brooksbaseball

Back up and running.

2010-04-28T14:32:00.001-05:00

Everything should be working again.

[Someone found a funny bug that said Jake Peavy threw about 3,000,000 pitches. But, it should be fixed. =) ]

Technical Difficulties!!1111one

2010-04-28T08:52:00.001-05:00

Will be back online shortly. Sorry.

Hotlinking

2010-04-18T14:49:00.003-05:00

Hotlinking is now re-enabled for all plots. Let me know if you encounter any serious problems.

Hotlinking and Goatse

2010-04-08T13:19:00.003-05:00

Well.

One of the new "features" here at BrooksBaseball.net is that if you hotlink my images, I will replace them with pictures of Goatse.

I consider this a feature because once your readers react in disgust, they will no longer visit your website, and thus, will no longer worry about PitchFX data from my website, which will therefore no longer crash my database.

No, but in all seriousness, we are going to be disabling hotlinking very shortly (if not right now), so please copy images you want and save them to your own drive or image host (photobucket.com or whatever) and link to that.

Because my webserver just melted.

-Dan

Tonight

2010-04-04T10:12:00.001-05:00

Hi all-

I'm sure there will be a small spike in hits tonight with people looking for PitchFX related stuff given that baseball's back!

It will be a work in progress over the next few days as I try to optimize the changes to the site after what MLB has given me to work with.

So, bear with me.

Updates

2010-02-11T23:07:00.003-06:00

So, as I mentioned in an earlier post, MLB made my site all screwy by changing some files.

The good news is that I did some coding tonight and got some basic things working again. You should be able to see a few plots.

The bad news is that it is tedious work to fix everything and so it will take a few days before it is all back to normal.

Site Broken

2010-02-11T10:14:00.001-06:00

Hi all. With ~10 minutes notice, MLB decided that they were going to completely change the way PitchF/X data is served by deleting a critical directory that my website uses to parse data.

What that means is, my website is completely broken.

It will take a few days to put back online probably, if it can be done.

Normalized Strikezone Maps for WS Game 2

2009-10-30T00:23:00.001-05:00

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.

The Physics Teacher

2009-10-15T12:35:00.004-05:00

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.

Arizona Fall League F/X

2009-10-13T20:29:00.004-05:00

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!

Futures at Fenway Fx

2009-08-10T09:19:00.002-05:00

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!

Some Backend Stuff + Sponsorships

2009-08-05T09:55:00.011-05:00

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

Graphing the Future

2009-07-12T19:33:00.001-05:00

The data is hosted in a different place, so a slightly updated version of the PitchFX tool (with Futures Game data) can be found here:

http://brooksbaseball.net/pfx/indexfut.php

Enjoy!

It's true...

2009-07-03T09:33:00.002-05:00

It's true, I'm terrible at updating my blog.

A few quick notes:
1) I will be at the PitchFX summit next week! It ought to be a great time, and I'm looking forward to meeting many people who I've emailed with over the last few years.
2) You can now search brooksbaseball.net by using baseball-reference.com. Simply select a pitcher, select "game logs", and then the links in the "Pit" (pitches) column will link directly to the PitchFX data for that day. Makes searching easier!

Opening Day

2009-04-06T11:20:00.003-05:00

Welcome to the 2009 season!

This is technically the first opening day for brooksbaseball.net. I hope you have fun accessing all the PitchFX data for the 09 season.

If you notice a bug, or have a request for some new feature, don't hesitate to send me an email: dan (at) brooksbaseball dot net.

The King Felix Debate

2009-03-09T01:56:00.002-05:00

If you happened to catch the USA/Venezuela game last night, you were treated to some great play-by-play by one of our Sox radio broadcasters (Dave O'Brien) and some of the worst color commentary ever recorded by Rick Sutcliffe.

But, in a stunning, shining moment of clarity, both Dave and Rick managed to have 5 minutes of un-forced conversation that approached the issue of King Felix Hernandez, who pitched admirably and effectively against the Italian team, coming out of the pen. The point of all of this talk was simply "why?". Why was King Felix, who you'd figure to be one of the real weapons on the Venezuelan squad, coming out of the pen to pitch against Italy?

And, fair enough, good question. Felix pitched 4 innings of 1-hit ball, posting 4Ks. Why waste this kind of pitching on an undermanned Italian squad when you know you've got to face the US if you win? Why burn King Felix if you don't need to?

