Visualizing Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball
(May 2009 Update: The Pitch F/X viewer for all MLB Pitchers is up and running).
“Back in 1980, STATS Inc. … sent its own scorekeepers [to record] play-by-play information about the games that had never before been systematically collected: the pitch count at the end of at bats, pitch types and locations, the direction and distance of batted balls. They broke the field down into twenty-six wedges radiating out from home plate.”
– Michael Lewis, Moneyball, p. 84
A friend recently sent me a blog post (originally from Josh Kalk ) visualizing the differences in two Red Sox pitchers’ styles by using a data set — called MLB Extended Game Log — which catalogs over a dozen attributes of each pitch thrown. This got me wondering about why baseball has attracted such interest by statisticians, and also about ways in which this pitching data, in particular, might be better visualized.
Read more
-
Subscribe
-
Books
-
Articles
-
Software
-
Data
-
Visualization
-
Talks