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Thursday, March 04, 2010The influence of batters’ expectations on pitch perceptionHi everyone. This is my first post on The Hardball Times Live and I’m really excited to have to opportunity to post here. I hope you enjoy my work. You can find more of my original research at my personal site. What we’re going to look at today is the relationship between percentage of pitches on a certain count and batting eye by pitch type. You can read more about batting eye at my site but to summarize - it is a measure of how good the batter is at judging whether a pitch is in the strike zone. Batters are obviously much less concerned with taking a strike when they have less than two strikes on them - and may choose not to swing at pitches which they know are strikes in these counts. Therefore looking at batting eye on most counts is an imperfect measure. For this reason we are going to look only at two strike counts for this analysis. Unfortunately this gives us a mere four data points per pitch type, which means that the correlations I’m going to show you are based on a very limited number of points. On the plus side each point represents a few thousand pitches. Additionally, while this data is for the 2008 season, the numbers look very similar for 2009. I have also done a bit of follow-up analysis which will allow me to look at more of the points at the same time. Let's take a moment and think about what we might see in this analysis. I came up with a couple of different theories. -You might suspect these measures are completely unrelated. After all a curveball is a curveball regardless of count and the batter should be consistent in their ability to tell if it’s going to be a ball or a strike. -Perhaps pitchers can outsmart batters and throw pitches which the batters are not expecting. Since I’m writing the article you can pretty much rule out the first theory and while some pitchers might be able keep batters off balance it doesn’t seem to be the case when we average over the league. You might now conclude that the two measures are directly related - that the more frequently a type of pitch is thrown on a specific count the more a batter will be expecting that pitch type and the better they will read it. You’d be right – with one exception. Check it out.  We see that this strong positive correlation between percentage of pitches and batting eye exists for three of the four main pitch types. Batters seem to be better at reading fastballs, curveballs and sliders on counts where those pitches are more likely to be thrown. But what’s up with the change-up? The change-up is generally thrown as a complement to a fastball. After seeing this data I thought that correlating batting eye on change-ups with percentage of fastballs thrown might be interesting. Here we see a pretty strong negative correlation.  I want to include one caveat here. Batting eye on change-ups also correlates strongly with percentage of sliders and curveballs thrown. In fact these correlations are a bit stronger. Comparing change-ups to fastballs makes the most sense to me intuitively, but the batter could just be looking for more off-speed pitches which might help them pick up change-ups. Overall I think that there is ample evidence to support the following conclusions: -Batters are better at judging whether a pitch will be a ball or strike on counts where they expect that type of pitch to be thrown. -Batters do a good job of anticipating what percentage of each pitch type will be thrown on a specific count. The one exception to these rules is the change-up, which batters seem to be better at picking up when they expect less fastballs (and more off-speed pitches.) I'm really looking forward to delving deeper into baseball and the tendencies and strategies behind it. I hope you'll enjoy reading my posts as much as I'll enjoy writing them. Free Links!Come get your free, low-calorie links: -Amazin' Avenue and Talking Chop are both coming out with annuals this year, as SB Nation's baseball world keeps getting cooler. I was privileged enough to get a preview of the Amazin' Annual, and as a Mets fan, I can say it's true awesomeness. Oh, and our own Dave Studeman contributed to it, so you know it's good. -Another THTer, Jeremy Greenhouse, shows us the best pitches of 2009 according to PITCHf/x. -How close are we to seeing a female major league player? -A cool interview with Brett Gardner, who just wants to get his OBP over .350. -Tom Tango expounds on some questions regarding FIP. -Now former minor leaguer Garret Broshuis writes about his decision to retire. -What are Jim Emonds chances of making the Hall of Fame? -John Sickels and Kevin Goldstein each answer a bunch of prospect-related questions. -One prospect list is cool, but Jeff Zimmerman combines thirteen of them to get a Wisdom of the Crowds 2010 Prospect Rankings. -Do not get behind in the count against Mark Reynolds. -The Marlins have some smart eggs on their team. -Is there a shirt that can prevent pitcher injuries? -Former Mariners star prospect Jeff Clement is learning how to become a Pirates first baseman. Wednesday, March 03, 2010Madison Bumgarner’s missing velocityMadison Bumgarner worked in a Spring Training game for the Giants on Wednesday. He happened to be facing the Mariners in Peoria. Peoria happens to have PITCHf/x installed. This is the sixth game of Bumgarner's seen by PITCHf/x. Here's each game, the park, and his average fastball velocity (lumping four- and two-seam varieties together, using my own pitch classifications). And, yes, there were a few Spring Training games captured by PITCHf/x last year (all in Scottsdale, March 15-19, 2009). I wouldn't expect to see him at top velocity already, but FYI dead-arm trackers (h/t JD Sussman): 03/17/2009 Scottsdale 93.4 mph 09/09/2009 San Francisco 88.7 09/19/2009 Los Angeles 91.8 09/22/2009 Phoenix 90.6 10/03/2009 San Diego 91.6 03/03/2010 Peoria, AZ 89.3 The Giants will be in Peoria two more times and Surprise twice (site of the other PITCHf/x installation) by March 15, with a split-squad pair at each park on the 15th. Hopefully we'll catch some more data on Bumgarner. Until then, the worriers can worry. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||