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Ball_Tracking
Thursday, September 11, 2008
You can mix pitch breaks (direction: straight, north/south, east/west, NE/SW, etc; and amount), you can mix pitch locations (in, out, up, down), and you can mix pitch speeds. But as Dave shows, some pitchers mix pitch speeds better than others.
It is possible that he is giving up mixing pitch speeds with much better mixing of location and break, though it’s hard to believe a young starter can get a handle on that. I suppose this is what two-pitch relievers do. One-pitch relievers like Mariano obviously rely one only two of these three timing parameters.
Anyway, nice and simple graph. I like these kind of time-progression charts that Dan Brooks also does. I’d like to think that each team should have one guy on staff who is entirely dedicated to doing nothing but analyzing this data, for the direct benefit of the pitcher.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
I’m going to have to continue to be a d-ck on the matter of break and movement. The basic difference between a fastball and changeup is speed. The spin direction and spin rotation speed remains pretty much the same, though I will defer to those who study this issue more than I do. Let’s take a look at Josh’s chart on CC:
When you look at this chart, we see “movement”. That movement is the difference between how much movement the ball actually had, compared to how much movement that same pitch “would have” had with no spin, but thrown at the same speed.
What does CC care about? How much rpm and spin angle to impart on the pitch, and how much actual break the ball had in the physical world of Earth (gravity, time). This “movement” chart is an in-between data that shows implied movement, without actually telling the viewer what really happened. And it doesn’t tell CC exactly how much rpm and spin angle he’s got on the ball. These movement charts are great for analysts like us in order to classify pitches, but I don’t think it tells the viewer anything.
Just looking at the chart, and it looks like the fastball and changeup “moves” the same, except in the physical world, the actual break will show a difference for the batter and viewer.
I respectfully think that any movement chart be accompanied with a break chart. If someone like me, who thinks about this stuff too much, is confused, imagine those readers--who don’t give much thought to this--how little he actually appreciates what the chart is and is not telling him.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Lots of people are doing setups of PITCHf/x, and some are sharing them. Here’s another from Dan Turkenkopf.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
A very good and fairly light Josh Kalk read on the knuckleball. I’d say that of all the PITCHf/x articles I’ve read, this would be one that would feel perfectly at home in a mainstream press. I also like the links to the Banks articles. Just good all-round read.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Only fastballs. That’s a sweet layout too, where the horizontal axis is the count from 0-2 to 3-0, that follows the Linear Weights by Count chart we’ve discussed in the past.
Monday, July 28, 2008
John looks into how often pitchers throw the inside changeup and how Ted Lilly bucks that trend. I commented on ballhype:
John, can you show Lilly’s previous pitch and location, prior to the CH, and how that compares to the other pitchers?
I will guess that would be one way to figure if he meant to throw inside. How often would a pitcher throw two balls consecutively inside, especially if it’s a FB/CH combination?
Unless you’ve already done it, I think that would be a great article on how pitchers “mix ‘em up”, in terms of distance gap between back-to-back pitches, break, and speed.
Friday, July 25, 2008
With Josh Kalk and Alan Nathan(video).
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Great job by Paul in finding correlations between some PITCHf/x data and performance stat lines.
A couple of things I’d change is make it GB/(GB+FB), rather than ratio. I’ve talked about this alot.
Use K/BFP, not K/9IP. I’d also suggest trying an additional correlation against (K-BB)/BFP.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Josh shows us that their tools remain very close inning to inning, except maybe if they have an extended inning.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Ooooooh… I like this presentation. You get to see the pitcher’s fastball speed game by game, along with his range within game (those ranges I believe are the 25th to 75th percentiles… if not, that’d be nice to show), along with this vertical and horizontal movements. All on one graph. Very very nice.
His home/road comment may simply be one of data quality.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
I don’t have the answer, but I have the process. I emailed this to someone else, and I’ll just repost it in its entirety:
Here’s a little trick to figure out how accurate are pitchers with their pitches: look at all 3-0 counts, where the batter is a pitcher (and preferably a man on 1B)
In this situation a pitcher would be out of his mind to throw anything other than a pitch down the middle. Why in the world would he try to walk such a batter, or even tempt fate? He’s throwing it down the middle, and he’s almost certainly throwing him a fastball. And, the pitcher/batter is almost certainly taking as well.
