THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tom, did we read the same article?  That thing is so riddled with inaccuracies and misunderstandings about PITCHf/x, HITf/x, and FIELDf/x that it was tough to find anything correct in it.

During the 2008 MLB season, the PITCHf/x camera system was installed in every major league park – with certain exceptions made for the last year of Yankee and Shea stadiums in New York, as both the Yankees and Mets relocated to new stadiums in the 2009 season.

Actually, Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium both got PITCHf/x camera systems during 2007 and had them in place for all of 2008 as well.

The object of the PITCHf/x system was to gather data from the stadiums in order to composite requisite information for the camera system technology to go live in 2009.

No, it went live everywhere but Baltimore and Washington during 2007.  Those two stadiums were added to begin the 2008 season.

Data was collected during the 2008 season by the PITCHf/x system that included tracking nearly all pitches thrown for the entire season for supposedly all 30 teams, totaling approximately 700,000. And that data is now being used as the base measure to evaluate MLB umpire accuracy for 2009.  – Unfortunately, the umpiring data for the new Yankee Stadium and the Mets’ Citi Field was not included; unaddressed publicly by MLB. –

I’m not even sure what her point is here, but I do know that new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field are included.

PITCHf/x takes 25 pictures of the ball in flight between the pitching mound and home plate. Sportsvision® software then uses a ‘best fit’ algorithm in order to calculate compensation for different variables of the ball’s flight path, including the position of the ball when it crosses the plate.

But here is where the disparity arises, as a strike is not called at the front of the plate but where it crosses the plate as it makes its way into the catcher’s glove. The camera, however, starts reporting data 5 feet in front of home plate; reminiscent of the ill-timed traffic light camera that incorrectly tickets a driver for going through a red light while traveling through the tail end of a yellow caution light in an intersection. –

As best I can tell, she is arguing here that umpires are being graded against a system which is only measuring them at the front of home plate?  That is false.  The data reported on Gameday is at the front home plate.  That is different than the data that is used to grade the umpires.  The PITCHf/x system can tell you the pitch location at any point in the trajectory, and the umpire grading software does take advantage of this.  It is also very well aware of the rulebook definition of the strike zone, which is her false accusation in the next paragraph.

For after PITCHf/x, the upcoming HITf/x will be used for scouting in the not too distant future by MLB teams and it also will be a supposed tool that will measure every aspect of every player’s mechanics.

It’s not clear to me here if she’s referring to HITf/x, or more probably to FIELDf/x, but in either case, it’s not really going to measure a player’s mechanics.  FIELDf/x will track his gross movements, but not his mechanics.

Such technology will put sabermetrics to shame and will again rely upon technology which again, the naked eye cannot see on its own.

Will put sabermetrics to shame?  How about...will boost sabermetrics to unprecedented heights?  Who do you think is going to analyze this data, Ms. Grassi?

It will record events that the naked eye can see, but the naked eye doesn’t do nearly as good a job at remembering them accurately or finding patterns and making queries from data sets that cover hundreds of thousands of pitches

The Sportsvision software will utilize 2-4 cameras for HITf/x which has been gathering data throughout the 2009 season, while presently installed at the San Francisco Giants’ AT&T Park.

Here she means FIELDf/x.  HITf/x uses the same cameras that are already in place at every MLB stadium for PITCHf/x.  They are installing new cameras for FIELDf/x in order to cover the whole field.

Sigh.  This article couldn’t have been much worse if Ms. Grassi hadn’t bothered to research anything at all.

Perhaps I should have said it was well-styled, but poorly-researched.

Her conclusions are of course wrong, highlighted by her last two paragraphs.

I understood the point of her article to be about how all this new-fangled technology is ruining everything good about baseball.  It’s screwing up the umpiring, and now it’s going to try to ruin scouting, too.

But all the “problems” she points out with the umpire grading are based on faulty understanding of the system or just plain inaccuracies in her reporting.  And then you pointed out the problem with her view of how it will affect scouting.

I guess if you are going to write a screed against technology in baseball, getting the facts right would only hurt your cause.

Her article may be well-styled, but well-styled lies don’t go down any better for me.  Her article makes me a little angry, in fact.  I guess I should expect this kind of baseless attacks as the ball tracking technologies gain prominence, but it’s sad to see a site like Primer give her a platform for it.

Mike, writing a retort at THT in setting the facts straight would help I think.

(If you do a “view source”, you can capture everything you did here already with the formatting, and simply cut/paste it there.  Then ask Repoz to link to your blog post.)

If you took everyone with strong intangibles, removed them from MLB, I’m fairly certain, a new crop of intangibles superstars would rise up to take their place.  It’s a story-telling crutch, for the most part, not a skill to be uncovered.

At least Primer had a similar reaction to this article as you did, Mike.

#5

That reminds me of something that I wish someone with database skills could take a look at.  You could take a group of players who are perceived to be an awful clubhouse presences with terrible intangibles (whatever the hell that even means), who beat up little girls and hate America. 

Then you would compare how his teammates have done when they were on his team, compared to their preseason projections.  You would do the same with a group of players with perceived great intangibles.  Then compare how well the players performed compared to their projections.  So intangibles WOWY. 

