Wilson: Measuring the quality of a pitch
From Jason Wilson at The Hardball Times on March 16, 2017:
At the 2016 SABR Analytics Conference we sat down with analysts from 15 different major league teams and provided a customized report on their 2015 pitching roster from the perspective of our new metric, QOP (quality of pitch). Those discussions were fascinating and highly informative. This was especially true for me, a statistics professor who got into QOP purely for the statistical interest, without any background in sabermetrics. I’d like to tell about those meetings, but first — what is QOP?
QOP is a model that combines speed, location and movement (rise, total break, vertical break and horizontal break) into a single number that calculates the quality of a pitch on a scale from 0 to 10. See our website, QOP Baseball, for more information including how it was developed and access to the data. QOP has numerous possible applications, including pitcher improvement (comparing pitches during and between seasons, see section 5), scouting (if implemented on a radar gun in minor leagues or overseas), injury prevention (significant decline during a season, see our SABR 2015 presentation, slides 25-28), and fan enjoyment (different info than mph or rpm).
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/measuring-the-quality-of-a-pitch/
Originally published: March 16, 2017. Last Updated: March 16, 2017.