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In Major League Baseball, a player hits a home run when the ball flies over the outfield fence. However, the distance between the hitter and the outfield fence varies by stadium, which means a home run in one stadium might not be far enough for a home run in a different stadium. For The Washington Post, Kevin Schaul made a thing that lets you compare stadiums.
Tags: baseball, home run, Washington Post
Posted by in Baseball, home run, Infographics, Washington Post
Baseball games grew longer over the decades, with the average length well over three hours in recent years. Ben Blatt and Francesca Paris, for NYT’s The Upshot, show how a few rule changes this season keep the ball moving for shorter games.
Posted by in Baseball, Statistical Visualization, time, Upshot
NYT’s The Upshot analyzed spin rate on pitches before and after enforcing a ban on sticky substances that provide more grip on the ball. The rule has been in place for decades but wasn’t enforced. However, there’s been more strikeouts than usual, which makes for less exciting sports, which means less people watch, and therefore, the league makes less money. So, bye sticky stuff.
Posted by in Baseball, pitching, Statistical Visualization, Upshot
Mark Rober, who is great at explaining and demonstrating math and engineering to a wide audience, gets into the gist of machine learning in his latest video:
Tags: baseball, machine learning, Mark Rober
Posted by in Baseball, machine learning, Mark Rober, statistics
Pitch speed starts to decrease with a baseball player’s age at some point. This makes sense. That’s why athletes retire. The Statcast pitch distributions show when this happens for individual players, categorized by pitch type. I like the transparent distributions for past seasons as a mode of comparison. [via @statpumpkin]
Posted by in age, Baseball, speed, Statistical Visualization
Post-game sports interviews tend to sound similar. And when you do say something out of pattern, the talk shows and the social media examine every word to find hidden meaning. It’s no wonder athletes talk in cliches. The Washington Post, using natural language processing, counted the phrases and idioms that baseball players use.
We grouped phrases that were variations of each other together (within a one- or two-word difference) into a list of roughly 20,000 possible cliches. Then came the subjective part. From that list, we chose the ones that were the most interesting, then grouped those with similar meanings. And voila — the phrases we considered to be the cream of the cliche crop.
I can’t decide if the word cloud to open the article is a fun hook or a distraction. I’m learning towards the former, but I think it would’ve been less the latter without the interaction.
Tags: baseball, cliche, Washington Post
Posted by in Baseball, cliche, statistics, Washington Post
Oh. So that’s why I was always placed in right field that one year.
Little League Analytics
pic.twitter.com/THf5FyqRF7
— PetrosAndMoneyShow (@PetrosAndMoney) June 14, 2018
Posted by in Baseball, Humor, Infographics
When watching baseball on television, we get the benefit of seeing whether a pitch entered the strike zone or not. Umpires go by eye, and intentional or not, they tend towards finishing a game over extra innings. Michael Lopez, Brian Mills, and Gus Wezerek for FiveThirtyEight:
The left panel shows the comparative rate of strike calls when, in the bottom of an inning in extras, the batting team is positioned to win — defined as having a runner on base in a tie game — relative to those rates in situations when there’s no runner on base in a tie game. When the home team has a baserunner, umps call more balls, thus setting up more favorable counts for home-team hitters, creating more trouble for the pitcher, and giving the home team more chances to end the game.
I doubt the shift is on purpose, but it’s interesting to see the calls go that way regardless. Also, from a non baseball-viewer, why isn’t there any replay in baseball yet?
Tags: baseball, FiveThirtyEight, sports, work
Posted by in Baseball, FiveThirtyEight, Infographics, sports, work
After the crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs, home runs in professional baseball dipped the past few years. They seem to be back up though, and new metrics on hitting angle might have something to do with it. Dave Sheinin and Armand Emamdjomeh for The Washington Post delve into the angles, along with hit speed, and how they lead to more home runs.
Tags: baseball, Washington Post
Posted by in Baseball, Infographics, Washington Post
When a baseball player is hitting well, commentators will sometimes say that it looks like he's hitting with a bigger bat out there. The ACME Catalog, a creative technology studio, took the phrase to a more literal sense. They used baseball bats to represent on-base plus slugging (OPS), "the ability of a player both to get on base and to hit for power," for standout players during the regular season versus the World Series.
The standard baseball bat is about two and a half inches in diameter, which was used to represent the league average OPS. With a quick calculation, find how much greater a player's OPS is compared to the league average, and then translate that to bat size. My one concern is that they scaled by diameter rather than circumference (or volume), so when you look at a bat from the top or at an angle, a player's bat perhaps looks a bit bigger than it should.
But if you look at it profile — the actual hitting area — then it's like you're dealing with a two-dimensional rectangle. So in that case, it might be okay. I'm not sure. I do know that I like the idea, and bonus points for making actual bats.
More on the process in the video below.
[via @blprnt]