Pitch elevation in 2017, and does it lead to success?

As I was listening to a number of podscast that discussed pitch elevation in the current season, I wanted to put my Baseball Savant datasets stored on Google BigQuery into practice. So I created a view with all Pitching data from Baseball Savant for the 2015 and 2016 season, as well as the 2017 season up to and including May, joined it with some data from the Crunch Time Baseball player map, saved it as a table in Google Cloud Storage (the 1,6 million records are too large to export directly from GBQ. I did connect natively through Tableau Desktop at work, but this is not available in the Public version of Tableau) and exported to CSV from there.

This simple visualization shows per team, type of pitcher, season and pitch type what the average height above home plate in feet was. As concluded in some of the podcasts, the Dogers bullpen is throwing Four seam Fastballs a lot higher to fight the increasing number of flyball hitters (see my "Flying it out to yonder" dashboard for more on that topic), but when looking at all pitch types Boston is actually the biggest "raiser". They also lead to pack in Four seamers thrown by Starting Pitchers, although they don't have the highest increase compared to 2016 (that looks like a race between the Twins, Brewers and the Marlins).

What I find interesting is that the Astros, the best team in baseball so far this season has a decreasing average height above home plate for the bullpen throwing Four seamers, the lowest average for all pitches by RP's and by far the lowest average when including all pitchers and pitch types. With those settings the Dodgers are actually middle of the pack and declining compared to 2016.

As the Oakland A's are almost at the bottom in that graph, just above the Astros, Diamonbacks and Angels, let's hope this declining trend is the way to success in the current season!