Long: Why PITCHf/x is important
From Jeff Long at Beyond the Box Score on July 22, 2014, with mention of SABR members Scott Lindholm, Harry Pavlidis, Justin Hunter:
I’ll admit that this is a narrow vision of why PITCHf/x is important. That’s because PITCHf/x is important for a lot of different reasons. After all, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways that analysts have used PITCHf/x to provide deeper insights into the game that we all love to watch. The following paragraphs will outline a bunch of different ways in which PITCHf/x is important, though they’re not the aspect that I’ll primarily focus on with this piece. More on that later. First though, here are the non-most important reasons PITCHf/x is important.
First and foremost it helps us understand the pitches that are being thrown, where they’re being thrown, and what they’re doing once they leave the pitcher’s hand. This is beginner stuff, but the data is very important because without it nothing more advanced could be built. Not only that, but it gives us some insight into how umpires call games, and what exactly the strikezone actually looks like. We can take that stuff even a step further as my colleague Scott Lindholm did, and look to see if umpires change how they call games as innings go by. It’s not just pitchers and umpires though, we can see some pretty cool data on catchers using PITCHf/x as well. When it comes to this, nobody does it quite as well as the PITCHf/x experts Dan Brooks and Harry Pavlidis of Brooks Baseball and Baseball Prospectus.
Read the full article here: http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2014/7/22/5919581/why-pitchfx-is-important
Originally published: July 22, 2014. Last Updated: July 22, 2014.