from Amazon
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Fielder positioning
You could do alot with $1 stopwatch (hangtime) as we know.
Now, this is what you can do with a 50$ camera (positioning):
Wonderful, isn’t it? It would be beneficial to know how a player’s fielding value breaks down between his positioning (of which he may or may not control, and if you see him play the rover position, you are inclined to believe it’s manager-influences), and his legs/arms. Furthermore, there’s simply the question of regression, which is why we’d like to know how much of a hitter’s skill comes from BB, SO, HR and how much from BABIP.
I know we’ll get all this positioning from the FIELDf/x jackhammer, but we should have been getting this from the scorer’s hammer for decades. (Hire more scorers.)
Matt Thomas has been doing this for at least 4 years now in St. Louis. He has given presentations on his work at SABR and at each of the past Pitch Fx Summits. He tracks both the landing positions of each hit ball and the starting positions of the fielders. He works as a MLBAM stringer therefore has an excellent and consistent viewpoint for setting up his camera on a tripod. He was allowed to bring in a surveyor’s transit to mark fixed registration points on the field. Sportvision has helped him obtain lens correction factors for the camera he uses from the same source that they use to correct the lens of the Pitch Fx video cameras. He has tried to convince MLBAM to include his system as part of the information they collect.
This is not a technical problem. It is a problem of economics and motivation. MLBAM does not see itself as being in the business of collecting analysis quality data. At least not yet. Perhaps if the teams pressured them to collect this data, then they would make the changes necessary to do so. That is, they would make the changes if the teams agreed to pay for the additional costs.
This data will be collected eventually. It is too important and valuable not to be. But right now everything is in limbo waiting to see how the Field Fx system turns out. MLBAM has said that a major revision of their data collection system will take place during this off season. But they have also said that they are reluctant to pay for changes that would be made obsolete by an automated Field Fx system. MLBAM has gradually been making improvements in how its data is collected at the minor league level. One can only hope that they will see the wisdom of revamping their data collection system in such a way that analysis quality data can be collected at the minor league level where a complete Pitch/Hit/Field Fx system may not be available for years.