Visual Baseball:  Next up – PitchCode

by
May 15, 2010

As a follow-up to the introduction of BatCode, here’s its estranged twin PitchCode. In this post I’ll share two ways to use PitchCode for John Lester’s 2009 season. The first works just like BatCode – showing the results of each at-bat (against Lester) with a line representing a walk or hit and line thickness representing power. The second approach zooms out to the inning level and shows each of Lester’s 2009 innings, with line thickness representing the number of runs Lester allowed in each inning.

Which one (if any) do you like? What do they reveal (if anything) about Lester’s 2009 season?

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Kevin Dame is a writer and visual designer who brings sports information to life in new and meaningful ways. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter @kevintdame.
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David Gassko
13 years ago

Awesome stuff, Kevin! I think the inning graphic is better for sure.

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davidmoon
13 years ago

looks to me like you need them both.  if i see it correctly, lester gave up a sizeable amount of hits late in the season but not a lot of runs. either his so rate was sharply increased or his defense baled him out more often. i guess i’d lean towards the latter.  combining the two code lines gives one a better feel for what really happened to the pitchers line during a period of time. having said that, i will add, i have zero idea about lesters real numbers in 2009 and the charts are difficult to combine as the timelines are impossible to coorelate as the r/i chart has no dated line.  so overall, i guess there is probably a better way to evaluate a pitcher. FIP?  so overused…and that data i so questionable, in my humble ametuer opinion.  keep up the great work though kevin, i’m a visual learner and a lot of your stuff is super useful.

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