5 replies to this topic

[SoxScout]

http://katron.org/pr...l/hit-location/

Hat tip to Tango

This is amazingly cool.

Adrian Gonzalez's 2009 in PETCO super-imposed over Fenway:



Prince Fielder

Edited by SoxScout, 03 March 2010 - 06:37 PM.

[OttoC]

What a great idea! He also has pitcher cards with Pitch f/x data: http://katron.org/pr.../pitcher-cards/

Edited by OttoC, 03 March 2010 - 07:43 PM.

[YTF]

The 4 shades of blue are very difficult to differentiate. You can tell the lightest from darkest, but after that it's pretty tough.

[Eric Van]

One important thing to remember is that results after making contact of a given degree of hardness appears to be less than 50% of how a park influences offense. The larger part is the influence of the hitter's background on both the ability to make contact at all, and how hard the hardness is.

(This is based on data from 2009 but the results were statistically significant with just one year's data. Park factors for BABIP were smaller than park factors for SO and robustly correlated to them.)

But still, a super useful tool -- much more so for outs than hits, though, since the locations are where balls were fielded, not landed.

[OttoC]

One needs to exercise some caution when using data from this site. For example, when I looked at Varitek's chart I could only find eight of the ten home runs he hit at Fenway Park, so I checked pitcher-by-pitcher and found that two pairs of home runs were superimposed--Shields/Meche and Cecil/Mitre. Knowing this, I could see that two of the dots were slightly elongated. I followed up by checking the home runs on Hit Tracker. Here I found that horizontal angles and distance were close enough for the Cecil/Mitre pair to account for them appearing superimposed but while the Sheilds/Meche pair down the right-field line were close to the same angle, the distances were quite different--73' in standard distance and 57' in true distance. Superimposing this pair of home runs on another park could result in an erroneous picture.

One other thing that should be noted is that balls in park are plotted at the position of the fielder when he gets the ball, not where the ball struck, so you cannot differentiate between balls hitting the wall first and ones that don't reach the wall. At Fenway, this could have a huge impact on evaluating balls hit to left field and left-center. For example, a ball hit off the LCF wall that the LF misses on a jump may end up plotted as a double to medium CF.

I still like the idea and I am going to suggest to the author that expanding the filtering options to include off RHP or LHP might be useful.

[OttoC]

Sean expanded the interface so you can choose LHP/RHP and LHH/RHH.

I superimposed Fenway on Fenway and checked ground-ball outs by LHH vs. all pitchers and there is definite evidence of shifts. If you choose Ortiz in place of all LHH, you can see that most of the GB outs from shifts comes from his at bats.

Also, I just noticed that you can zoom in on the fields.