Actually, it doesn’t sound like it would be that hard to do, you could probably pull it off with BDB.  I might give that a try.

I don’t know why so many people assume (or portray themselves as assuming) that the advent of a new system that provides more information (e.g. Hit Fx) will necessarily *displace* older systems (e.g. visual scouting).  We’re not talking about robots replacing assembly line workers here; more information (provided it is accurate, and the Fx products are) is always better, and will never inspire any sane analyst to discard any other accurate information. 

However, it may cause someone to examine more closely whether the legacy information (or system for generating said information) is, in fact, accurate.  Supposing that in some particular case, technology-generated information conflicts with visually generated information, among thoughtful analysts this would provoke honest and diligent analysis to resolve the discrepancy, or to at least understand it as best as possible.  Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

I particularly scoffed at the part where she described how Jeter’s scout somehow managed to do his job without a laptop and cell phone.  True enough.  Here are a couple more examples she might like to use in the future.

During the Civil War, soldiers managed to do their job with a musket and bayonet.  That must mean that automatic weapons, hand grenades and kevlar helmets must be bad for soldiers, right? 

They also blundered around with little idea of where they or their enemy were, exactly, until someone (usually on a horse) rode up and filled them in.  That must mean 2-way radios are bad, right?

Back in WWII, U.S. Navy navigators managed to keep track of their ship’s location with a sextant, chronometer and a clear view of the horizon and a few stars or planets.  That must mean that GPS is bad for navigators, right?

Did an early-1990’s scout carry anything that an 1880’s scout didn’t?  Hmmm… maybe a stopwatch, a ballpoint pen, a camera (still or video), a tape recorder, keys to his car, a credit card to pay for his hotel room.  Who knows, maybe one of this writer’s parents wrote an article 25 years ago decrying the needless (nay, evil) technological doodads that the 1990’s scout carried and held so dear…

I’m impressed that she thinks scouts will be rendered obsolete within 3-15 months!

Using Derek Jeter, a first rounder, as an example of a player who wouldn’t get a shot?

Come on, he’s a tremedously athletic player.  Tall, strong, and fast.  His intangibles might take the excellent physical ability and make him a future HOFer, but if Derek Jeter was a lazy bum he’d have more than enough ability to be at least a disappointing starter at the MLB level, somebody like Khalil Greene, Yuni Betencourt, or Juan Uribe.

I remember somebody else used Zito as an example of how scouts missed the boat on players, and that it took a sabermetric view to appreciate him, when Zito was scouted very highly.

Actually, I think she raised a valid point, if I interpret correctly what she is saying (and perhaps she does not make the point as clearly as she might have).  Her point seems to be that with all the technological advances (sabermetric analysis, pitchf/x, etc.), there is a danger that the traditional methods of player evaluation will be lost.  If that is her point, it is certainly one worth making.  However, my own view is that it is not worth losing sleep over.  I think that the successful teams will be those that learn how to balance statistical and other high-tech information against the more traditional methods. 

I do agree with Mike Fast that she has lots of her facts wrong.  But that should not detract from the point she is trying to make (or, at least, the point that I think she is trying to make).

Alan, maybe that’s her point, but I’m not particularly worried about it happening. 

First of all, any team that truly wants to keep their traditional methods of evaluation will be able to do so.  I suspect that will be 30 out of 30.  In fact, I don’t see how these new methods can displace the old if the new methods are not available in the sites where the prospects are playing (high school , college, the DR, etc).

Next, when winning matters (and in this case it certainly does), old methods only get replaced when the new method is demonstrably better.  Another real-life example of mine, on my Navy ship, we used sound-powered phones to communicate throughout the ship.  These devices use no electricity, are rugged and you can hear clearly.  No one’s redesigned these things since before WWII, because they do what they’re supposed to so well that there’s no need.  On the other hand, weapons systems, radar, sonar, communications technology, GPS, all of these innovations have swept through the Navy and changed the ships a great deal, because there’s no denying that a radar-guided gun is superior to one that isn’t, and a surface-to-surface missile with 80 miles range is superior to one with 20 miles range, and GPS beats the heck out of celestial navigation in all situations except when you’re adrift in a lifeboat without batteries…

If traditional methods die out in a sport where winning matters, it will only be because something made it superfluous.  and I’m not expecting that to happen with “traditional” experienced-eyeball scouting…

Mike, writing a retort at THT in setting the facts straight would help I think.

Good idea, Tom.  My response is here:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/is-sportvision-ruining-baseball/

Alan, I confess I let my initial emotional response get the better of me in my responses here.  I didn’t like her criticism of one of my favorite things about baseball.  I think my factual points stand, but I didn’t need to be so harsh on the value of the article as a whole.  I appreciate your response here; it helped me consider a perspective I missed in my first reading.

Hopefully my response at THT is a little more evenhanded and reasoned and considers her point in writing the article more carefully.

Mike (#14):  Nice job!
Mike (#15):  Actually, my initial reaction was the same as yours.  Then I went to the BTF site and read some of the comments there and decided that she had been trashed sufficiently (and a whole lot less intelligently than on this site), so I decided to find something positive to say.

I have been interviewed lots of times by reporters who seem to “get it” as I am talking to them.  Then I read their article and realize that they got it all wrong.  She may well have done that with Zander.