THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

He’s at home in the numbers, and he thinks he’s found a secret to his 2009 success. He attributes part of that secret to the Pitch f/x technology on MLB.com’s Gameday Premium.

A few years ago, high-speed cameras were installed in all Major League ballparks, Bannister says. The technology can quantify numbers that hadn’t really been quantified before.

Technically, the Pitch f/x feature spews out three numbers with every pitch. The simple number is the pitch’s velocity. The other two are a little more complicated. The “Pitch-f/x” value is the measurement of the distance between the location of the actual pitch and the calculated location of a ball thrown by the pitcher in the same way with no spin. The “Break” quantifies the distance in the given trajectory of a pitch compared with a pitch that was thrown in a straight line. In short, a big, loopy curveball will have a large amount of “Break.”

This isn’t an article about Bannister, it’s a bad advertisement that completely undersells the technology to promote a product.

Your “most recent articles” box is rendering on top of the “The book” title on my PC - Firefox 3.5.2 on Windows 7.

Exactly.  I can guarantee you Bannister isn’t using Gameday Premium to do his PITCHf/x analysis.

The “three numbers with every pitch” is one of the worst things MLBAM ever came up with.  I wish they would admit that already and quit acting to the Gameday viewer as if that is what PITCHf/x is.  It would be one thing if they’d ditched it in 2007 when it was obvious it wasn’t helpful.  To still be using and promoting it two years later is a horrible disservice to their viewing audience in that it furthers the misconception that stats/PITCHf/x is an unknowable mystery that somehow magically works although those geeks that come up with it are out of touch with real baseball.