichiro '06: 87% Cntc%
Sexson '06: 69% Cntc%
Lopez '06: 86% Cntc%
Ichiro '04: 24% StL% (called strikes)
Ichiro '06: 31% StL%
...and so forth. I could look at this stuff all day. If anyone has any hypotheses as to why Ichiro suddenly had a leap in called strikes last year, I'd love to hear them.