THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Is O-Swing reliable?

Josh is a smart kid.  Really neat application.  I’m curious about calculating the swing areas, as there may be an issue with comparability across individual swing zones (especially in smaller sample sizes).  I’ve talked about this before, but I also know that Josh has read those caveats carefully.

Josh, since comments don’t seem to be allowed at THT on this, could you present some thoughts on these issues here?  How did you choose the smooth and how did you deal with outliers in the data (i.e. swinging at one pitch in the dirt, when there are only two of them to a given batter).

Millsy, perhaps you’re looking at the batter article?  That’s an old one, in which comments are turned off.  The new article is the pitcher one--I believe you can leave comments there.  (I just did).

Woops!  Clicked the first link by accident.  Thanks, studes.

Millsy: I can’t speak for Josh, but I would hope and pray that he would use regression toward the mean.

Thanks for linking to the post, Tango. Discussions of the calculation method are over in the comments of the “pitchers and swing area” article.

Very good stuff, Josh! I just read it.  One more thing from pitch f/x data that we can use to estimate the true talent of a pitcher…