|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dan Brooks |
| << Previous Author Entries | No More Author Entries |
October 5, 2012 5:26 am
Advance Scout |
Even if you figure out what Darvish has done, you might not know what he's about to do.
Today brings baseball’s first wild-card play-in games. It also brings another baseball first: Yu Darvish’s first start against the Baltimore Orioles, scheduled to get underway at 8:37 PM ET.
You can bet that the prospect of facing Darvish for the first time in a high-stakes game has the Orioles worked into an advanced scouting frenzy. Their season—a magical one, at that—hinges on their ability to analyze (and effectively attack) a pitcher whom their hitters have never seen.
September 27, 2012 9:47 am
Baseball Prospectus News: Announcing the PITCHf/x Matchup Analysis Tool |
A new way to visualize and analyze every batter-pitcher matchup from the PITCHf/x era.
Just in time for the playoffs, we’re bringing you a way to get detailed information on every batter-pitcher matchup via our new Matchup Analysis Tool, found here and also accessible through the “PITCHf/x Matchups” dropdown link on the “Statistics” tab of the navbar at the top of the page.
The Matchup Analysis Tool allows you to select a particular pitcher and batter and visualize every time they’ve faced each other during the PITCHf/x era (partial 2007, complete 2008-2012). As an example, let’s take Prince Fielder vs. CC Sabathia.
September 14, 2012 5:15 am
Baseball Prospectus News: Introducing Pitch Sequence Visualizations |
Want to know not just what pitches a pitcher throws, but where, when, and in what order he throws them? Now you can.
At Brooks Baseball, we’ve built a repository where you can access almost any information about any pitcher’s pitches and be confident that the pitch types were identified correctly. For example, you can ask how many times batters swung and missed at a Stephen Strasburg changeup, how often batters hit Chris Sale’s slider for a groundball, or what the overall called-strike rate is for Felix Hernandez’s fastball.
But PITCHf/x databasing is still in its infancy. Pitching is not the sum of individual statistics about individual pitches any more than a piece of music is the sum of an individual set of notes. Pitching is a sequence of events—the previous pitch’s execution may be as germane to the outcome of the at-bat as the current pitch’s execution. We often hear about how a pitcher might go up in the zone with a high fastball to raise a batter’s eye level and then down in the zone with a curveball. None of that was captured in the maze of tables and charts already available.
August 30, 2012 5:59 am
BP Unfiltered: Is Stephen Strasburg Wearing Down? |
Was Stephen Strasburg's velocity loss during his last start atypical? And if so, should we be worried?
ESPN Stats and Information published an article about Stephen Strasburg’s less-than-successful start on Tuesday that noted, “Strasburg’s velocity declined as his start went on. His heater averaged 96.6 MPH in the first two innings and 94.8 MPH after. “
August 17, 2012 1:30 pm
BP Unfiltered: Clay Buchholz Does the Splits |
Clay Buchholz is known for throwing a nasty changeup, but he's added a new off-speed pitch to his arsenal in 2012.
Clay Buchholz has added a splitter this year to go with his well-known (and devastating) changeup. We first noticed this back when he was throwing one or two per game, but now it’s not unusual to see him throw a nice cluster of splitters in each start. A comparison between his pre-splitter and post-splitter pitch graphs is shown below:
August 14, 2012 5:00 am
PITCHf/x Profile: Dissecting the Decline of Josh Beckett |
Josh Beckett isn't the ace he was in 2007, but what about him has changed over the past five seasons?
In 2007, Josh Beckett finished second in the AL Cy Young voting. He led the league with 20 wins. He was a 4.8 PWARP player, good for third in MLB. He struck out 8.7 batters per nine innings and finished with 194 punchouts.
Fast forward to 2012. Beckett’s win-loss record is 5-9; more importantly, his walk rate is up, and his strikeout rate is down. He’s been worth 0.5 PWARP, good for 174th in baseball.
August 10, 2012 11:34 am
BP Unfiltered: A PITCHf/x Companion Piece on Jered Weaver |
Jered Weaver has turned himself into a lefty-killer. Dan looks at how he has changed his approach.