Well, I'm not sure. But here are two possibilities. The first is that, actually, at the time the Venezuelans brought him into the game, the score was tied, 0-0, on account of Mark DiFelice and his 10,000 cutters (A thought: Does Mark DiFelice extend this strategy into other games as well, throwing only "Scissors" in Rock/Paper/Scissors?). The second is that Felix's effectiveness really masked the fact he isn't really up to MLB speed quite yet.

If you don't know anything about him, let me briefly describe Felix Hernandez. He throws hard. Very hard. A lot hard. When he can locate and he isn't acting like the Mariner version of Julian Tavarez, he has disturbingly good stuff. For example, in a lame attempt to correct for park effects (who knows yet if the cameras are similar this year, we'll just have to guess at it), here's a Felix start from last year at Toronto, on June 11th:

Yeah, that's right. 97.4mph max on that fastball. He can bring the heat, and sustain the heat, the entire game.

Here's the same kind of plot for his four innings in the WBC:

Maybe I'm just reading too much into things, but that certainly looks different. In this one, he's all amped up for the first inning, hitting almost 96, and then he hits a wall. A big wall. Next inning he's down around 94. Then he's down around 93. And by the time the fourth inning rolls around, he's hovering at 92.

This isn't to say anything bad about Felix - he's in a version of extended spring training just like everyone else is, and he isn't tuned up yet. I don't think this is characteristic of the Felix Hernandez we're going to see in the MLB. But I think it certainly might account for why Venezuela wasn't saving him up for the US team, which is laden with bona fide major league sluggers. Felix might just not be ready for that kind of intense competition yet, at least not at the level that Dave and Rick were expecting.

Mark DiFelice: The Italian Mo

2009-03-08T12:51:00.003-05:00

So, the Italian team had a relatively unknown pitcher, Mark DiFelice, start their WBC Game. He pitched four innings, didn't give up a run, and generally did a good job. So why a blog post about him?

Well, Mark DiFelice managed to go 4 innings, throw 45 pitches, and throw only 4 fastballs and 2 curveballs. It wouldn't be so odd if I told you that the 39 other pitches were something like knuckleballs - maybe he's just the Italian Tim Wakefield. Or, maybe the 39 other pitches were a heavy sinker, which a sinkerballer could conceivably throw that often in a short start.

No, Mark DiFelice, starting pitcher for Italy, managed to throw 45 pitches, 4 fastballs, 2 curveballs, and 39 cutters/sliders. 39 Cutters!

The graph above shows all of Mark's pitches, with the horizontal movement of the pitch due to the spin of the ball on the X (horizontal) axis, and the speed of the pitch on the Y (vertical) axis.

Despite the fact that Mark apparently throws at three decidedly non-fast speeds ("slow", "pretty slow", and "very slow"), the "Green" is clearly his "fastball". It's faster than the rest, and it moves like a fastball from a RHP would move. The "Blue" is clearly his curveball. It moves like an RHP's curveball and is thrown decidedly slower than the rest.

And then... Purple. An entire mess of one pitch: the cutter. Never mind the fact that a lot of these cutters don't really even move that much, he continued to throw them. A lot. Ignore the few mislabeled pitches on the next plot (Gameday algorithm continues to frustrate...), but look, in the fourth inning, Mark DiFelice manages to throw ALL cutters. Not a single other pitch.

Impressive.

And, just in case you were wondering: "didn't team Venezeula figure this out?" The answer, almost certainly, is yes. Despite throwing 4IP of 0ER ball, he gave up two hits and a few very loud outs (including a sensational diving play and a runner gunned down trying to take second).

How can we tell Venezuela was looking cutter? Well, only one non-cutter pitch was even swung at all game, and every at-bat ended on a cutter:

World Baseball Classic PitchFX!

2009-02-25T22:59:00.006-06:00

I shot off a quick email to the man in charge at MLB Stats, Cory Schwartz, and got the word that MLB will be tracking the WBC with PitchFX!

So, I have added a new tool at the right that is specific for the 2009 World Baseball Classic.

Only games in MLB Venues will be tracked by the system (because that's where they've got the cameras installed), but this should give us all the first look (and most detailed picture) of some of the hottest international pitching prospects and stars. It will also effectively give us spring training data on a number of MLB pitchers that are taking part in the Classic.

