from Amazon
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
When is a line drive a flyball?
Harry gives us a great look into HITf/x:
I have no doubt that if you look at where a line drive intersects with the ground ball, and where the line drive intersects with the flyball, that the outcome of those “line drives” will look alot more like GB and FB, respectively, than line drives.
Indeed, we don’t even need to classify things as GB, LD, FB, and Pops, if we have the launch angle. The ONLY reason we bother with the classification is that it’s easier for us to process and “see” the data. This is similar to trying to figure out if a ball was pulled, up the middle, or opposite hit. It all depends on where you draw the line. And once you do, you have to ask why have a “line” as some sort of demarcation point. UZR is better than ZR for the exact reason that it doesn’t treat all balls in the “zone” as if it’s one monolithic zone.
The horizontal angle that Harry shows is the spray angle. Indeed, I would recommend that we call this the spray angle, since this tells us exactly what it’s doing. I had to think about about what a “horizontal” angle is. I don’t have to think about the spray angle. The same thing for vertical. I’d prefer to call it the launch angle. Horizontal and vertical is more technical and less descriptive.
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Harry: for your SLG axis, stop it at around 1.000, and show “breaks” for those that go above. There is a huge difference between a .400 and .500 SLG, but that is almost completely invisible when the scale of the SLG axis goes to 3.0 I understand why you did it this first time. I DO prefer that you keep the same scale, as you did. This way, we don’t need to readjust our scale for every picture.