I will guess that Maddux/Moyer/Schilling will still walk the batter 10% of the time, while your Dempsters and other throwers (not pitchers) will walk this batter at least 25% of the time, if not over 30%.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
By , 01:20 PM
I was watching the Giants/Dodgers game last night and noticed, as I’m sure lots of people did, that Zito was throwing his fastball 86-88 mph, or something like that, at least according to the Fox broadcast.
I also noticed that Chan Ho Park was throwing in the mid-90’s, which seemed a little high, although I vaguely remember him throwing that fast in his last start as well.
The Giants’ announcers remarked that Zito has been throwing a lot harder in his last few starts.
Anyway, I checked Gameday today, and it had Zito throwing around 85-87, a little less than the Fox numbers I think, but still higher than his average so far this year, at least according to Fangraphs, which has him at 84.3. These are fastball numbers of course.
Park, on the other hand, was clocked by Gameday at 90-93, around 2, maybe 3 mph less than Fox and apparently the Giants home park speed indicator.
What is up with that?
I have a few questions for the people that follow and research this stuff.
I know that lots of the pitch f/x authors have mentioned this before, but at what point is the pitch being measured by pitch f/x (which is the same as Gameday, right)? We know that the pitch speed decreases a lot (3-4 mph?) from the pitcher’s hand to the batter, so where it is being measured is critical in terms of any kind of consistency.
What about the TV speeds? Where do they come from and where are they measuring the pitch (from the pitcher to the batter)?
What about the home park measurements?
What about BIS? Where do they get the pitch speeds from?
Is the Fangraph data from BIS or from pitch f/x? It can’t be pitch f/x can it, since they (Fangraphs) have data from 2005?
Has Zito really increased his velocity over the last X number of starts?
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Hat tip: Peter.
Monday, June 16, 2008
We’ve bagged us another.
First off, I applaud the use of zones-inside-zones. Secondly, we need to come up with LWTS by pitch in zone, per count. Just as we (Fast, Walsh, Hale, me, others) have come up with LWTS by pitch count, we now need to come up with LWTS by pitch count by zone. (Has someone done this already. Too much information to process at the moment.) A pitch down the middle of a 3-0 count is not the same as an 0-2 count. It doesn’t have the same run value. At 0-2, the batter is going there ready to swing. Not at 3-0. So, offering a pitch down the middle will have a higher offensive run value at 0-2 than 3-0.
By coming up with LWTS by count by zones, we’ll know who is throwing good pitches and who is not.
I like the side-view and top-view graphs that Mike has here. One thing I would offer as a suggestion to those graphs is for the dots plotted to actually have meaning. Imagine that you put a dot only for every .05 seconds of elapsed time. You’ll still have the same number of dots, but this time, they will be much more spaced out near home plate. And, you can even start showing the dots only in the last 0.25 seconds of its path. The appearance of the first dot tells you how many feet away it was for the batter to make his decision to swing (reaction distance). And, the amount of space between each dot will tell you how fast the ball was moving.
I think if you add this to his last set of charts where he shows you the path of the ball from the batter’s box (great idea!), I think that does a really good job of capturing 4-D data in a 2-D world.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
A one-stop shop, of researchers to whom we should be very grateful:
Josh Kalk
Dan Brooks
If anyone else is offering interactive tools, please post in the comments.
Mike gives us the findings…
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
By , 08:12 PM
Maybe you pitch f/x guys can chime in. Remember when Loaiza was throwing a nasty 92 mph cut fastball? Anyway, as far as I can tell, he was throwing a 76-79 mph fastball tonight and a 73 mph changeup or some kind of breaking pitch. He looked like he was throwing underwater.
The slowest fastballs I recall ever seeing in my 30 years of watching baseball were all from left-handers. Jim Abbott at the end of his career could not break 80, and of course Moyer throws a fastball in the high 70’s and low 80’s I think. I don’t recall ever seeing a RHP throwing slow than around 82-83. I think Nagy was around 82 at the end of his career. My rule of thumb has always been that once a RHP dips below around 84-85, he is done. Maddux is of course an exception because he has pinpoint control that few pitchers have ever had. But even he throws at 85 now and he is not that good. Once he gets to 82-83, he will be done as well. What the heck is Loaiza doing? Or should I say what the heck is Ozzie and Kenny Williams doing?
Someone asked, so feel free to use this thread for that sole purpose…
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