Mike was one of the PitchFX pioneers, at least from my vantage point. I remember reading the 2007 post he made called "Magnus Papelbonus", which ultimately led me to Alan Nathan (or maybe the order was the other way around). Many of the graphs on my website were shamelessly stolen (always with permission) from seed ideas in his THT column or blog. The Spin x Speed graphs were taken directly from the above article. The site previously featured trajectory plots from the batter's point of view that had a clever coordinate transform to visualize how hitters saw pitches breaking. I now use umpire charts with parameter's from Mike's analysis. There are probably, literally, a dozen different things on the website that would not be here if not for Mike Fast. If I had to retitle my website, it would be FastBaseball.net, with the subtitle "Replotting Every Pitch Using Mike's Clever Ideas, More or Less." What I'm trying to say is, Mike wasn't directly the inspiration for BrooksBaseball, but he was close.

I hope my readers join me by wishing Mike (@fastballs on Twitter) good luck at his new job. At least I have an NL team to cheer for now!

Discussion thread for Michael Pineda, recently acquired SP for the NYY.

Basic Pitch Information:
Fastball - 62.2% / 94.7mph
Slider - 31.5% / 84.1mph
Circle Changeup - 6.3% / 87.6mph
Cutter - ???
Two-Seamer - ???
(source: fangraphs.com)

Representative Pitch Data



Notes
Traded from Mariners to NYY on 01/13/12 for Jesus Montero.

1) Head over to the forums and register, even if you had an account previously. The database was cleared during the upgrade. New accounts are moderated, which should help remove some spam. It may take a few hours to get your account approved.

2) If you are a writer, blogger, or media: Let us know! We want the main page here to be a collection of article snippets that will drive traffic to your site. Over time, we hope to accumulate a huge database of PitchFX article links, organized by analyst or topic.

If you've been to this site before and you're like one of my 1,000s of other users, mostly you ignore everything but a link that says "PitchFX Tool", grab some data, and go back to report to your own forum/blog/community about what you think is happening with a particular pitcher.

And, personally, I think that's great. I never really imagined this site being anything more than that; the original point of this simple webpage was to have an easy way for people to get PitchFX data in realtime and share their observations with their friends.

When this site was started, PitchFX analysis was in its infancy. No one really knew what they were doing. There were a few pioneers, but for the most part, they were all working in their own individual problem spaces. Some of them were concerned with the physics of pitching, the forces that acted on the baseball, the accuracy of the measurements. Some were concerned with how new prospects were developing. Some were concerned with developing classification algorithms. Some were interested in consulting for teams. Some were just looking at the data to see if it could help them predict how their fantasy team might do. But there was no central discussion hub.

Sure, there are 50+ page long threads over at The Book Blog about PitchFX, dozens of threads where pitchers are dissected at SoSH, and countless other messageboards scattered around the internet where people talk about PitchFX data. PitchFX (and plots from my website in particular) have started to make it into blogs hosted by newspapers from New York to Rhode Island to Arizona and lots of places in between. The point here is not to take over those places or shunt posts from one place to the other. The point is simply to give everyone who comes to the site an opportunity to discuss what they find in the data with others who see baseball the same way they do. Rather than go back to your own messageboard or blog with your data and have everyone be sort of impressed but mostly confused by your funny chart with little dots all over it, here, everyone will speak the same language.

So, there is now a forum on BrooksBaseball.net where you can get together and talk PitchFX. I don't imagine that it will explode quickly - these things tend to evolve over time - but if you're a regular user (or intermittant user) of the site, register, and come talk baseball, pitching, and whatever else. We're a fun community. Hopefully, we can be a bigger community.

Second, this forum system incorporates an easy system for promoting posts and blogs into "Main Page" articles. That means we can easily create a big community system of posts and observations about players, highlight popular forum posts on the main page, and spur discussion about critical issues. Notice a camera calibration problem? Notice a really neat new pitch you've never seen before? Think a pitcher has an injury that you can find in the data? Think a pitcher has added something new or tweaked his repertoire? Using this system, you'll be able to share that information with a much wider community. And, if you've already published an article or find a cool one online, feel free to write an "abstract" for it, we can promote it to the main page, and we'll give it some additional press to a much wider community of interested PitchFXers.

Last, as always, please continue to send email to dan@brooksbaseball.net with any questions, comments, or concerns you might have.

Best-
Dan Brooks & Dustin Kikuchi
BrooksBaseball.net