I will be closely monitoring this new page/system for possible bugs. If you notice one, please contact me immediately.

PitchFX Data for Rays/Phillies

2008-10-29T20:00:00.002-05:00

The PitchFX Data for the Rays/Phillies Endless Game 5 is still posted under 10/27/08.

The strikezone maps include all of the calls from Monday.

Just a heads up for anyone planning on using any of it.

Someday We'll Watch It, The DiceK Correction

2008-10-11T00:45:00.004-05:00

The scariest part about Daisuke is that he consistently pitches this way. We're talking about a guy who pitched 7 shutout innings, striking out 9, while walking 4. Walking the bases loaded in the first inning and managing to escape. Stranding a runner on third with 0 outs. It shouldn't be possible to walk the bases loaded in the first and pitch a no-hitter through 6. But for whatever it's worth: it is.

For those of you still wondering what the dots mean, here is a plot of all the pitches Daisuke threw with annotations:

Green: Changeup
Blue: Slurve (Slider/Curveball)
Orange: 2-Seam Fastball
Red: 4-Seam Fastball
Purple: Cutter

While that plot is nice for looking at all of the pitches, this one might be a bit nicer for breaking down what actually worked for DiceK over the course of the game:

Here we can see his 9(!) strikeouts in black: 2 changeup, 5 fastball, 2 cutter (although, one of those is a very slow cutter, more like a true slider). You can also see that a bunch of his trouble came from the Slurve - 3 walks and 2 singles off of it.

That's the initial breakdown, but I'll have more on this start tomorrow.

A link to Daisuke's performance in Game 1 of the ALCS can be found here.

Establishing the Fastball

2008-09-18T19:11:00.010-05:00

Today's post concerns an interesting trend in pitch distribution: "establishing the fastball". You often hear about this strategy from broadcasters, but essentially the idea is to establish that you will throw your fastball early in the game (perhaps to set hitters up in terms of timing or trajectory), and then work off of that set up to effectively mix in your other pitches.

My disclaimer here is first that I'm just looking at a few pitchers on one pitching staff that's been caught by one catcher the majority of the season. Can we capture this trend and gain some insight into pitch distribution?

Data for this project has been gathered for from every game in the 2008 season. Pitch identification has been done by the MLB Gameday Algorithm, which isn't great, but we're also looking for something that's supposed to be a very large effect, so it's possible that this won't prevent us from finding it.

To begin, I'll look at Daisuke Matsuzaka, who's fun to write about and sometimes aggrevating to watch pitch.

We'll start by dividing up "Pitch Counts" into a series of 20-pitch groupings and then looking at the relative distribution of pitch types within those groups.

You can pretty clearly see that the proportion of fastballs (plotted here in green) decreases steadily through the first 40 or so pitches, and the proportion of sliders generally increases; both of these values then level off into a relatively stable proportion for the rest of the start. Meanwhile, the relative distribution of other pitches stays essentially unchanged.

I've labeled these things here:

So, it's fairly easy to see that the pitch distribution for Daisuke, averaged across all of the games in the season, is at first biased heavily (over 60%) in favor of throwing a fastball, which steadily levels off to around 50%, and the proportion of sliders increases from less than 20% to greater than 30%.

These effects are even more dramatic when looking at what Daisuke throws on an 0-0 count:

Early in the game you have an over 80% likelihood of seeing a first pitch fastball, which decreases to (and levels off at) just above 50%. Likewise, seeing a slider on the first pitch starts at around 5% and increases to (and stablizes at) 25-30% likelihood.

Some pitch distributions, however, remain relatively unchanged. For example, if you get into a full count, in most game situations the pitch distribution is relatively equivalent (although, caveat emptor, there's a lot of variability due to small sample size):

On the other hand - and I was quite surprised by this - if you're in any 2-strike count, the pitch distribution still follows the game plan. So, early in the game he's not trying to put you away with the slider.

What does all this mean? Well, I think one thing it shows is that although a pitcher (like Daisuke) might have a relatively stable pitch distribution after some reasonable point in the game, using the aggregate pitch distribution numbers that are shown on some websites might not be such a good idea. In order to get a good idea of the real proportion of pitches, it's best to first adjust for establishing the fastball.

