NCAA Limits Live Blogging

Thought this story on blogging sporting events and the NCAA, sent to me by a colleague, was pretty interesting. I agree that making rules like this only hurts the sport in the long run. Of course the technology will advance to where, using a handheld device, you could essentially simulcast the game from your seat with commentary etc. but blogging is still a long way from that...

PITCHf/x Musings

Many of the colunms I wrote discussing the PITCHf/x data made available through MLB.com's Gameday system are now available sans subscription on Baseball Prospectus. Those articles are:

October 25, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Free Stuff and the Men in Blue.
Postseason umpiring and an early holiday present for our readers.

October 11, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: On Atmosphere, Probability, and Prediction.
Ranging across a couple of old and new themes, explaining that there's something about the weather, and Pythagoras can rock steady.

August 23, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Visualizing Pitches.
After digging through this data, you'll no longer wonder why they say hitting is the hardest thing to do in sports.

August 16, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Putting the Pedal to the Metal.
What happens when pitching in a pinch? Do pitchers have something extra that they can put on the ball when they're in a jam?

July 26, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Calling the Balls and Strikes.
A look umpire tendencies to see how much human error plays a role in calling pitches.

July 5, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Searching for the Gyroball.
Is it there, or isn't it? Dan dives into Dice-K's data to find out.

June 28, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Playing Favorites.
Parsing the data can help us address questions of bias among umpires in calling balls and strikes.

June 21, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Gameday Meets the Knuckleball.
Dan continues his series using pitch data by examining the case of Tim Wakefield.

June 14, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: The Science and Art of Building a Better Pitcher Profile.
Popping the hood on King Felix as a demonstration of what's possible with PITCHf/x data

June 7, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Gameday Triple Play.
How different ballparks affect velocity, whether pitchers use the fastball more early in games, and the challenge of quantifying plate discipline.

May 31, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Physics on Display.
Further adventures in pitch-by-pitch data.

May 24, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Batter Versus Pitcher, Gameday Style.
Evaluating the strike zone, the umpires, and some large-scale issues with a tremendous new tool.

May 10, 2007.
Schrodinger's Bat: Phil Hughes, Pitch by Pitch.
Dan uses MLBAM data to reconstruct the no-hitter that wasn't.

BIPChart v2.5

Today on Baseball Prospectus I discuss a new version of my BIPChart software and make it available from this link.

The biggest change is probably the inclusion of Contact Slugging Perentage (cSlug) per a suggestion by Tom Tango. It also now includes a total line on the grid display (circled in red), a new summary display, corrects a bug where homeruns weren't included in the cBA (formerly BABIP), and shows a scrolling list of new articles at BP.

Retro 24

Thought this was pretty funny and a reminder of how technology has changed...

An Eye on the Game

In the fall of 2006 the Giants installed some new technology at the ballpark dealing with optimizing their data storage as necessitated by their adoption of digital video. A nice overview of the system was written up in eWeek in April. A case study from their vendor Data Domain is also available. The article mentions that the Giants use Sydex Sports Software, out of Grand Rapids Michigan, for their "baseball analysis software" and that "half of baseball" are now their clients.

The Future of Data Collection

In my post on the Year in Review I noted that I'm looking forward to my third season as a stats stringer for MLB.com. To that piece of info Tangotiger asked whether the stringers would be using stopwatches to record data items like hang time in order to more accurately measure batted balls for purposes of defensive evaluation.

Before I had a chance to ask, Tango took matters into his own hands and had an interesting email conversation with the Director of Stats at MLBAM.

One tidbit here, as many have guessed, is that there will likely eventually be a subscription or premium service to get access to this data in a more useable format. In addition, in relation to my column last week on camera angles he had this to say regarding the Enhanced Gameday system used in the 2006 postseason and which I wrote about here.

"As an aside, what’s been amazing to me about this program is what we’ve learned from the data we captured last season. That is, we found out that what we thought we understood about pitch movement has been, for lack of a better word, wrong. Think about how most fans observe pitches: on TV, through the center field camera. However, think about the challenges of accurately judging the pitch this way: you’re trying to follow a 4-inch wide ball from a distance of 400 or more feet, scaled down onto a 27-inch TV screen or 17-inch computer monitor, or whatever your viewing screen might be. And don’t forget that the camera is offset from center by an unknown amount that varies in each ballpark. This creates massive scaling errors in the human mind… for instance, we discovered that in many cases, a pitch that looks like it just missed the black may actually have been 8 to 10 inches outside."

This is fundamentally the reason why other camera angles or even enhanced computer images like Gameday would be wonderful to have. While the centerfield angle may give us the most information about the pitch in real time, that information is not very accurate.

Graig Nettles Eat Your Heart Out

A week or so ago I posted a picture of a patent for a device used to track the state of a baseball game. From the same source here's a patent for a bat from 1894 by one Charles Jacobus that allows the hitter to insert weights that move.

"The disposition of the sliding b and c within the bat as just explained, will permit the batsman to quickly and forcibly swing the bat for a stroke, and simultaneously with such movement the gravity of the balls b or weight c, will cause either to slide outwardly until stopped by the plug d, thus disposing said weights at the outer end of the bat,increasing the momentum of the moving billet, and enabling the batsman to strike a forcible blow."

Of course Graig Nettles was famous for using a bat that had been hollowed out and filled with six superballs that bounced in the batters box after the bat cracked in a game on September 7, 1974. Nettles pleaded innocent saying he had received the bat from a fan and didn't know the balls were in there. Here's a nice list of some of the doctored bat infractions collected in the wake of the Sammy Sosa incident in 2003. I've not seen this idea described from a physics standpoint so I can't say whether it would really provide more greater bat head speed but on the face of it the idea seems reasonable although the increased velocity would have to compensate for the decreased mass.

It turns out that other have used this basic design. There is apparently a story of a minor leaguer who managed to place a tube of mercury inside his bat, relying on its shifting weight to provide more power. I'd like to know more details if anyone has them.

Watching Baseball in 1895

This from Unca at Micrographia. Google has recently has recently scanned most of the U.S. patents back into the 19th century. Up till now, it was almost impossible to search online for patents before 1976 (you had to know the patent number). There’s some wonderful items on baseball (make sure you also search on "base ball" and use the advanced search to limit to years, etc.), one of which is this "Base Ball Game Illustrating Apparatus" from 1895.


As with later devices such as that depicted in the movie Eight Men Out and one I saw on display at the Field Museum in Chicago several years ago, the device tracks the status of the game as relayed via telegraph. This device allows for the manual manipulation of the players from behind the apparatus.