Underheight.com

Major League Baseball will soon be installing cameras in all stadiums to gather petabytes of positional data.

A half-century after Branch Rickey harrumphed, “There is nothing on earth anybody can do with fielding,” all these pixels and bits will almost certainly revolutionize the analysis of baseball glovework. Even the most traditional fans may appreciate the importance of on-base percentage and other modern offensive statistics, but they still rate fielders by errors and fielding percentage, which are about as computationally sophisticated as a horse clomping its hoof.

The primary job of a fielder is to turn batted balls into outs: an infielder by gobbling up ground balls and throwing them to a base, and an outfielder by catching as many fly balls as possible. But errors (and the rate of not making errors, which is fielding percentage) measure only a fielder’s glaring mistakes — they ignore the more important matter of who reaches balls that others do not.A half-century after Branch Rickey harrumphed, “There is nothing on earth anybody can do with fielding,” all these pixels and bits will almost certainly revolutionize the analysis of baseball glovework. Even the most traditional fans may appreciate the importance of on-base percentage and other modern offensive statistics, but they still rate fielders by errors and fielding percentage, which are about as computationally sophisticated as a horse clomping its hoof.

The primary job of a fielder is to turn batted balls into outs: an infielder by gobbling up ground balls and throwing them to a base, and an outfielder by catching as many fly balls as possible. But errors (and the rate of not making errors, which is fielding percentage) measure only a fielder’s glaring mistakes — they ignore the more important matter of who reaches balls that others do not.

Fans and team executives have recently developed systems to track how many balls are hit to each area of the field, where fielders are positioned and whether balls are hit hard, but they rely on eyeballed estimates. The new camera-tracking system will assess it all to the inch.

This is a much more robust system than the GPS-enabled shoes I mentioned in a post a couple years ago.

The camera system has been quietly tested and refined in the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark this season by Sportvision, the Bay Area company that developed the yellow first-down line for football broadcasts and car-tracking software for Nascar races. Sportvision has worked with Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league’s Internet subsidiary, in the venture that will eventually cost upward of $5 million to install the system in all 30 stadiums, according to executives involved with the project.

Some fun Christmas break Hot Stove reading:

Complete copies of Baseball Digest at Google Books, from 1945 - 2007. It looks like they have all (or almost all) of the issues for each year, too.

Some absolutely fascinating articles from April 1970, for example:

• Carl Hubbell says TV has improved pitching, since a lot more kids can see how major leaguers throw.
• Computer picks top major leaguers.
• The roster for the 1970 Seattle Pilots.

How quaint — the Pilots left spring training in 1970 and sat in Utah awaiting word on their home for the year: Seattle or Milwaukee. Bud Selig bought the team on April 1, 1970 and moved them to Milwaukee immediately.

I’m assuming Baseball Digest published this issue before April 1 even though it says April on the cover like many magazines do.

(Why did you think I picked April 1970?)

Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling has a clear message from the USO tour in Iraq:

We’re winning

I dare ANY media outlet to print that. I dare you because it’s true. The most powerful message I got over there, from every single soldier, was their extreme disappointment that we are not hearing the facts about what they are doing.

Two analogies I thought were ‘appropriate’ in this context.

A table needs four legs to stand, right now Iraq is standing on 2 of its own, and we’re (NATO forces) providing the other two.

A football game with 2 minutes left, right now we have a 3 pt lead, the next year or two will be spent increasing that to 20 or more points. Would you rather play the last two minutes with a 3 pt or 21 pt lead? Which one would you feel was more of a lock?

Make no mistake, when we leave it needs to be ‘a lock’ or else we’ll be sending these brave warriors back into harms way, when we should not have to.

To the war critics:

Before you piss and moan about anything understand we met soldiers from the post at Waleed on the Syrian border (a bad ass bunch of Marines I might add) to the FOBs around Baghdad that were still seeing ‘action’ unfortunately. NOT ONE of them was anything but respectful, and dead set on completing their mission.

So all of you “bring them home now” folks who think you are doing some greater good by saying that, are in effect doing the exact opposite. They want to come home when the mission is done, period.

What winning really means:

It went something like this. They were occupying a Government building in a city that housed senior Baathe party officials pre war. The city was at around 50k in population. Post war the city was about 4000 people. That number had now swelled to over 40k and was growing daily and the US base there was in a building that the mayor of the city, and citizens, interacted with on a daily basis!

