THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, August 30, 2010

Digitally expressing pitching grips

Love the idea and execution Mike has.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

PITCHf/x Summit 2010 - Recaps

I’ll update links as they come in.  First up is Colin:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11868

Ben:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11869

Friday, August 13, 2010

In a universe filled wih Paul Malholm, it’s Bill Hall, not Prince Fielder, that is the hitting star

Jeremy makes the case.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Halladay’s new changeup

Cool article by Dave Allen.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Club Head Speed

I guess this golf data is from Trackman.

Sunday, August 08, 2010

PITCHF/x at SABR40

From the incomparable Cecila Tan, easily my favorite liveblogger.

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Alan Nathan at SABR40

Cecilia’s blog on Alan’s Mantle’s 565 foot HR.

Friday, August 06, 2010

Felix throws 91mph curveball?

I’m looking at the July 31 game, specifically in the 6th inning against Cuddyer.  There are three PITCHf/x sites I’m looking at, and presumably they are going with the MLBAM classification.

First up is Timothy Fisher’s site, pitches 78 and 79.  It seems clear to me that 4 of those pitches could not be curveballs.

Here’s TexasLeaguers, and can we guess the speed of those 4 “curveballs”:

Here is what his changeups look like:

Here’s Brooksbaseball.

My question: what attributes did those 4 90-91 mph pitches have that would make them be considered to be curveballs and not changeups?  MLBAM does show the confidence levels in their classification, and for those 4 pitches, they are the lowest among the curveballs, from .73 to .86 confidence.  All the other curveballs have confidence of .90 to .91. 

Anyway, I did NOT see those pitches.  If someone wants to go to the tape, and show us that Felix did in fact throw 4 curveballs at 90-91 mph, I think that would be pretty jaw dropping.

Otherwise, I would say that any pitch that is outside a 5 mph range (for that pitcher) would have to have a low confidence level, regardless of the remaining attributes to that pitch, no? 

Friday, July 30, 2010

Expanded pitch classifications

Max gives us the list. 

Monday, July 26, 2010

Ubaldo = Regression, using PITCHf/x

Ricky: .247 wOBA on contacted PA in his early season run, and .378 on his current run.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Fastball speeds at the ASG: average of 96mph!

Whoah:

Of the 272 pitches thrown, 190, or 70 percent, were fastballs. The average fastball speed in the game was 96 mph. Wow.
...
The average fastball speed boost relative to the regular season was 1.5 mph for starters and 0.4 mph for relievers.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

wOBA by Strike Zone location

Harry at WSJ with more talk at BtB.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

PITCHf/x Summit 2010

http://baseball.sportvision.com/summit

David Wright’s swing zones

Just beautiful:

The colors indicate run values, so closer to red the better, and the contours show Wright’s swing tendencies. He swings at 75% of pitches within the smaller circle, and 50% within the larger one, in other words.

Stolen Bases and PITCHf/x

Great stuff from Jeremy.

It’ll feel good to retire one day, knowing there’s some a great group of talented and hardworking analysts out there, who have jobs where they can sneak in all this great work. 

The internet is as much about adding value to corporate america’s efficiency as it is about removing value by surfing and posting.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Using PITCHf/x to see who crouches

Love it.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Strasburg’s PITCHf/x after 5 games

Great stuff from Mike, especially this:

To RHB, he’s targetting the ball down, below the knees.  To LHB, he’s targetting either down, or away (along his pitching-hand).  A substantial portion of these changeups are outside the strike zone.  And yet the batters can’t help themselves. 

If I had to guess, batters are used to seeing 91mph pitches as fastballs or sinkers, and so, they expect a ball that is coming in mid-to-low to remain somewhere above the knees.  But Strasburg 91mph is a changeup, which means it has extra drop on it (18 inches, rather than 6 or 12 for Strasburg’s fastball / sinker).  And so, the batters can’t lay off it.  Yet.

I’d like to see a similar chart for Lincecum, if Mike is up for it.  And, if you are looking for extra work, how batters respond to Lincecum’s changeup the second game and third game they face him.  That is, do they learn?

I’m also surprised to the extent that his velocity is down throughout the game.  Mike, two things: is his location also off?  And does his movement also diminish?

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Scientific Baseall

A standard Brian Bannister article, but then this is a new one for me:

However, there is one sign of growth at the lower levels at an Oklahoma City training facility.

Glenn “Butch” Schoenhals, a retired neurosurgeon and longtime amateur coach, is the owner and president of Scientific Baseball, which operates the only PITCHf/x system outside a major league ballpark. He’s using the system to teach players as young as 9, and even to train umpires.

“This simplifies the process,” Schoenhals says. “It converts what we think to what we know.”

“That’s great,” Bannister says. “This is where I foresee all this going.”

Monday, June 21, 2010

SABR 40 - Alan Nathan, Dave Allen, Josh Kalk, et al

For those in the Atlanta area on Aug 7:

3:00 p.m. New Technologies in Baseball, panel moderated by Alan Nathan

Alan Nathan moderates a discussion of the latest developments in Sportsvision’s PITCHf/x, HITf/x and FIELDf/x, and TrackMan’s radar technology used to measure ball flight.

Dave Allen is an expert in spatial statistics and graphical analysis. He is a staff writer for Fangraphs and Baseball Analysts. He will talk about PITCHf/x analysis.

Josh Kalk is the Baseball Operations Analyst for the Tampa Bay Rays. Prior to that he was one of the leading PITCHf/x analysts and a writer for The Hardball Times.

Greg Moore is in charge of marketing for Sportvision’s baseball products, including PITCHf/x, HITf/x, and FIELDf/x.

Rob Ristagno is Director of Business Development for TrackMan. He seeks new markets in which to apply the TrackMan radar technology, including professional baseball.

Alan Nathan is an expert in the physics of baseball, with experience using both PITCHf/x and Trackman for trajectory analysis.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Figuring out command

I’’m glad there are others also thinking about this:

With fastballs, you either go high heat or throw at the knees. With sliders, there’s back foot or back door. Curves are intended to be thrown either anywhere in the dirt or anywhere in the zone. Anyway, those are the assumptions you need to make if you believe clustering makes sense. Furthermore, if you’re limited to k-means clustering, you might as well assume that all pitchers have two intended locations for their fastballs. That’s what I did, anyway. So I gave each pitcher his own two separate cluster centers, and found each pitch’s standard deviation from those centers, grouping by pitcher. Here were the leaders:

I’m not sure about a fixed “2”, but it’s a good start.