from Amazon
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
John Abbamondi, asst GM of Cards
By Tangotiger
Glove-slap Kevin:
“The foundation of all analysis tends to go back to scouting, but that’s one guy sitting in a ballpark, and you can’t have people at every game,” he says. Statistical tools like Pitch F/x, which delivers data on every pitch thrown, can help confirm or refute the more subjective analysis. “Say a scout went to see a prospect and wrote a glowing report,” says Abbamondi. “We can check that game data to see if it’s consistent with this pitcher’s other games. If the data shows us that the pitcher was doing something a little different that day, maybe the scout caught him on a very good day. We might not realize it was an outlier without that data.”