Dan Haren, Brian Wilson and Kenley Jansen threw a combined one-hitter against the Cleveland Indians June 30 in Los Angeles.

Although not as cool as the rare combined no-hitter (the last combined no-hitter happened to the Dodgers in Seattle in 2012), it was clutch pitching with the LA offense scoring just one run.

With Haren, Weez and Jansen all throwing with similar results, I was curious if they all attacked Indians the same way. tl;dr, they’re different pitchers.

These pitch location plots don’t account for righty and lefty batters, but you can see Weez bein’ Weez and avoiding the zone.

zone breakdown by Baseball Savant

The pitchers are pretty unique in terms of stuff: Haren has a knuckle curve, Wilson switches between heat and sliders and each of Jansen’s 11 pitches against Cleveland was a type of fastball.

I pulled together some metrics on their June 30 performances including velocity, strike rate, groundball rate and percentages of pitches thrown to different regions. Then I brought in a handy script that performs principal component analysis, which can reduce a bunch of observations to a few important values. I asked PCA to take all the stats and summarize each pitcher with just one number. Using my subjective selection of variables, it spat out this chart.

Chart code on GitHub

It shows Haren and Weez were slightly more similar on June 30, probably because they threw off-speed stuff and Jansen didn’t. There are obviously lots of ways to compare pitchers, doesn’t the idea of reducing them to just one number make you want to rage?