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July 12, 2011

Quiz results: All-Star Game

With mere hours to go before first pitch in the 2011 All-Star Game, the polls are closed (well, not really—you can vote, but it's too late to be counted in the "official" tally).

Here are the most up-to-date results of the question that asked about tonight's game:

Who are you rooting for?      Percentage
AL                                 46.9%
NL                                 53.1%

Unlike the last Pop Quiz, which asked what to do with the DH, where the NL-style pitcher batting dominated the voting, this poll was quite close. However, in the end, the National League gets the slight edge. (And, no, I didn't stuff the ballot box.)

Regardless, I think we can all hope for a good, tight game—and no tie!
Posted by: Greg Simons

July 11, 2011

Oh boy, the home run derby is here

Right up front, I don't enjoy the Home Run Derby. I find it rather boring, lacking a certain level of competitiveness that I associate with baseball.

But to be honest, just because I don't like it does not make it a bad thing.* There is a buzz around it. A noticeable buzz. While surprising to me, one has to appreciate when something creates a buzz for baseball, right?

*Yes, unlike some folks that like to jibber-jabber about baseball, my personal preference about something does not specifically mean it is bad.

But I want to like the Home Run Derby. So, here are two thoughts of mine of what to change:

I will talked about, until I can't talk any more, the need for Duane Kuiper and Steve Stone to do the announcing. There is a fun bit of irony there that lets people know baseball doesn't always have to take itself so seriously. Kuiper is a good announcer in his own right, and Stone is going to be better than just about anybody ESPN would put behind the microphone.

But a Kuiper/Stone combo would have a limited appeal, I understand that. It is easy to fix though. Invite radio and TV announcers from different teams to take a turn calling parts of the derby. Sprinkle in a few ex-players who are currently in announcing to provide color commentary and let them talk about famous home runs they hit or gave up. There are enough announcers to make this a rotational setup and keep things fresh.

Spread the field out a little more by including prospects. Why not have a minor leaguer battling the boys in the bigs? This would allow many fans more of an opportunity to see some of the talent in the pipeline than the Futures Game. It would also spark some competitiveness.

Why not make it a three team competition, including the retired players that might want to take part? The Future, The Present, The Past. Imagine a final round of David Ortiz, Bryce Harper, and Ken Griffey, Jr.

Even if you have only two teams, make each have to include a minor league player and a retired one. There will be a added sense of excitement.
Posted by: Mat Kovach

July 15, 2010

Were the All Stars really throwing that hard?

If you watched the All-Star Game on Tuesday night, you may have noticed a lot high-nineties fastballs zipping from pitcher to catcher. At one point Fox put up a graphic listing the fastest fastballs of the night:

Pitcher    Speed (mph)
Price        100
Verlander    99
Johnson      99

Some people wondered, particularly with David Price, whose average fastball speed this year is 95 mph, whether the Fox speed gun was "hot". I believe that Fox was actually getting its pitch speed data from PITCHf/x rather than a radar gun since the speeds that Fox reported match up very well with the speeds in the PITCHf/x data for the game.

Rather than looking at peak speeds, let's look at the average fastball speed for every pitcher who threw in the game.

Pitcher    Speed (mph)
Verlander    99
Price        98
Wilson       98
Johnson      98
Thornton     97
Broxton      97
Jimenez      97
Valverde     96
Wainwright   95
Kuo          95
Hughes       95
Bailey       95
Capps        94
Lester       94
Bell         94
Halladay     93
Soriano      93
Lee          92
Pettitte     91

That's a lot of mid and upper-nineties fastballs! Of the 272 pitches thrown, 190, or 70 percent, were fastballs. The average fastball speed in the game was 96 mph. Wow.

Was the PITCHf/x system reporting pitch speeds accurately in the All-Star Game? The simple answer is, as far as I can tell, yes.

Many of the pitchers were definitely recording faster speeds than they had throughout the season. In addition to the aforementioned Price, Justin Verlander, Josh Johnson, and Adam Wainwright were each measured as bringing their heat two to three mph faster than during the season. The average fastball for all pitchers in the game was measured at one mph faster than the same pitchers threw during the season.

The initial inclination would be to say that the PITCHf/x camera system in Angel Stadium was out of calibration such that it was measuring pitch speeds about one mph too fast. That sort of error is not unheard of. However, we should also not be surprised if starting pitchers threw their fastballs harder than usual in short one or two inning stints or if the emotion of the confrontation with All-Star batters on a national TV stage was enough to give well-rested pitchers a little extra zip.

I don't know a simple way to determine whether either of those things are true, although we do see that the pitchers with the biggest boosts to their fastball speed were all starting pitchers. The average fastball speed boost relative to the regular season was 1.5 mph for starters and 0.4 mph for relievers.