Let's take a look at other Red Sox pitchers to see if we can get a better handle on this. Here's Jon Lester, showing a similar trend, but with a quicker "fastball establishment":

But, the trend becomes more like Daisuke's trend if you look at only 0-0 counts:

So, again, over the first 40 pitches, the fastball is "established" and continues to lose likelihood of being thrown, while the curve and slider/cutter increase. Of course, Jon Lester throws a much larger proportion of fastballs, but the trend is still relatively apparent.

For Josh Beckett, on the other hand, we see a much more gradual decline in the relative proportion of fastballs thrown over the course of the game:

But again, this trend (40 pitches of fastball establishment) is recaptured quite nicely if we look at only 0-0 counts:

So, what have we learned? Well, it's fairly easy to see "Establishing the Fastball" as a gameplan strategy by the Red Sox staff as a whole (and not just Daisuke), and it appears to take about 40 pitches before Sox pitchers stablize into their gameplan. After that, the relative proportion of pitches remains relatively unchanged.

Psychadelic Charts for the Common Man

2008-09-18T11:21:00.004-05:00

There is a thread at Sons of Sam Horn entirely devoted to talking about Jon Lester.

This is odd, because it is against their policy of megathreads, but if you're looking for some retrospective analysis of Jon's stuff over the course of the season, you could just compile that and post it on the web. A friend and I are planning to do that, just after I manage to crawl out from the mound of papers currently stacked up on my desk (note: if my advisor is reading this, it's my first blog post in a month, really).

Anyway, a recent discussion was about whether or not Jon was getting stronger as the season went on. Fair question. Here's my post on the issue:

The first figure is simply a graph showing his average fastball velocity and average curveball velocity over the course of the season, for all the games except Philly (their system is pretty clearly broken).

There's a steady rise in both Fastball and Curveball velocity, suggesting that the rise in fastball velocity isn't due to a change in fastball type distribution.

The other graph is a bit more psychadelic, so here is the explanation. I realize that averaging across pitch types can be bad because of the known issues in trying to identify pitches, so I took one of his first starts from each month of the season and plotted each pitch on the same Horizontal Movement X Speed axis. To account for the fact that different systems may have slightly different speed readings I used his first start at Fenway for each month.

Warmer colors (yellows and oranges) are early in the season, cooler colors (blues and purples) are later in the season.

I think it's pretty clear that the velocity increase is not due to pitch misidentification or something else, as the velocity increase is really across the board. Cooler colors are clearly above warmer colors in each cluster in this figure.

For those struggling to identify these pitches I have labeled them.

1. Bottom Left (Ugly Dark Purple) - Curveball
2. Middle Left (Light Blue) - Cutter (a few sliders towards the curveball side)
3. Top Middle (Green) - 4Seam Fastball [a few changeups are thrown with this kind of movement and erroneously grouped in the circle, they are the very slow 4seam fastballs, sorry]
4. Top Right (Light Purple) - 2Seam Fastball
5. Bottom Right (Orange) - Changeup

Around the Web II: Updates

2008-08-11T14:18:00.003-05:00

Some updates from around the internet:

Oliver Perez seems like quite the popular figure, as he is the focus of an update on New York Mets Daily devoted to a PitchFX analysis of what's worked since his mechanics change (http://newyorkmetsdaily.com/?p=209) by Brian Joura. Perez is also one of the players examined in a Newspaper article (http://www.nysun.com/sports/is-the-metamorphosis-of-perez-pelfrey-for-real/82691/) by Tim Marchman.

Jeff Samardzija has recently been the subject of an article (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/41242-jeff-samardzija-pitchfx) by Kanka, who looks at some of the pitches he threw while making his major league debut.

Jon Lester is pretty damn good this year, and has been inspiring all sorts of media. Peter Bendix takes a look at Lester's progression in an article (http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/8/4/585966/jon-lester-the-best-pitche) on his blog.

As always, if you're planning on writing an article about pitching or a pitcher and either have questions about using PitchFX data or need specific graphs or plots made, send me an email at dan@brooksbaseball.net.

One Great Pitch, One Terrible Pitch

2008-08-10T17:54:00.005-05:00

Clay Buchholz is a bit of an enigma. He's a guy who pitches a no-hitter last year and has, supposedly, incredible stuff... at the same time he can't seem to put it together to get out Major League hitters.

