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Saturday, September 05, 2009
Reaching out to any of the pitch f/x guys…
As a Padre fan, I am continually frustrated at how often it APPEARS to me that their hitters (in general) look exclusively fastball in fastball counts and get off- speed pitches. The problem with looking exclusively fastball as a batter is that you end up swinging and often missing at off-speed pitches outside of the zone and you often take off-speed pitches for strikes. In general, for a batter to look exclusively for a certain pitch is a bad idea unless he is 80 or 90% certain that it is coming (or whatever the number is).
Anyway, would it be a lot of trouble for someone to look at the pitch f/x data and find out how often a Padre batter gets an off-speed pitch in a hitter’s count (1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 3-1, and 3-2) as compared to the league as a whole and how the batters do on those off-speed pitches in those hitters counts, again as compared to a league average batter (comparing count for count - such as with a 3-1 count and an off-speed pitch, Padre hitters create X value and the league as a whole at a 3-1 count and an off-speed pitch creates Y value)?
Also, if you can do that for the first half compared to the second half. I suspect that pitchers are starting to realize that Padre hitters do that.
I am very down on Padre coaches. Their team has dismally underperformed in all areas for 2 straight years now (check out my article in the 2009 THT). If my suspicions are true about their hitters, they need to do something about it and fire their hitting coach at the same time. The manager should have been fired a long time ago, in my opinion.
Maybe I am wrong though. Maybe it is just selective memory. Just as it looks to me like Eckstein grounds out to second base every time I see him bat (how often does he do that?), which is unusual for a RHB of course.
It would only be a couple lines of SQL code if gameday included count information for each pitch, but it doesn’t. That forces us to try to recreate the count from the events. That would work great if pitch f/x was cleaner. But its pretty bad at times. Sometimes pitch f/x has an entire game as a single at-bat; much of the time, it leaves events out (originally, did pf/x leave out pitches where the batter made contact?).
I had no confidence recreate counts, but clearly people are doing this. If anyone has a “cleaned” database that has count information, I’d love to get my hands on it.