During the offseason I had this crazy idea to go grab every pitch from a single game and squeeze it into one GIF. Mission accomplished:

Note: if you are prone to seizures you'll want to skip this GIF and you probably don't want to stare at it for too long.



The game is from May 13, 2014, when Dallas Keuchel threw a complete game shutout against the Texas Rangers. David had the recap for the game and the theme of the comment section seemed to be that Keuchel had arrived as a major league starter. kdm59 had this comment:



Dallas Keuchel has a 3.06 era? Man is he in for some serious regression. Wait. What is that you say? His FIP, xFIP, and SIERRA are all lower? Who would have thunk it Somebody wrote an article proclaiming Keuchel as an ace. Maybe one should be written about all of the starting pitchers. What the heck - do it for the relief pitchers also.

Keuchel's 80 game score for this game would end up being his second highest in the 2014 season. His best mark came two weeks later when he posted an 83 game score after he threw another complete game on May 25, 2015, against the Mariners.

The GIF itself took about six to seven hours to put together. It took two hours to grab all the pitches. Another two hours to trim the video down and convert to a format I could import into Photoshop. Then I spent another two to three hours piecing together the GIF frame by frame.

Mind you, not every pitch is accounted for, but most of them are. They're also not in order. It "only" took about 80 frames to get through Keuchel's throwing motion, so I didn't need all 108 pitches. As for the order, I was at the mercy of CSN Houston's choice of shot when Keuchel started his windup. Sometimes they came back from shots around the ball park to Dallas in the middle of his motion. Other times he was in the stretch and I had to wait until I was further along in piecing together frames to start using the frames from those pitches.

Overall, I thought this experiment was a success. I have some other ideas for similar GIFs, but would love to hear any ideas you might have for similar types of projects.