Before you complain about a particular pitcher getting a particular call, I think it's important to look at the entire strikezone over the course of the game. It turns out, in this case, it's pretty revealing: Normalized Strikezone maps.

Essentially, Mariano Rivera didn't get any pitch called a strike that really hadn't been called a strike before he came into the game.

A friend sent word today that my website was cited in David Kagan's article "The Anatomy of a Pitch: Doing Physics with PITCHf/x Data". This is really neat, because it's always fun to get cited; and it's also really embarrassing, because it means my website now has more citations than some of my academic work. =)

In any event, the article is well written and informative; you can get it here:
The Physics Teacher Online

Of course, if anyone has any questions about using my website to teach physics, please don't hesitate to send me an email at dan@brooksbaseball.net and I will be more than happy to help you download or understand the PITCHf/x data.

Quick update-

Arizona Fall League PitchFX is being tracked in two parks - Surprise (!) and Peoria.

Info comes courtesy of Harry Pavlidis who sent a message after a tweet by Cory Schwartz.

Be forewarned, not all games are likely to be tracked.

I wrote a quick update to my web tool that will capture that data:
http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfx/indexafl.php

Enjoy!

Data is, again, hosted in a slightly different place, so here's a slightly different version of the fx tool made for the Futures at Fenway game:
Futures at Fenway PitchFX Tool

Enjoy!

So I spent the last few days fixing up some back-end stuff (that most people won't see) and adding a new way to help support brooksbaseball.net (that most people will see).

When you search for a pitcher using the PitchFX Tool, you will now see "Pitcher Sponsors" under their data. Sponsoring a pitcher on brooksbaseball.net works very similar to the process on b-ref; you get to pick your sponsor name, a link, and a short message to appear every time someone looks at data from that pitcher. The sponsorships will last until the end of the season and only require a $5 donation. For more detailed information, click here.

Since I only (quietly) made this live last night, most pitchers are still available.

For an example of what it looks like in action, here's one of the many starts made by the incomparable Tim Lincecum. All of Tim's starts, for the rest of that season, will include that tag (and Lincecum, for obvious reasons, is a pretty popular pitcher on brooksbaseball.net).

Why do things this way? Well, for one, a huge amount of traffic to specific players comes from team-specific blogs and websites. Visitors from Orioles blogs tend to look at Orioles pitching. Visitors from Red Sox blogs tend to look at Sox pitching. When you sponsor a page, you're promoting your website to a specific group of fans. Plus, your fellow bloggers will know that you're a good person that helps supports the websites that you use. But, mostly, I'd much rather use fun, community driven messages from websites that don't otherwise promote themselves, helping to drive traffic back into the baseball analysis community.

So, if you've got a pitcher you love to track on brooksbaseball.net or think you know the pitcher next destined for greatness, I'd appreciate if you would think about sponsoring a pitcher, giving a little back to the website, and spreading the word about your place to talk about baseball with the other passionate fans that use the site every day.

Also, if anyone has any feedback on the system or ways it could improve, don't hesitate to contact me at: dan@brooksbaseball.net