In an article today, Sam Miller explored some of Jered Weaver’s best pitches. Sam noted how Weaver’s results have changed vs. left-handed hitters, and then showed some of Weaver’s best two-seam fastballs and curveballs from his recent start.
August 9, 2012 12:02 pm
BP Unfiltered: Yu Darvish with Two Strikes |
Yu Darvish is taking a different approach with two strikes than he did toward the start of the season.
One way to look at how a pitcher attacks hitters is to look at what the pitcher throws in two-strike counts. In two-strike counts, pitchers often try to put hitters away with a breaking ball, induce weak contact with a sinker, overpower hitters with an extra-hard fastball, or throw a changeup with a bit of extra screw action.
August 8, 2012 5:00 am
PITCHf/x Mailbag: Swing Tendencies on 3-0 Counts |
In the inaugural PITCHf/x mailbag, Harry and Dan examine how batters and pitchers behave on 3-0 counts.
Dan Brooks and Harry Pavlidis, the minds behind Brooks Baseball and the PITCHf/x Hitter and Pitcher Profiles, will be answering your statistical questions using PITCHf/x data on a regular basis at BP. To submit a question for consideration in their next mailbag, email them at mailbag@brooksbaseball.net or cram your question into 140 characters and send it to @brooksbaseball or @harrypav.
For our first PITCHf/x mailbag, we’ve decided to take a look at a deceptively simple question. We’re not so good at simple, however, so we took lemons and made a small storage building out of them.
July 23, 2012 9:14 pm
BP Announcements: Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball |
Saberseminar just over a week away!
Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball, a weekend seminar for the benefit of the Jimmy Fund, puts you up close with some of baseball’s top coaches, statisticians, scouts, doctors, and scientists. The seminar takes place on August 4 and 5, 2012 in Boston, MA, and is limited to 200 of baseball’s best fans.
Register now so you can join us on August 4 and 5, 2012 at Boston University’s Metcalf Science Center and enjoy the edge that professional scouting, science, and sabermetrics will give you at your next fantasy or real-life baseball game.
July 13, 2012 11:33 am
BP Announcements: Normalized Hitter/Pitcher Profiles Have Arrived |
Our new normalization option lets you compare hitters and pitchers to players of the same handedness.
First, thanks for your enormous level of support and feedback for our new Hitter and Pitcher Profiles. Because of your suggestions, we increased the number of sortable statistics to 19, added several new color schemes, changed some of the layout, and added several new multi-sort options. Your feedback makes building new and great tools easier, so thanks!
We want to announce a new option on our tools and briefly describe how it works. This option is “normalization,” which allows you to compare a pitcher or hitter to other similar pitchers or hitters. It works only for a few of the 19 sorts right now—it will work for all of them eventually—but we think that the most instructive sort is “frequency,” so we’ll describe it using that and let you play around with it. We’ve already done some limited “beta testing” of this new feature via Twitter, and people found it really fun and informative, so we’re excited to announce it on Baseball Prospectus. (As an aside, Harry and I often beta new features late at night on Twitter, so you can come follow us and be part of the creative process if you want.)
July 12, 2012 5:00 am
Baseball Prospectus News: Introducing the BP Pitcher Profiles |
A few days after the rollout of the BP Hitter Profiles, we present their companion piece, the Pitcher Profiles.
Last weekend we posted “Hitter Profiles,” which let you look at PITCHf/x data for each hitter in MLB filtered by a bunch of different attributes. Today, we’re posting their companion piece, “Pitcher Profiles.” You can search for pitchers here. As we did for the Hitter Profiles, we’ll be adding a dropdown link to the search interface from the “Statistics” tab on the nav bar at the top of the page.
We think these profiles will revolutionize the way people look at PITCHf/x data. Location is perhaps the most important attribute of a pitch, and the Pitcher Profiles allow you to examine the results of pitches across multiple spatial locations. PITCHf/x data has been available for five years, but we haven’t been able to examine it this way, at least publicly. (There are scouting services that provide this kind of data.) It was the first thing that a scout I talked to asked for.
| << Previous Author Entries | No More Author Entries |
|
Baseball Prospectus Home | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | Customer Service | Newsletter | Masthead | Glossary | Contact Us Copyright © 1996-2013 Prospectus Entertainment Ventures, LLC.
|
Surprise Me!