With today being my last day at
@DrivelineBB
, I’m excited to say I’m joining the
@Royals
R&D team as an amateur scouting analyst. I learned an unbelievable amount from Driveline. It was an amazing experience to be a data analyst at a company that values data as much as them.
I’m happy to announce that I will be playing my last year of college baseball and pursuing a master’s at Indiana University. Thank you
@IndianaBase
for the opportunity and thank you
@DavidsonBASE
for an incredible 4 years.
Run values are becoming a staple of baseball analytics. For those unaware, run values are the change in the expected runs due to an event. And they are super simple to calculate! Here is a RE24 table, which represents the expected runs for an inning after a runner-out state
There's usually a tradeoff between velocity and movement for breaking balls. Pitchers look for both, but more velocity relates to less movement. Both lead to success. These plots show the differences in velocity and horizontal movement between the types of breaking balls.
Friday night debugging sesh got me thinking about this: "Debugging is like being a detective in a crime movie where you're also the murderer....and the victim". GANs are being pretty adversarial right now. They're winning battles, but I'm gonna win this war
Zack Wheeler has been dealing this postseason, so here are his Stuff+ and Command+ on each of his pitches this season. 100 is MLB average, with a standard deviation of 50. Having 5 pitches that are above average in stuff and command will play for sure
Congrats brother! Thank you for helping lead us during my first two years. UNC is getting a phenomenal teammate. Good luck up the road, not that you need it
Thank you to all of my coaches, teammates, and everybody in the Davidson Baseball family who has made these last four years unforgettable. I am very excited to announce that I have committed to play my final year at UNC Chapel Hill as a graduate transfer.
Go Heels!
@IndianaBase
alum Kyle Schwarber is hitting 💣💣💣 in the playoffs. His xwOBA on balls in play is up from 0.462 in the regular season to 0.579 in the playoffs, with exit velo 86.2 -> 87.9 and launch angle 19.9 -> 11. Ks have gone 36.8% -> 34.4%
The left plot shows all breaking balls of these types in the 2023 regular season. We can clearly see how distinctive these pitch types are (yes, even the sweeper), despite some overlap. The left plot's boundaries were created with support vector machines, dividing pitches by type
With all this talk about sweepers, here are the average movement profiles in inches of different breakers
Slider: 5.8 HB, 2 IVB
Slurve: 14.2 HB, -2.4 IVB
Curve: 9.6 HB, -8.9 IVB
Sweeper: 14.8 HB, 1 IVB
Sweepers have more horizontal and less drop than slurves
I used publicly sourced data from pybaseball (), a very useful Python package for the everyday baseball analytics nerd. This included run values of the individual pitches, but I had found myself in need of RE24.
For context, average MLB xwOBA on balls in play this year has been 0.372. xwOBA factors in characteristics of a hit and calculates the expected value in terms of run expectancy, and then scales up to match the scale of OBP
The right plot is a snippet from a
@DrivelineBB
pitching report for the offseason. I instituted the lines from the first plot into the report, with some intuitive adjustments of course. The second plot shows Yu Darvish's averages for the last two seasons. He has all 4 pitch types
RE24 represents the 24 possible base-out states. There is also RE288, which includes the count. There are situations where you may be interested in either. Simply find the average runs scored in the inning after that situation occurs!
@jrussell3306
Reposting this for clarification and not to confuse anyone. Individual pitches have an average of 100 and standard deviation of 50. That means roughly 68% of pitches will fall within 50-150, and 95% between 0-200. A pitcher’s stuff+ or command+ is the average over their pitches
More context: baseball savant has an 88mph hit with a 20 launch angle as having past results with .432 batting average, 29.4% 2B, and 0.3% HR. An 88mph hit with an 11 launch angle is .689, 60.1% 2B, and 1.1% HR
@jkelly_1214
@drivelinekyle
@DrivelineBB
Fangraphs has a page dedicated to this. Search Fangraphs dollars per war and you should find it. Involves projected war over a contract that a FA signs and the dollars of that contract. Hope that helps