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Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Where pitches are thrown -> where balls are hit
Max does it again. He figures out on a -1 (inside) to +1 (outside) scale where a pitch was thrown. He figures out on a -1 (pulled down the line) to +1 (opposite field foul line) where the ball was hit. Then, he runs a correlation to see whether a batter has a tendency to hit the ball toward the spot where it was thrown or not. Fantastic! As he summarizes:
high correlation (near 1) means the hitter has a tendency to pull inside pitches and hit outside pitches the other way; zero correlation means that where the ball is put into play by the hitter is absolutely unrelated to where the pitch was located; inverse correlation (near -1) would mean the hitter hits… inside-out and outside-in.
Beautiful, right? At the end of his article, he gives the complete list. Best example of a player who hits the ball in the direction the pitch is thrown is Justin Morneau, with a correlation of r=.42. There are NO hitter that hits them the other way. The most extreme example as a spray hitter is Jimmy Rollins with an r=.01.
But Max doesn’t stop there. No, then he gives us Linear Weights by Pitch Location / Batted Ball Location Quadrant! He shows that pulling an inside pitch is the best result. I was going to get on his case that the sample players in each quadrant is not the same. But, he did such a fantastic job that I was prepared to give him a pass on it. Then, he recognizes the issue, and corrects for it:
I redid the calculations. For every batted ball I subtracted, from the outcome run value, the hitter’s (the one who put the ball in play) average run value on batted balls.
Results are as expected. The exciting thing is not that he told us something new. We pretty much could have guessed the results. But, he quantified it for us. Indeed, he agrees:
I don’t think there’s anything groundbreaking in this post. I just wanted to quantify a couple of things that are quite known.
I love the inpiration he had, and the effort he put in. This is the kind of work that only a true baseball fan would even consider, and lucky for us, a resourceful baseball fan quantifies it for us.
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