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Thursday, August 07, 2008

Presentation on Defense

By Tangotiger, 01:57 PM

Recently, MGL and David Gassko did a presentation of defense (pitching and fielding) at MIT.  MGL sent me his powerpoint presentation (2 MB).  I converted it to HTML without all the nice pics and formatting, so for those interested, here you go.


#1    dave      (see all posts) 2008/08/07 (Thu) @ 14:42

Wouldn’t it be easier to just publish it as a google doc?


#2    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2008/08/07 (Thu) @ 15:12

It wouldn’t be easier for me, no.

If MGL wants to, he can go for it.  Though I remember having problems in the past with any document greater than 500KB.


#3    MGL      (see all posts) 2008/08/07 (Thu) @ 20:23

My funny pictures are missing from the HTML doc.  Those weird captions reference the pictures.


#4    birtelcom      (see all posts) 2008/08/07 (Thu) @ 23:26

For “weaknesses” under UZR you have “none”. I would at least put “cannot be used for historical comparisons”.  This is weakness, if you consider it such (I do), for all metrics that require detailed zone evalaution data, that will simply never exist before the last few years.  I would also add: “subjective element of assigning zones”.  For all their limitations, metrics that rely on stats such as assists, putouts, Ks, balls in play, etc. are purely objective: an out occurs or does not, fielders participates in outs or they don’t, balls are in play or not—these records are not only availabe through most of baseball history, they are also relatively simple facts, not requiring subjective evaluations of what “zone” a ball falls in, whether it’s a “line drive” or a “fly ball”, etc..  Metrics such as UZR are extremely useful, but I don’t think we should treat them as flawless.


#5    MGL      (see all posts) 2008/08/07 (Thu) @ 23:43

#4, that was just a joke.


#6          (see all posts) 2008/08/08 (Fri) @ 01:20

When I read the captions, I was like “okay, what the hell is going on? Am I missing something?”

But anyway… were most of the presentations similar to this? Were they more/less sophisticated? I wanted to attend when I first heard about it, but now I feel like it would have been less informative for most of the readers of this blog.


#7    MGL      (see all posts) 2008/08/08 (Fri) @ 10:16

I don’t know about the other presentations, but yes, this was for high school and middle school students with little or no experience with baseball analysis.  We did have an open Q&A session for the guest attendees though.


#8    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2008/08/08 (Fri) @ 11:06

Were they overwhelmed or intrigued?  Did any of them actually come to this site?


#9    Hats For Bats      (see all posts) 2008/08/08 (Fri) @ 12:42

may there be something similar to this in the future? I wanted to go but never had the time to make the trip (from nyc). maybe it could be like a weeklong thing so you could go more in depth as well. im a high school senior and I would definitely be interested in something like that, and I bet others would be as well.


#10    Tangotiger      (see all posts) 2008/08/08 (Fri) @ 13:51

Weeklong?  More in-depth?  I hope MIT has a big budget.


#11    studes      (see all posts) 2008/08/08 (Fri) @ 17:26

Wow.  You guys are just plain wacky!


#12    MGL      (see all posts) 2008/08/08 (Fri) @ 19:47

I don’t really know much about it.  You’d have to talk to Chuck Korb at the Sons of Sam Horn website.  Or e-mail him at .


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