Friday, October 12, 2007

Chat Transcript 10/12

Thanks to everyone who participated in the chat today. You can post any other questions here and I'll do my best.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:53 PM

    Do you know how pfx and pfz are calculated? In other words, do you know the formula (if there is one) used to calculate those metrics? I would have thought it would be equal to .5*a*t^2 with "a" being az for pfz and ax for pfx, but that is not the case: using that method the magnitude of the calculated values are too high.

    Now just a comment... I liked your last article on BP.com. Using the temperatures you posted for the stadiums, and elevations I found, I calculated air densities in kg/cubic-meter for those stadiums (using the dry air constant) and listed them below. The difference between completely dry and saturated air is about a 1% decrease in air density. The difference between 1025 and 1000 millibar conditions (sea-level pressures) is about a 2% decrease. The difference between freezing temps and 95 degree heat is a 13 or so % decrease. So temperature and elevation is what matters most. Your Pct. Speed Difference table is sort of in the same order of my listing, but there's plenty of stadiums that are on complete other sides of the table. I know for a certainty at least some of the time Comerica's start speed has been 2-3 mph slower than radar guns on TV with end speeds being rather reasonable.
    at&t 1.210421548
    mcafee 1.205955856
    safeco 1.203235236
    petco 1.196216755
    tropicana 1.193750955
    minutemaid 1.190648317
    fenway 1.190051602
    shea 1.189922509
    yankee 1.189707379
    citizens bank 1.178579127
    anahiem 1.170748152
    metrodome 1.165644624
    comerica 1.164838215
    jacobs 1.164781009
    cellular 1.164539825
    dolphin 1.164091253
    dodger 1.164032862
    miller 1.162786252
    wrigley 1.162659604
    pnc 1.161822595
    busch 1.149111808
    gabp 1.146446619
    kauffman 1.138447675
    rangers 1.137247584
    turner 1.129902359
    chase 1.129572072
    coors 0.97579623

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  2. I'm not sure I follow your first question. pFX is calculated as the square root of the sum of pfx_x squared plus pfx_z squared. I don't know what you mean by pfz...

    Thanks for the putting this list together. This is exactly what I wanted to do but didn't get the elevations for the parks. The correlation between these values and my pct diff in the article was .26 when you leave Comerica and Dolphin Stadium out of the mix. I definitely think there is something not quite right about the setups in those parks.

    Thanks again.

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  3. Anonymous12:53 PM

    I'm sorry about that. By pfx I meant pfx_x and by pfz I meant pfx_z. And to be clear the "t" in .5*a*t^2 is the time flight of the ball (about .4-.5 seconds) calculated from the equation 1.417 = y0 + vy0*t + .5*ay*t^2.

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  4. pfx_x and pfx_z are calculated from the acceleration data included in the XML data. You can read more about that at http://webusers.npl.uiuc.edu/~a-nathan/pob/tracking.htm

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