THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

hmm i signed up but when I tried to access the hit fx data it denied me.  I got one email from them saying I submitted my registration.  I wonder if they need to accept it tho.

I also did a ‘will not attend’ registrattion and then was unable to access the data. I sent them an email but have not received a reply yet.

This on the page

“Player Tracking research has already begun. In the future we’ll be able to track all players and the ball throughout an entire game. Player tracking will lead to amazing new insights about defensive strategies, reaction times, fielding range and player speed.”

Looks like they are working on players positioning and the landing spot of the ball, alogn with times.

Brian - They have been working on player and ball tracking for a while with an interesting technology different than what I have seen proposed elsewhere.  But don’t hold your breath on it.  They are still working out all the kinks on Hit f/x plus all these new developments need the prospect of paying customers to make the additional technology feasible.  Hit f/x used the exact same hardware that was already being used for Pitch f/x and it still took over a year to get it to where it is now.

Echoing Peter’s post, the player tracking is still very much in the research stage.  I suspect Marv White will tell us something about that project and its current status at the summit.  As Peter said, hitf/x simply analyzes the batted ball trajectory from the pitchf/x videos.  While that might seem to be a straightforward thing to do, it is not.  The pitched ball trajectory is pretty well constrained to lie on a line between pitcher and batter, so it is easy to “find” the ball on the images using some simple algorithms.  The batted ball can be anywhere, so it is more difficult to come up with an automatic tracking algorithm.  Of course, one can analyze by hand by tediously going through each frame of the video and locating the ball.  Peter and I both have some experience doing that and it is very time consuming. 

I hope many of the readers of this blog can do some analysis of hitf/x data in the next month and come to the summit.

Like Brian, I sent an e-mail as well. (I think that the automatic signup only works for invitees.) I don’t anticipate an answer on the weekend. Just as well - I have other projects that demand some attention tonight.

Sadly, I don’t see the summit fitting into my budget.

Peter and Alan - I realize the player tracker isn’t right around the corner, but it’s cool that it is in development.

Right now, I would welcome the opportunity to see some hit f/x data and be able to play around wuth it.

It looks like their automated program was able to record stats on about 70 to 75% of the hit balls in April.  I have found 20 or 30 numbers that look wrong for the 14977 balls they gave numbers for.  Not bad.  I expected that there would be a number of pop ups and balls that were obscured by the batter or the lines or that hit the ground right away and therefor wouldn’t have enough frames to make an accurate calculation.  It will be interesting to find out if some parks have more problems than others because of the angles of the cameras.

Wasn’t there someone who did player tracking at SABR 37? Don’t know very much about what it was all about.

Maybe it was SABR38 sorry

David...yes, Matt Thomas presented a poster at the 2007 SABR convention in St. Louis.  He has a camera set up in the press box at Busch Stadium and uses it to track player movement.  He attended the first pitch f/x summit last year and told us about his sytem.

I heard back this evening from the pitch f/x summit folks, they gave me a user name, and I am now logged in. Once I find some time, this will be fun.

I heard back as well but still couldnt login.  Not sure what the issue is.

This is the error I’m getting.  Maybe someone smarter at Mysql then me can help

Could not establish connection
SQL Error - Access Denied for user ‘john_signore’ @ 173.81.100.254 (using password: YES)

John/13 - as far as I can tell, they have to have your name on their list before you can sign in. If you have written them and gotten a response, that should be talen care of.

Your username will be the root of your emil address (everything left of @), and everyon uses the same password.

I got online with heidi, and exported the db to my pc, but when I tried loading it into MySQL it was nothing but error messages. Any tips on how to import the the downloaded data?

I got it working now.

I think what happened was the first time they emailed me, they may have made a mistake on their part cause after the 3rd email they sent me, I didnt change anything just connected and it worked.

I’m sure this has been posted before, but is there a link for instructions on how to grab the data from mlb and set up a database?

Rally, if you want the HITf/x data, you will need to visit this page:
http://baseball.sportvision.com/summit
You will need to register on that page, and Sportvision will add you to their list of allowed users.  I think they have been adding users fairly promptly upon registration (<1 day).

PITCHf/x data is also available from the HITf/x database once your register.  If you wish to get older PITCHf/x data, a lot of people use Baseball on a Stick by Kyle Willkomm:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/baseballonastic/

I also have instructions for making a PITCHf/x database yourself at my blog:
http://fastballs.wordpress.com/2007/08/23/how-to-build-a-pitch-database/

I have a pitch fx database but usually wait till the end of the years to load them.  Is their a script available to spider and parse the data on a daily basis?

Brian - Are you trying to use the script that they included with Heidi to download data?  If so it needs a ) at the end of the script.

Check out Mike’s link.

Cory Schwartz of MLBAM just posted this link, highlighting new technology for ball and fielder tracking that will be unveiled by SportsVision at the conference next weekend. They plan on having it all ballparks for 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/sports/baseball/10cameras.html?_r=5&hp

I have been maintaining a daily Pitch F/X database that .sql ready.

Look for the ones labeled: pbp2.200979.sql.gz They contain the 2007 and 2008 data also. 

http://www.wantlinux.net/baseball/

These have not been corrected to Harry’s individual game adjustments.