Dan Haren's consistency is disturbing

My love of Dan Haren is well documented across various mediums (I've raved about him on our blog in addition to both our podcasts and ESPN's Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast). Simply put, Dan Haren is as good as he is because he throws an effective four pitch mix: a fastball, cutter, curveball and splitfinger fastball. Each of Haren's pitches are above average (three of them are at least a full win above average in value) and he mixes his pitches well (no pitch is thrown less than 13.3% or more than 45.9% of the time), keeping hitters entirely off balance. He also has scary good control, as evident by the1.39 BB/9 and major-league leading 6.35 K/BB. However self-evident these numbers may be in eliciting how good Haren's control is, nothing is as telling as a picture (which of course is worth a thousand words). Below is a locational chart of every pitch Dan Haren has thrown in 2009, courtesy of The Hardball Times:



Notice the consistency in location/movement among his four offerings? That's just nasty.

Oh, and for the record, Matthew Berry, Dan Haren has been absolutely stellar over his last four outings. Take out the 5 or 6 bad starts that "ballooned" his ERA from 2.3 to 2.7 in late July/early August and Haren has been absolutely consistent all season.