I am fleshing out a new way of looking at how relief pitchers wear throughout the year for my next THT article and I thought I would start by check our new closer Saloman Torres.  Torres has thrown 46 2/3 innings this year and is on pace for almost 90 innings.  This should be nothing new for Torres who threw more than 90 innings from 2004-2006 all in relief so you wouldn't expect him to wear down.  Also, Torres has now worked three days in a row and it would be nice to see how that might be affecting him.  Here is the plot

via baseball.bornbybits.com

Torres uses his sinker almost 80% of the time so I am focusing in on just that pitch here and plotting the speed and movement against the date.  Here are all of his 40 games and the error bars are the standard deviation of his sinker for that game.  The speed is the black dots in the middle and they go with the axis on the left and the movements are on the top and bottom and go with the axis on the right.  Let me know if this doesn't make sense or if you think this is too busy of a plot.

Anyway, back to Torres.  As you can see it took him a while to get going with his sinker around 91 MPH and about 4 inches of vertical movement.  After about half a month Torres warmed up and raised his velocity to closer to 94 MPH and his vertical movement down to around 2 inches of vertical movement.  Notice on June 8th (date 159) Torres had five days off and he didn't have much sink on the sinker at all.  We all know what happened yesterday and that Torres had thrown three straight days but it doesn't look like his stuff suffered much at all though possible it wasn't riding in to right handed batters as much as it had before (the more negative the horizontal movement the more it moves in to a right handed batter).  It looked to me like Torres made some good pitches yesterday but he didn't get the results and this seems to agree with that.