FREE hit counter and Internet traffic statistics from freestats.com

Monday, May 14, 2007

Charting Sammy

Along with the Mother's Day festivities I had a fun weekend collecting and analyzing Enhanced GameDay data. What that allows is for analysis of individual pitchers and hitters. For example, below is a graphic (click to make larger) of all 340 pitches that have been tracked for Sammy Sosa this season. Since Texas is one of the parks in which the system is running and since others where it has been running the longest include Chicago (AL), Oakland, Seattle, and Anaheim, the Rangers tend to have more of their games being tracked. New parks will be added as the season goes along and all told there are now 13 parks in which the system has collected some data with Detroit, St. Louis, Washington, and Colorado (yeah!) being add in the last few days.

The strike zone that is drawn is an average of the strike zone for each plate appearance. Obviously these graphs can be broken down further by count, pitch type, and especially handedness of the pitcher but even so here you can see that when Sammy chases pitches they are often down and away and fouls off a fair number of pitches that inside.

In any case, look for more of this in the future here and on Baseball Prospectus.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't this view from behind the plate? In that case, he's chasing the stuff down and away and fouling them off inside, which sounds right.

Dan Agonistes said...

Oops, you are correct. I had forgotten that in when I manipulated this kind of data for another program I had inverted the view to get the perspective from behind the pitcher. I fixed the text. Thanks