THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tom, no link in your post, but I assume you’re talking about Steve’s Sabermetric Primer here:
http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2010/1/7/1238375/sabermetric-primer-an-assortment

Ack, right.

Glad to see you read VEB Tom!

Trip Somers has said he’s going to add a lot more stuff to his website.  I think when he does that, it will be one of the best resources we’ve had in a while.  Not only do you get to split it up by pitch type and batter hand, he let’s you choose the time frame as well.

As a lazy individual who knows nothing about web querying and has no interest using an in-browser tool to get lots of data, I was curious if there was some _other_ way to acquire or download the pitch F/X data, for either the 2008 or 2009 season, or preferably both.

Not looking for anyone to give me their hard work, but was interested if there existed a freely available database, similar to the Lahman one.

StatZombie, Darrell Zimmerman has what you want here:
http://www.wantlinux.net/category/baseball-data/

Plate-count split is actually next on my list. I need to run a program on my 2009 data to add count data to each pitch, then I’ll throw in the code to make it part of the tool.

Thanks for the love.

Thanks for mentioning this, I hadn’t thought to do add the pitch count

@counter I had in before to number the pitches in each PA.
@nb and @ns initialize number balls and number strikes to 0.

SET @counter:=0;
SET @nb:=0;
SET @ns:=0;
SET @previousPA_CT=’’;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS mybbos.pitches;
CREATE TABLE mybbos.pitches
SELECT
ab.YEAR_ID,
ab.GAME_ID,
ab.GAME_PA_CT,
p.id AS GAME_PITCH_CT,
@counter:=IF(@previousPA_CT=p.gameatbatid,@counter+1,1) AS PA_PITCH_CT,
@nb AS BALLS_CT,
@ns AS STRIKES_CT,
# if new PA then pitch_ct=1, else add 1
# for first pitch nb and bs will be 0

ab.BAT_TEAM_ID,
ab.RESP_BAT_ID,
ab.FLD_TEAM_ID,
ab.RESP_PIT_ID,
ab.GAMEDAY_CD,
p.des,
p.type,
p.x,
p.y,
.....
@previousPA_CT:=p.gameatbatid AS temp,
@nb:=IF(@previousPA_CT=p.gameatbatid AND p.type=’B’,@nb+1,0) AS temp2,
@ns:=IF(@previousPA_CT=p.gameatbatid AND p.type=’S’,IF(@ns=2,2,@ns+1),0) AS temp3
# at end copy current atbat_id for later comparison
# now increment balls and strikes if still same PA
# don’t increment strikes past 2
FROM gameday.pitches AS p
....