Over his last few starts, he's been shelled. In the 5 starts before the one this afternoon, he gave up 5 HR and was good for a 6.59 ERA, with 15BB and only 24K. Today, he gave up 3 more HR, 5 more runs, and 7 hits - all in 3 innings pitched.

What's working for Clay, and what's not? To answer this question, we'll turn to a specific PitchFX plot from his most recent start.

An interesting feature of Clay's changeup is that it doesn't move the same as the change that's normally seen in the majors. Most changeups fade away from LHH (or in to RHH). This makes them fairly easy to identify on a Horizontal Movement X Speed plot because they usually lie opposite of the Curveball. Clay's pitches are a bit more difficult to identify using only horizontal movement because his changeup fades in the other direction. This also leads to the Gameday system (and, somewhat amusingly, the Fenway Park scoreboard) to call most of his changeups as sliders:

You can see it's difficult to tell apart his offspeed pitches which all cluster in the righthand side of the graph.

On the other hand, it's easy to tell them apart if we plot Speed x Spin Direction Angle. We can calculate the spin direction by using a formula from Alan Nathan to recreate the way the ball was spinning on its way to the plate (which subsequently results in most of the movement on the ball):

There. That's easier. On the plot above, there are 4 distinct pitches: the fastball (green halo), the changeup (red), the slider (blue), and the curveball (orange). You can see by looking at the individual dots that most of the hits (light blue) come on the fastball and the curveball. If you watched the game, it was pretty clear that his fastball command was bad and hitters were really teeing off on it.

On the other hand, look at the changeup (red). 13 changeups. 12 strikes, 7 swinging. And only 1 ball. That's basically as effective as an offspeed pitch is possibly going to be in a single game. Hitters had no idea what to do with it.

It's pretty hard to argue with the results when your pitcher is getting lit up and he can't command his fastball. But he still has that dominant pitch.

The strange thing about this dominant pitch is that while it was leaned on very heavily early in the season, he has stopped throwing it as much as he once was. At his start in Tampa on 4/26, where he went 9 innings (eventually taking the loss on a 2-run bomb), he threw 40 changeups in 113 pitches.

It's just as dominant then as it was today, but then it was 35% of his pitches:

Today, he threw 13 changeups in 74 pitches, which is 17.5% - or exactly half of what he used in the dominant start at Tampa. Admittedly, part of this is probably dictated by the fact that he was pulled early in the game, but through his first 74 pitches at Tampa he had 33 changeups - a 45% clip. On 8/4 he threw 15 changeups in 93 pitches. At LAA he threw 18 in 90. At Tampa he threw 41 through 113.

Every time you don't call for the changeup, you're replacing a great pitch with a mediocre fastball. And since his return, he's been much more fastball-heavy, even though his changeup hasn't lost any of it's effectiveness.

Is the Clay we saw today the same pitcher as early in the season at Tampa or last year during the No-no? Perhaps not. The Tampa start might have been a fluke. Or, we could be seeing the result of strange game planning, pitch selection, and bad execution from Varitek and Buchholz. For whatever reason, he's gone away from the dominant changeup, and it isn't working.

A Defensive Oddity

2008-08-10T16:10:00.004-05:00

If you happened to be watching the Rays @ Mariners play into the 10th inning on Saturday, you saw one of the strangest defensive alignments in Baseball: their center fielder was playing on second base.

It wasn't just that the center fielder was playing second base. He could have been, because their center fielder is BJ Upton, who played second for them up to June 7th of last year. He was playing literally on the base, and there were only two outfielders.

Here's an unlabeled screengrab from the game:

And here's a labeled one:

The arrows point to Rays fielders. Note the 5 in the infield.

Here's the situation: it was the bottom of the 10th, bases loaded, and only one out. Rays manager Joe Maddon knew that a fly ball to the outfield was easily going to score the runner from third, and so he started to pull Upton in. He motioned in. And then in. And then in some more. And finally, Upton was playing on second.

It should be noted that at the time, Chad Bradford (a submariner / groundball specialist) was pitching, and so the extra infielder may have helped. It didn't turn out to figure in the play, as Bradford got a sharp grounder to third which resulted in a 5-2-3 double play. But still, as odd a defensive alignment as you might see.

In this shot, you can pretty clearly see Upton holding the runner on second:

Just thought this was one oddity in a season filled with strange plays that was worth mentioning.