Dan Fox has a terrific article over at Baseball Prospectus (subscriber only, pay the $5 a month!) where he analyzed over 40,000 pitches worth of Gameday data. Lots of interesting stuff in here, this article alone is worth the subscription.
One bit that I found especially intersting: He looks at the starting and ending velocity of pitches and shows that the heavy air in Petco causes the ball to slow down more than at any other Gameday park. Obviously that same effect is going hold for batted balls as well, accounting for all those balls that look like homers off the bat, only to die at the warning track.
This is one of the best Gameday data articles I’ve seen, definitely check it out if you’re interested in this stuff.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Larry // May 24, 2007 at 5:21 pm
The data on pitches is amazing.
What is the source?
2 Anthony // May 24, 2007 at 5:29 pm
I think he used some kind of data mining script to pull it out of the Gameday XML files. The only other way to do it is to go into each game and load it by hand, which would take forever.
3 Larry // May 24, 2007 at 5:33 pm
thanks
4 LynchMob // May 26, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Agree that the subscription to BP is *very* worth the cost … I’d pay it just for the UTK articles … but now the articles based on the GameDay stats are clearly on that list as well … as are articles about prospects and match-ups and …
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