from Amazon
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Scratching the Holy Grail
Sabermetrics is the convergence of performance analysis and scouting observations. David scratches the surface. Tracking pitch-by-pitch, including count, pitch type, velocity, location, famigli of batters, pitchers, as well as tracking hit-location, millisecond-by-millisecond, including fielder positioning, is the holy grail. There is a mountain of haystack for us to find that needle. All we need is more researchers.
One interesting question is…
...how often does Brandon Webb and his brothers get a GB on balls thrown down and balls thrown up the zone. That is, are they “true” groundball pitchers, who can get batters to hit the ball on the ground, because they can. Or, are they groundball pitchers, as a byproduct of them throwing the ball low? That is, suppose that on BIP, you have the following breakdown of GB% in the upper, middle, lower zones:
upper: 10%
middle: 30%
lower: 80%
And suppose the percentage of times that Webb gets a BIP is:
upper: 10%
middle: 20%
lower: 70%
Multiplying the first (rate of GB per BIP) by the second (frequency of BIP), gives us: .63 GB per BIP. (All numbers for illustration.)
Now, suppose the frequency table (the second chart) was flipped around to 70/20/10. We’d now get .21 GB per BIP.
Remember, our pitchers, in this illustration, aren’t inducing more GB, but rather simply changing the location of the pitches, with each location having a predefined chance of getting a GB.
My question: is this true? Or, do Webb and Zito have different chart #1?