from Amazon
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Groundball Distributions
John Walsh gives us a good graphical representation of where groundballs go.
(Aside note to John: Dan Levitt or Dan Levine… I wish everyone would have an easy handle to remember like Tango or MGL… did something similar, but in table format, not the cool graphs you have.)
Anyway, he did the very first important thing you need to do: break it down by handedness of batter. Anyone who has ever played baseball ever in their lives knows the reason. And John does it. But then, shockingly to me, in his table “Who fields grounders”, he went back to the main data without the handedness split. And he shows, unsurprisingly, overlaps in fielding slices. From the point he introduced the split by batter hand, he had to continue to the rest of the article with that split.
You would then see far different outs/BIP rates for each slice, based on handedness. That’s why we need to split it up. Hopefully John can handle that in a part 2.
And, I agree with John’s basic point about getting back to basics. If it’s one thing Dewan’s Fielding Bible did, is that it is important to present something in no uncertain terms: data. Don’t just present the final adjusted numbers, but present the underlying data in something manageable. And that’s what John is doing here.