Moreover, there are a couple things that I usually check when making adjustments to pitchers' fastball speed data in PITCHf/x. The first is the drag coefficient calculated from the PITCHf/x data. This is a physical constant that is dependent on things like the physical characteristics of the baseball but independent of a lot of other things, like the ballpark. The drag coefficient measured by the PITCHf/x system on Tuesday night was very close to the average expected value of 0.36.

The other thing I check is the average fastball speed of pitchers in a given game relative to their season average. But instead of simply doing it for a single game, as reported above, I do it for multiple games and look for trends. The average fastball speed recorded by PITCHf/x in Angel Stadium this year has actually been 0.8 mph less than the average fastball speed for the same set of pitchers pitching in other ballparks.

So, if anything, the "gun" in Angel Stadium has been a little cold in 2010. (I don't know whether the PITCHf/x system was recalibrated immediately prior to the All-Star Game, such that any bias in the data from earlier in the season would be irrelevant to the data collected Tuesday. We'll know more about that after we get data from the Angels' first homestand after the break.)

Fastball speed data is interesting, but we don't always know how accurate it is. In this case, although I can't give an official Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, I don't see any convincing reason to believe that the speeds that Fox (and PITCHf/x) reported were juiced.
Posted by: Mike Fast

June 25, 2010

Could all this Strasburg noise be for nothing?

Today, Dave Cameron weighed in on the whole "Should Stephen Strasburg go to the All Star Game" debate. That got me thinking, if Strasburg is elected, will he even play? Here's what I had to say in the comments over at Fangraphs.

Are we sure Strasburg would even pitch if elected? The Nats are holding a considerable cash cow in Strasburg and he happens to be on a pretty strict innings/pitches cap. I would think the Nats will try very hard to persuade him not to alter his routine so he can pitch the 5th inning of a game he’ll be going to for the foreseeable future.

Most importantly, Strasburg is already lined up to start somewhere between July 9th and 11th depending on how the Nationals juggle the rotation. The All Star Game is the 13th. It's hard to imagine Strasburg climbing the mound in Anaheim on short rest after how carefully the Nationals have nurtured him. Perhaps the Nats would embrace the opportunity to get their money maker in front of the national audience and skip/shorten his last start.

So what do you guys think? Will Strasburg be available to pitch? Will the Nationals attempt to convince him not to pitch? Will he play regardless of his team's wishes?

To me, this is a much more interesting question to pursue. I think that people get caught up in these notions of what the All Star Game is and isn't. I'd have to guess that if it's about anything, it's the league showing appreciation to the fans by putting the most interesting and exciting players from each league on display. Right now, Stephen Strasburg is probably the most interesting and exciting player in baseball. He makes my cut.
Posted by: Brad Johnson

July 09, 2009

Trackman Baseball

The Trackman Baseball system makes its public debut for the All-Star home run derby in St. Louis. ESPN is calling its implementation of the Trackman feature "Ball Track". Trackman is a portable Doppler radar system already in use for tracking golf ball trajectories and now being deployed in baseball.

The Doppler feature of the radar measures the radial velocity of the ball relative to the radar detector by looking at the frequency shift of the reflected signal relative to the emitted signal. An array of three detectors arranged orthogonally is used to gather phase information from the reflected signal. The difference in the phase of the reflected signal between a pair of detectors can be used to determine the angle to the ball in that dimension. Thus, with two such pairs of detectors, the angle to the ball in two dimensions can be measured. This can be accomplished most optimally with three detectors, with one pair in a line at a right angle to the other pair. If the initial distance between the ball and the radar is known (for example, by measuring the distance from the radar to home plate by some other means), by combining the two angles and the radial velocity information, the exact position of the ball is established in three dimensions.

In addition, a unique feature of this system is that radar reflections from the spinning stitches on the ball can be used to determine the spin rate by measuring the separation of the sideband peaks produced by the signals off the stitches.

That's probably more than most of you want to know about how the system works, but I'm guessing a few physics nerds out there are as jazzed by the possibilities of this system as I am. Many thanks to Dr. Alan Nathan and a few other folks who will remain nameless for their explanations of the Trackman system. You can see a cool graphic of the Doppler returns from a batted ball in a presentation (7 MB Powerpoint, see slide 37) by Alan Nathan on the subject of the physics of baseball.

The bottom line is that this system can be used to reconstruct the full trajectory of a batted ball. It gives us a direct measurement of spin magnitude that we can't get from HITf/x or PITCHf/x. It's nice to see this system getting some public air time.

Hat tip to JBrew at Beyond the Box Score. Thanks also to Alan Nathan for some corrections to my initial post.
Posted by: Mike Fast


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