from Amazon
Friday, July 24, 2009
The Running Men
Pirates coach on Dan Fox:
Every week Fox e-mails a baserunning report to Pirates third base coach Tony Beasley. “At first I was skeptical,” says Beasley. “Now I think [Fox is] a genius. The numbers reveal things you don’t really see with your eyes. You see that last year [first baseman] Adam LaRoche didn’t go from first to third a lot and didn’t take a lot of chances in general. Now he’s being more aggressive and is one of our best base runners. These numbers give the players something of substance to work for. Players want to hear the truth as long as you can back it up. And now we have numbers to back up everything.”
Joe Maddon:
If the opposition is consistently trying to stop Carl’s running game, a hitter behind him is going to see a better pitch, and that’s something that’s hard to define or quantify. “Though I have no doubt,” he adds, “that someday, probably soon, someone will.”
The Book, p. 325, Table 131. It is basically a “with or without you” (WOWY) of the best baserunners, and how batters hit when those guys are on base and when they are not.
And the future:
Cameras used for digital tracking systems will not only measure the exact speed and location of the ball on the field but also the movement of players as well; who, for instance, takes the most efficient routes from first to third, or second to home? “That will change the conversation quite a bit,” says Fox, who has been meeting with professors at Carnegie Mellon University about building such tracking systems for the Pirates. (A system is being tested in San Francisco.) “The metrics we have now are going to look like vast approximations of what we will have.”
Thanks to Albert Chen, the writer of this piece. An excellent sabermetric primer for the masses. This is what it looked like in SI.
Glove-slap: BtB.
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