Player Cards for Batters Now Available
I know I promised a post with a full explanation of my code but things just keep changing and I am going to hold off until I am really happy with everything to make that post. So again I have messed with my clustering algorithm and added a couple of dozen hand edits on top of that mostly changing classifications of sliders/cutters and splitters/sinkers. I think things are getting close as probably about 95% of pitches are correctly being classified.
This has allowed me to then run the data through another plot maker to make player cards for batters as well. Again, I require 100 pitches seen by PITCHf/x to qualify. I have added the most recent team a player has played for and what hand he throws with. Sadly some players, like Adam Dunn, bat with the opposite hand than they throw with. I'd love to add if they bat left handed, right handed, or are a switch hitter but that data doesn't seem to be easily available in the files I am grabbing from MLB. So I am going to have to grab some other files and cross reference to get that. We will see when I get around to that.
There are some more things I am planning on adding to the player cards like contact rate and how often they swing at balls but to make those numbers meaningful I need to find a league average first. I also am going to be comparing pitchers this way. Hopefully an update with that will come this weekend.
As always, if you see something you think is wrong or something you would like to see added, or a design thing you would like to see changed leave a comment below.
posted by Josh Kalk @ 4:40 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I know, I know...I'm a nitpicker...
So I was wondering why you draw the strike zone as being more than 20 inches wide?
The plate is 17 inches wide, and the radius of a baseball is slightly less than 1.5 inches...So the rulebook zone should be ~20 inches wide..it looks to me like you have it 24 inches wide.
I will grant you that there are some called strikes that are outside of the rulebook zone, I'm just wondering why choose a different value for the plots?
Ugh your right. It looks like I am adding the ball width in twice maybe. (or maybe something else). I'm rerunning everything this weekend and I will fix this then. Thanks for pointing it out.
An idea for the batter cards: average and slugging are great, but they ignore swing-and-misses and foul tips. Can you include average and slugging with swings as the denominator? Or maybe a contact % or in-play % instead. Not sure which would be better.
I am looking into adding a contact percentage and the percentage of balls the player swung at and hopefully that will help. It most likely won't make it into the next update, which should be out tomorrow night and include all of the regular season, but hopefully the next one after that.
Post a Comment
<< Home