Ben-Porat: Scouting the minors pitch by pitch: modeling infield defense
From Eli Ben-Porat at The Hardball Times on February 22, 2017:
Today, we’ll attempt to build a play by play model of defense for minor league players and test it against major league talent. We’ll first build the model step by step, with the assistance of tables, charts and graphs, then explore the results of the model visually and determine whether or not we have built anything worthwhile. This is neither the first defensive metric system, nor is it the last; the methodology here likely borrows concepts from other models, however, this is essentially a model that is custom built to work with the data available for it, rather than a re-hash of more mature models. We’ll compare our model to UZR to determine if, generally speaking, the models produce similar results, despite different methodologies. The comparison to UZR is a simple way to test whether this comparatively crude model is on the right track; where there are disagreements I would err on the side of UZR.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/scouting-the-minors-pitch-by-pitch-modelling-infield-defense/
Originally published: February 22, 2017. Last Updated: February 22, 2017.