March 22, 2010
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Tuesday, June 09, 2009Which batters hit the hardest balls in April?With the release of Sportvision's HITf/x data for April 2009, we can look at who hit the ball the hardest in April. Since batted ball speed does not decrease much even when the batter hits the ball off center, it is more instructive to look at batted ball speed in the horizontal plane. In other words, hitting the ball very hard straight up is likely to turn into an out, while hitting the ball very hard straight toward the outfield is likely to turn into a hit. In fact, we find that batting average is maximized at an elevation of 11 degrees, so we'll look at the average batted ball speed for batters in that plane. We should also remove bunt attempts since they purposefully attempt a low batted ball speed. Here are the results for the 303 batters with 20 or more non-bunt batted balls recorded by HITf/x. Average batted ball speed for a non-pitcher was 75.1 mph. When pitchers were batting, their average batted ball speed was 66.1 mph. Click for more... College World Series odds: Pre-OmahaWith Texas's win over Texas Christian last night, the field for Omaha is set. First-round times and matchups have been announced, so we can look at every team's chances of making it the rest of the way. For background and methodology, you can read the article I published when the 64-team bracket was announced. For a variety of reasons, Arizona State has once again taken over as the slight favorite, with a nearly one-in-four chance of going home victorious. Virginia and Fullerton follow close behind, while Southern Mississippi and Arkansas vie for the title of "biggest underdog." One interesting quirk in the system is that, while I simulate the tournament based on strength ratings (winning percentages based on runs scored, runs allowed, and strength of schedule), those strength ratings change with every game. Virginia looks even better on paper than they did two weeks ago, but now they rate less than a tenth of a percentage point better stronger than Arizona State. Fullerton has also made their case in the first two rounds, now looking much better than they did at the outset of the tournament. Read more for the complete pre-Omaha odds. Click for more... David Ortiz and HITf/xThere is a discussion at The Book Blog which began with a link Tango made to a post by John Dewan regarding the declining length of David Ortiz's air balls and has evolved into a discussion of batted ball speeds as measured by HITf/x. It's worth your time if you're interested in the new HITf/x data. I posted a couple graphs in post #18 regarding how batting average is affected by the speed of the batted ball and the vertical launch angle. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||