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Friday, December 17, 2010
Andy Pettitte
Great stuff from Mike. I love looking at this one:
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One thing I keep forgetting to tell Mike about this: keep the circles the same for all pitchers. If you have it go from 65 out to 95, make it the same for everyone. Since we’ve got Wakefield and Chapman, then make it 60 to 105 or something. I think it helps that everyone has the same scale. I’m not totally sure it’s a good idea, but I think it might be.
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In the comments, Mike talks about whether to present charts from the pitcher or catcher perspective, and he noted he gets far more requests to make it from the catcher perspective. I agree with the majority. The reason to me is pretty straightforward. If you are a hitter, catcher, or umpire, you want to see the charts from their perspective. If you have HITf/x, you want to see it from the perspective of home plate going out to the field. For all of these, the perspective is that you want to be standing on home plate looking out.
Now, for the pitcher, you probably want it from his perspective, but not necessarily. Even so, given how there’s so many more reasons to go from the plate-out perspective, that would easily carry the day.... IF we needed to have it standardized.
Of course, people are free to do whatever they want. Everything is pretty much an arbitrary capricious choice in the end. We don’t have to be myopic.
So: standardized? Plate-out. Your unique perspective? Whatever you want.
This is similar to the spray angle. To me it was pretty clear the advantage of making the 2B bag as 0 degrees. -17 is proportional to +17. You can combine data by taking the absolute value, or whatever. It just makes it easier to handle, to present, etc. I’ve always hated STATS’ A to Z indicators. Even BIS used some uncommon method for vectors. I saw their data back in, I think 2005. A fantastically well-done database. Just really good. Everything was a code, it sent my database heart aflutter. Loved it. Except their vectors. They were doing something novel, but not practical. I told them I was turning all of their vectors into degrees. The programmer loved the idea, and I think they went to angles right after.
Like I said: arbitrary, capricious. But, if you can make it easier to process (as an analyst or reader), then that’s the better choice, and you move on.
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