This isn’t a fun week – in a contracts class from 8-4 every day and then it’s into the office for another few hours to do a ton of work that got thrown at me because the people who are really responsible for it don’t know how to work with huge data sets. So there won’t be as much baseball work to get done this week as I would want, but I still have to keep up the blog posts! And obviously sitting in a classroom for 8 hours will give my mind ample time to wander and contemplate some things for this project.
For instance, today I found myself thinking more about what a true talent level actually means – basically an extension of the second paragraph of this post. As I said there, players have many different talents and trying to collect all of that information in a single statistic is going to be problematic. In what proportions do you mix these different talents? You could just assume that all hitters face pitchers with totally average pitches that they throw at the same rate as the major league average and have handedness in line with the actual breakdown in MLB by innings pitched. But is that meaningful? A left handed hitter that struggles against lefties may face a ton of LOOGYs and therefore face a higher percentage of lefties than normal – but then again he might get lifted for a pinch hitter in that situation or sit more often with a lefty on the mound and therefore face fewer than normal.
Regardless, there is no doubt that I’d rather be thinking about this stuff than the lifestyle of a Federal contract. Which is pretty good motivation to keep thinking about it even further.
Pitch-f/x is the awesome system that MLB uses to document every single statistic about the movement of particular a pitch. However, it took quite some time to find one centralized location that provides solid documentation for all of the fields provided by the system (including ones that have been added in recent years). So for the benefit of myself and others, here it is:
- type: ball/strike/ball in play
- id: pitch ID for within that particular game
- x: horizontal location at which the ball crosses the plate in pixels
- y: vertical location at which the ball crosses the plate in pixels
- des: outcome of the pitch (18 total)
- sv_id: date and time of pitch, in YYMMDD_hhmmss
- start_speed: speed of pitch as it is 50 feet from home plate in mph
- end_speed: speed of pitch as it crosses the plate in mph
- sz_top: top of the strike zone for the particular batter in feet
- sz_bot: bottom of the strike zone for the particular batter in feet
- pfx_x: horizontal break of the pitch in inches
- pfx_z: vertical break of the pitch in inches
- px: horizontal location at which the ball crosses the plate in feet
- pz: vertical location at which the ball crosses the plate in feet
- x0: horizontal release point in feet
- y0: release point on C-2B axis (this is fixed at 50 feet)
- z0: vertical release point in feet
- vx0: horizontal velocity in feet/second
- vy0: velocity in the home plate-second base plane in feet/second (there has to be a better term for this)
- vz0: vertical velocity in feet/second
- ax: horizontal acceleration in feet/second/second
- ay: acceleration in the home plate-second base pane in feet/second/second
- az: verticaly acceleration in feet/second/second
- break_y: distance from home plate in feet at which the ball deviates most from a straight line path from release point to the point at which the ball crosses the plate
- break_angle: angle at which the ball breaks – from the catcher’s perspective, a break angle of 0 indicates no horizontal break, a positive angle indicates a ball that breaks from right to left (away from left-handed hitters) while a negative angle indicates a ball that breaks from left to right (into left-handed hitters)
- break_length: largest deviation from a straight line between the release point and the point at which the ball crosses the plate in inches
- pitch_type: type of pitch thrown
- type_confidence: confidence in the pitch_type classification by MLB on a scale from 0 to 1.5
- zone: pitch location in one of 14 zones around home plate as defined by MLB
- nasty: MLB-defined rating of quality of pitch, from 1 to 100
- spin_dir: from the catcher’s perspective, the angle (from 0 to 359.999) between the the pole around which the ball is rotating and the positive x-axis; a ball with a spin_dir of 0 has no horizontal movement and some amount of top spin while a ball with a spin_dir of 180 has no horizontal movement and back spin
- spin_rate: revolutions per minute of the ball
The two most helpful sites in compiling this information were from Alan Nathan and Fast Balls.
This post by Dave Cameron at FanGraphs does a pretty good job at pointing out the difficulties that arise when trying to separate talent from results. Trevor Cahill has certainly had a very strong year by “traditional” measures (ERA, WHIP), but in other ways (GB%, K%) has performed worse than even Jason Justin Masterson. I’m not very concerned about whether the Cy Young vote should be based on wins and losses or K-rate or SIERA (although if I did have a vote, it would probably be for Cliff Lee despite witnessing this in person). It’s not the perception of talent that I care about, but rather actual talent. More precisely, the probability that a particular player has talent level X on a given day (see here for a very good background). Using all of the wonderful information available from MLB.com, it is possible to begin stripping away park and luck and quality of opposition and come closer to some distribution of true talent level for that player.
However, of course a player doesn’t have just one talent – a pitcher might have great fastball velocity but no command, or a wonderful change but a curve that gets pounded. On the other end of the pitch, a hitter might crush high and tight fastballs from righties but couldn’t hit a curve from a lefty to save his life (and in the case of switch-hitters, they likely behave like two totally different hitters depending on the side of the plate they are on). My goal is to use what we do know based on what has happened in the past to construct a better measure of player talent.
So we’ve brought back A90F (that’s what all the kids were calling it back in our July 2008 heyday) in order to document our experience trying to make it in the baseball world. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on, and it’s my goal to have some sort of a update every day. Regardless of how things turn out in the end, I’m very excited for this journey and hope to share the experience!
You can tell it is new by the capital letters.
So let’s try this again. The Tribe is mired in a 3 year slump, but not all starts and ends with them. Big things are happening! And here is where we will track it all. Geoff is working on a new system that has a lot of potential and seems very interesting. I’m trying to change the game with fantasy sports, starting, of course, with a baseball tilt. And we are both adults*, which in this case purely means we have a better chance at success than ever before.
So, come along and join us, and let’s see what happens.
* Not an indicator of maturity, per se.
ottoneu's development blog