Gyro degree is a pitching metric that describes the amount of gyroscopic spin a pitcher imparts on a ball.
A type of spin that influences ball movement, a pitch with 100% gyro spin, is affected less by spin axis or Magnus forces, and has its movement influenced mostly due to gravity.
Think of a football with a perfect spiral or a bullet being shot out of a gun, these objects have pure gyro spin. Their movements are mostly affected by gravity and won’t contain heavy lateral break like curveballs or changeups due to the type of spin axis or Magnus forces.
Gyro Degree is a pitching metric that is important to understand, as the type of spin you create on the ball and how that induces movement can help you learn new pitches and improve on the ones you already know.
Measurement
Gyro Degree is directly measured by a Rapsodo pitching unit and is measured in degrees. Righty and lefty pitchers are measured differently, with righty Gyro Degrees being measured from 0-90 degrees while lefties are measured from 0 to -90 degrees.
Lefties are measured with negative values because the same amount of gyro spin thrown by a righty will be mirrored by a lefty. A righty throwing a pitch with +20 degrees gyro would be –20 degrees for a lefty.
The maximum Gyro Degree value, 90 degrees (or –90 degrees), indicates perfect gyro spin meaning we’d expect the ball to be affected by mostly gravity. The minimum Gyro Degree value, 0 degrees, indicates perfect transverse spin meaning the pitcher influences movement through factors like spin axis or grip.
You can read more about Transverse or Gyro spin and how that affects ball flight on our Spin Efficiency video. Basically, what you need to know is that pitches with transverse spin allow themselves to be influenced greater by spin axis, Magnus force and other aerodynamic or pitch factors, which result in greater movement profiles.
Every pitch will have a Gyro Degree value that can help you measure how much of each type of spin it has. This data can then be used when analyzing your pitches to work towards implementing your preferred movement profile.
Applications
Here’s one example when using gyro degree. If you’d like to develop a sweeping slider, your goal might be to maximize horizontal movement. In this case, you’ll want some amount of transverse spin which means you’ll have a lower gyro degree.
The higher the amount of transverse spin, the more sweeping movement we’d expect a slider to contain. You can use Gyro Degree as a guide to track your progress and evaluate how you succeed at implementing transverse spin or horizontal movement onto the ball.
Conversely, if we are looking to develop a gyro slider, we’d want to aim closer to 90 degrees. This pitch type is thrown hard and breaks sharply due to mostly gravity and the type of spin this pitch possesses. On a vertical and horizontal movement plot, a gyro slider would be labeled right where the x and y lines intersect with 0 inches of vertical and horizontal movement.
Summary
Gyro Degree can be a useful metric in conjunction with other pitch data points like movement, spin efficiency and spin axis. It’s one part of the many ingredients that tell us how and why a pitch moves the way it does.
Related Links
https://rapsodo.com/understanding-rapsodo-pitching-data-spin-profile/
https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/hkmz76/the_influence_of_gyro_degree_on_ball_trajectory/
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