March 20, 2010
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Monday, September 21, 2009Some food for thoughtI'm going to list two groups of players, and all you have to do is go ahead and look them over: Group A: Corey Patterson Eric Munson Luis Montanez Dewon Brazelton Christopher Gruler Kyle Sleeth Philip Humber Jeff Clement Evan Longoria Josh Vitters Group B: Dave Kelton Brian Sanches Bobby Hill Jon Switzer Joey Votto Jay Sborz Matthew Durkin Ivan DeJesus Jr. Joshua Butler Jordan Zimmerman Yeah, this is definitely an interesting bunch of names. Each team has an established star (Longoria and Votto), a well-regarded prospect (Vitters and DeJesus), and some "who's thats" (Chris Gruler, Jay Sborz). However, if we were to match these groups up in overall talent/playing performance, it'd be pretty tough to determine a winner. For Group B there is a huge drop-off after Votto, but some bright, young players in DeJesus and Zimmerman. We don't see all that much potential for Group A after Longoria, but there are some other guys after that who could help major league teams (Clement, Humber, etc.). So what's the point of all this? Group A represents all third overall draft picks from the ten-year span of 1998-2007, while Group B represents all draft picks taken third in the second round of those respective drafts. For such a wide gap in picks (taking into account the supplemental rounds), we don't see all that wide of a gap in talent. This isn't a lesson on the riskiness involved in the draft, and it also isn't a theory on why there was a drought in consistent talent during this time. I honestly was just browsing recent MLB drafts online and found this trend pretty intriguing. Go ahead and discuss any thoughts you have on why third overall picks have been pretty mediocre in recent years. What do hockey pucks from 1996 have to do with baseball in 2009?While doing some background reading for my 2010 Hardball Times Annual article, I ran across an interesting article about the development of the FoxTrax hockey puck in 1995 and 1996. The system was developed by Fox Sports to allow their TV broadcast to superimpose a blue glow around the hockey puck and add a comet trail to slap shots to help new American hockey viewers follow the action. What does this have to do with baseball, you ask? [Dora the Explorer-like pause for you to ask.] I'm glad you asked. Let me tell you. The development of the FoxTrax puck is part of the history that gave us PITCHf/x. The people involved in the FoxTrax development were expert engineers in fields like navigation electronics from Etak, radar systems from defense think-tank SRI International, and video effects from Silicon Graphics. Many of these people went on to found Sportvision, including current Chief Technical Officer Marv White, Sr. VP of Engineering Ken Milnes, and Chief Scientist Rick Cavallaro. One of the chief treats associated with my attendance at the 2008 PITCHf/x Summit was an hour sitting in Ken Milnes' office with Alan Nathan talking sports engineering. Among other things, Ken showed us a FoxTrax hockey puck and talked about its development. So I had some idea of the technical ancestry of PITCHf/x and the engineering challenges that Sportvision and its FoxTrax predecessor had tackled. But the interesting thing about this article by Rick Cavallaro was the detail with which he described the engineering challenges involved and how the FoxTrax team took on and solved each one. If you're interested in engineering and how it applies to sports, I highly recommend you read the whole article. I'll give just a few highlights here as they relate to PITCHf/x, HITf/x, and the upcoming FIELDf/x. The FoxTrax team had to learn about cameras--tracking the pan, tilt, and zoom of broadcast cameras and correcting for lens distortion. These lessons have direct applicability to tracking the orientation of the PITCHf/x cameras and reversing the effects of their lens distortion. They developed an x-y-z coordinate system for the ice rink and method for registering the location of objects detected by the cameras in this coordinate system. This registration system has been adapted for the calibration of PITCHf/x cameras to an x-y-z coordinate system for the baseball diamond. They also learned about the on-the-ground tricks required for wiring up systems at hockey arenas and connecting them up to their broadcast truck, lessons later applied during the PITCHf/x installations during 2007 and the ongoing maintenance of those systems. If this topic interests you, check out another telling of the same story and of Sportvision's history. Hit by pitches and pitchf/xThe ability to get hit by a pitch is an under-appreciated skill, perhaps to an even greater extent than the ability to draw walks. I’ve always felt that simple HBP per plate appearance leaderboards captured the best Biggios in the game, but in a needless effort to complicate things, I decided to bring a crude analysis using pitchf/x data into the mix. My dataset consists of 544 players who saw at least 500 pitches from one side of the plate. I classified pitches at least a foot from the center of the plate as inside. The correlation between HBP per pitch and HBP per pitch inside is .9, which suggests to me that this line of analysis is probably unnecessary. There is actually a weak negative correlation between the rate at which a batter is pitched inside and his propensity to get hit by those pitches. This suggests to me that pitchers are somewhat aware of which hitters are willing to take one for their team and therefore avoid going inside on them. Here are the leaderboards, with the note that the average rate of getting hit by a pitch is once per every 37 pitches classified as inside.
Full dataset can be found in a google spreadsheet here. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||