THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

That article was just begging for the use of the heat maps like the fastball run value by location series on The Baseball Analysts.  Although, it was interesting to see the different pitches contrasted on the same chart.

Jonathan by the way was the guy who did these great heat maps:

http://tangotiger.net/halejon/allcounts.html

You know, heat maps are cool and all, but I question their usefulness in many situations.  To an untrained eye, they can look like a mess, particularly when there is no clear pattern.

I personally think most readers get the info they need from simpler graphs, like the ones in Jonathan’s article today.  Of course, it all depends on what the writer’s goals are.

I was going to do both per swing and BIP too - I agree, if a guy misses a certain pitch/location 99 times and crushes it the one time he gets it, it’s not really a “home run pitch”. And I’m sure some interesting things would pop out of count, like when hitters can sit fastball.

Heat maps would be great, but I can’t figure out a way to do them for relative densities (i.e. percentages) yet. I believe all the heat maps we have seen so far (and certainly mine) have been purely based on quantity of strikes/HR/etc, which isn’t really what we’re looking for here.