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Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Line drive blooper
Jeff points out this call that was marked as a line drive. By my internal counting, that ball was in the air 5 to 6 seconds. Max time for a line drive would be, I dunno, 1 second per 70 feet (just guessing)?
Obviously, this was a miscoded entry. Why was it a miscoded entry? There could be many reasons.
1. The stringer really believed that it was a line drive from his vantage point.
2. The stringer was distracted for 2-3 seconds, and inferred Line Drive.
3. The stringer wanted to enter Flyball, but entered Line Drive.
4. The stringer entered Flyball, but the software translated to Line Drive.
5. There is no (or limited) quality checking of batted ball data.
When it comes to official MLB stats, those are (presumably) double-checked. When it comes to unofficial stats, like batted ball data, data quality is lower. You can see that in the NHL, where the action is fast and furious, and the various scorekeepers have a hard time keeping up. MLB really should have at least half a dozen scorers for each game (each delegated to a particular facet). The NHL has that many, and they (a) don’t rely on stats anywhere close to MLB, (b) take in less than half the revenues of MLB.
Ideally, the invalid entries are random rather than systematic.
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