Why?

0-5, 11.48 ERA, 26 2/3 IP, 1.95 WHIP, .392 BAA

If you've paid any attention whatsoever to the White Sox in the last month, you'd know that the line above resembled Mark Buehrle's worst month of his career; July 2006.  

That is pretty much the reasoning for doing this.  I've seen complaints about pitch selection during Buehrle's latest starts.  I've seen complaints about velocity.  Why has Mark Buehrle been so bad the last month?

Well, I'm happy to say that I don't have the answer to that, because tonight, "Buehrle was Buehrle".  Maybe we can see, though, why he was successful.  

Let it be known...

These numbers aren't perfect.  For one, the best way of doing this (for an amateur) would probably be to watch the game on MLB.tv, pausing it after every pitch.  I did it live.  

Second, we all know how quickly he likes to work.  Let's just say that didn't make it any easier for me.

Third, WCIU missed about five or six first-pitches of the inning.  I'm probably doing WCIU a favor by only saying five or six -- I'm fairly certain it was more.

The Basic Box Score...

Tonight against the Royals, Buehrle threw six innings, allowing two runs (both earned) on four hits.  Buehrle walked one and struck out three.  The two runs he allowed came off of a Reggie Sanders homerun.  The rest of the hits were all singles (Teahen 2, Phillips).  Of the 15 in-play outs, Buehrle recorded 12 groundball outs to three flyball outs.  He faced a total of 22 batters.

Inside the Pitches...

Note:  There wasn't enough time in between pitches to actually say what the pitch was (cutter, curveball, etc).  I did, however, get as many pitch speeds down as WCIU chose to show.  Also note that the total pitches may not add up to 93 (Buehrle's final pitch count), as I wasn't able to get close to ten pitch speeds.

Percentage of type of pitch:

Attacking the Plate...

vs. righties

Buehrle threw a total of 74 pitches to right-handed batters:

Well, I'll take a closer look tomorrow, but I figure you guys can also make some conclusions from it.  I actually cut the whole batter's zone into nine different parts (vertically:  up, middle, and low.  Horizontally:  left, middle, and right), although I confused myself on some of the pitches.

Just taking a quick glimpse, one can see that Buehrle was hell on righties tonight when he went inside.  They didn't touch anything on the inside part of the plate.  Without looking too closely of the speed of the pitches, but remembering the game itself, Mark did a really good job with his cutter tonight.

I'd like to repeat that the data isn't perfect.  There are most likely a couple of mistakes.