These soldiers were still on daily missions and at high alert but over the past 5 months things are changing dramatically. Where they used to spend 24/7 hunting down terrorists and extremists in local communities, they were now out and about helping rebuild vital parts of the city, playing games with the local children and integrating themselves into the communities there. The Iraqi’s were blown away at the fact that these soldiers weren’t demons or something worse.

It’s not over, not by a long shot, but we are winning and people need to know that.

(emphasis added)

Want to help the USO? They are always looking for donations, volunteers, and company partners.

Merry Christmas to our troops. And thanks for all you do.

The Oakland A’s new high tech stadium in Fremont, Cisco Field, delayed by international financial woes.

Cisco installing high tech video equipment in new Yankee Stadium, ready for stadium opener 2009.

I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the next evolutionary leap in stats.

As the GOP rebuilds, consider these options:

Curt Schilling for Governor of Massachusetts, 2010 — Here’s one reason why.

Mike Ditka for US Senator from Illinois — in Obama’s soon to be former seat…. (it almost happened in 2004)

OK, so it’s Labor Day and I’m avoiding going outside in the hot sun to labor. Those projects will still be there when it’s cooler, right?

While I get up the gumption to get dressed and fix the clothesline pole and the siding and clean out the shed, I figured today was a good day to actually play around with Baseball Reference’s Play Index. This service has been around awhile, but I’ve never really played around with it. Plus, they keep adding features to it.

You can create all sorts of crazy reports for batters, pitchers, teams, innings, matchups, etc. Data runs from 1956 to 2008 for regular season data, 1933-Present for the All-Star Game, and 1903-Present for the Postseason.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/

The reports will show you the top answer. If you want more than that, you need to subscribe for as little as $29/year. That might be cool if you’re a sports writer. I think the true hard core trivia buffs should be able to come up with scenarios where there is only one answer… which is a nice way of saying I’m too cheap to fork over $29. But it is a really cool service and they deserve credit for offering it up at such a low price.

The other cool thing is once you get the results, you can click on the link to the game data itself and view not just the box score, but the whole detailed scoresheet.

So, do you know who has the most HR’s in a game by a pinch runner for the Milwaukee Brewers?

The search for that answer actually led to these trivia questions:

Do you know who is the only Brewer to hit a grand slam after entering a game as a pinch runner?

In what year did 2 Brewers pinch runners hit a home run after entering a game as a pinch runner?

Can you name all 4 Brewers who have hit Home Runs as a pinch hitter, in order of the number of RBI’s (1,2,3,4)?

I ran several searches

1. Brewers as an NL team v. other NL teams

The results say it happened twice, and it shows only the first result:

1a.

From 1956 to 2008, Playing for MIL, Playing in the NL, Against the NL, Played: PR, (requiring HR>=1), sorted by greatest HR in a game

Darrin Jackson 1998-07-28 MIL @STL W 13-10
http://tinyurl.com/brewhr1a

If you look closely, in 1 plate appearance after entering the game as a pinch runner, Jackson had 1 HR and 4 RBI. That looks like a granny to me! Clicking on the link in the date column (which actually links to the game data) — sure enough — he hit it in the top of the 9th to put the Brew Crew up 13-9.

1b. To find the second one, I just altered the criteria slightly. Interestingly, changing the range of years to exclude 1998 yielded 0 results. Which meant it happened TWICE in 1998!

So to find the second one, I kept the date range as all available (1956-2008), but added the RBI criteria to be <= 3.

Mark Loretta 1998-06-13 MIL @PIT W 8-1
http://tinyurl.com/brewhr1b

2. Brewers as an NL team in interleague play

From 1956 to 2008, Playing for MIL, Playing in the NL, Against the AL, Played: PR, (requiring HR>=1), sorted by greatest HR in a game

Ryan Thompson 2002-06-29 MIL @MIN W 10-2
http://tinyurl.com/brewhr02

3. Brewers as an AL team, v. any opponent

From 1956 to 2008, Playing for MIL, Playing in the AL, Played: PR, (requiring HR>=1), sorted by greatest HR in a game

Bobby Mitchell 1974-09-24 MIL @CLE W 4-3
http://tinyurl.com/brewhr03

So there you have it. I can’t wait now to be woken up in the middle of the night in fits of statistical combinatorics…

And yes, I know I didn’t answer the question: Can you name all 4 Brewers who have hit Home Runs as a pinch hitter, in order of the number of RBI’s (1,2,3,4)?  That’s for you to get the answer.  I figured if I gave you something to work on you’ll come up with your own unique searches and reply to them here.  Anyone can reply to this posting — just click on the link right below the post.

