THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, August 20, 2010

Northern California Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Sports

In Redwood City (between SF and San Jose), on Oct 16, 2010.  Lots of interesting topics, including one from Book Blog commenter Brad Null, as well as this one:

Pitcher Accuracy through Catcher Spotting: Assessing Rater Reliability
by Andrew Thomas

Pitcher intent, as measured by the position of the catcher’s glove before a pitch is thrown, is an element of baseball that is regularly observed by commentators ("he’s missing his spots") but remains an uncaptured aspect of statistical analysis of the game, offering many potential aspects on pitcher performance that have yet to be exploited. There has yet to be a systematic way of collecting this data for public consumption, a far from trivial task, that can potentially be conducted by an automated video analysis system, or a collection of manual raters with expert judgement. We address two potential manual methods of data collection through video playback, demonstrate the validity and reliability of each measure on multiple raters, and conclude by discussing a broader program of data collection based on these methods.

Who’s going?