The baseball field in Baraboo, Wisconsin has been selected 2007 Baseball Field of the Year in the High School and Parks Category by the Sports Turf Managers Association.

Mary Rountree Evans Field (its official name) is home to Baraboo’s summer Legion Baseball and spring High School baseball teams. I’ve visited the park many times over the years for Legion baseball tournaments and we’ve swiped many great ideas from them on how to properly manage a small town baseball field. The details are key and proper care takes a lot of thought, preparation, and a coordinated effort from volunteers, players, coaches and city/school staff. What a lot of people don’t realize it’s more than just having and maintaining a great facility — it’s also the ongoing efforts at continuous improvement.

The Baraboo News Republic has the full story on the award.

A company in Australia is deploying a personal GPS unit on Aussie football players to track their movements during a game.

This device is exactly what’s needed to bring baseball defensive stats to the next level. Well, not exactly for baseball, as the strap-on contraption would be a little unwieldly for baseball players. I can’t imagine it would take much to modify the device to put it in the sole of a player’s shoe, for example.

While there are ever advancing analytical models to better quantify a player’s defensive ability (or inability), the biggest sticking point is quality data to study. Defensive statistical analysis is based largely on inferences or data that are not exactly a great metric of ability (see error, earned run, putout, assist). Some video and software companies are attempting to rectify this by throwing college students at thousands of hours of video to manually record player starting position, end position, speed, acceleration, turning, leaping, etc.

Sorry, that’s an Industrial Revolution solution. It’s a bit too Mechanical Turk for me. It’s an understandable temporary manual solution until a proper Information Age solution became available. And now there is one.

Ideally, we’d also get these GPS units inside the baseballs too, so we could finally record acceleration off the bat, deceleration in the air, speed, and flight path. Combine that with high speed cameras and optical sensors to track the spin of a pitch and it’s contact with the bat and we will open a whole new era of baseball statistical analysis. Add in real-time data those in the dugout can use to make adjustments and you have a potent leg up. Of course, that would require a lot of computing power at the park.

Don’t think for a second that someone like Billy Beane and the A’s or Mark Shapiro and the Indians haven’t already envisioned this future.

Shoot, we might finally be able to get an accurate measurement of home run balls while we’re at it too!

In a recent interview, Bill James was asked about the future of statistical analysis in sports. His point about improving leagues is valid. But there is still a lot to learn about the specific causes of baseball defensive ability, such as speed, positioning, etc. that will let us move away from inferences based on results. Once we collect these data, it will open a whole new world of analysis.

you’d think he was French.

Well, the post-season analysis of Ryan Braun’s debut as third baseman of the Milwaukee Brewers is in.

His hitting was outstanding, especially considering he was a 23 year old rookie playing only 2/3 of a season: 113 Games, 34 HR, 97 RBI, 15 SB, .324/.370/.634. He was also within a few plate appearances of qualifying for the batting title and would have finished 8th in the NL if he did.

Unfortunately, he lost a chance to get those plate appearances in September when he was often replaced late in the game for defensive reasons. To put it bluntly, his fielding was atrocious.

The Brewers said they kept him down in the minors to start 2007 to work out his defensive woes. A shortstop at Miami, the Brewers shifted him to 3rd. He only has about 300 games there professionally, so some seasoning is due. The Brewers were probably also keeping his service clock from starting. By keeping Braun in the minors to start the season, the Brewers may get an extra season out of him before arbitration and free agency.

Baseball Prospectus has an excellent article detailing their and others’ analysis of Braun’s defense. By all measures, he was simply one of the worst defenders in all of baseball last year. The negatives of his defense nearly nullified the positives of his offense.

So what are the Brewers to do? The BP article raises these possibilities:

• Move Braun to LF, sign Mike Lowell at 3B, sit on Matt LaPorta for a year
• Move Bill Hall to 3B, Braun to RF, and Corey Hart to CF; LaPorta gets the opportunity to make the big league club out of spring training.
• Trade Bill Hall and Claudio Vargas for Joe Crede and Faustino de los Santos, move Hart to CF, Braun to RF.

Hall got better at CF as the season wore on. His speed might also be wasted at 3rd like Braun’s, but Hall would likely have a more accurate arm than Braun. Looking at Hall’s recent infield defensive stats, he would be an improvement over Braun at third. Not great, but an improvement.

If the Brewers moved Braun to RF, Hart to CF, Hall to 3B, LaPorta to LF, and keep a bench of Dillon, Rottino, Gwynn, and Gross, then maybe Yost can actually be confident in doing a double-switch once in a while. But that’s an article in itself for another day.