Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 92 posts

Re: Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

#11

Post by kodablah »

phamilton wrote: post #8
kodablah wrote: post #4

Regardless of analytics, baseball is a game of reactions. Pitchers who traditionally made pitches to induce popups will inevitably change to induce grounders (by pitch choice, location, and/or speed). The beauty of the sport is that the sample sizes can get large enough to make legitimate inferences from the data unlike many other sports. For those specifically curious about baseball and statistics, both http://www.f…

For those not too familiar with professional baseball, there are 162 games in a season. A player starting every game would likely see 600+ at bats. A starting pitcher pitches every 5-6 days and will face 600+ batters per season. League wide there are about 125k outs recorded per season on 700k pitches. That's a ton of data. It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a s…

For those wanting to play w/ the data, there are a lot of resources [0]. I personally have combined older retrosheet data [1] with modern MLB data to some neat uses, not the least of which to try out tech like Druid (big data, live slicing, etc). E.g. If you wanted data from Sunday's Houston vs Texas game, GDX has tons of XML for parsing at [2]. There are plenty of guides that tell you what is what of course. It has been on my mind to develop a tensorflow graph trained w/ existing data to help me win some FanDuel/DraftKings money, but I haven't as of yet (and I should note the MLB data has restrictions against bulk or commercial use).

0 - https://github.com/baseballhackday/data-and-resources/wiki/R...

1 - http://retrosheet.org/

2 - http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2017/month_06/da...

Re: Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

#12

Post by bryanbuckley »

Lukeas14 wrote: post #7

>"The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago" This should be more prominent and is likely the root cause of guys swinging for homeruns more often. Every hitter will eventually fall into a pattern where they're hitting certain pitches to only a certain part of the field. With the increase in data it's muc…

Does it suggest that leadoff guys will be cheaper in the future? The next moneyball trend will be fast guys who can accurately place hits?

Re: Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

#15

Post by pgodzin »

howeyc wrote: post #6

Interesting how the article mentions it would seem intuitive to someone new to the game as well. Just hit where there's less defense and more area to cover, the outfield.

Sure, more area to cover but also a lot more time to get there. It's less trying to hit to the outfield, but rather hit homeruns. The problem is that it's easier said than done, and the old philosophy (look at Ichiro for example), was higher average and putting the ball in play was preferable to loading up and trying to hit a homerun. Now strikeouts and homeruns are way up, but batting averages are down.

Re: Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

#16

Post by bluGill »

phamilton wrote: post #8
kodablah wrote: post #4

Regardless of analytics, baseball is a game of reactions. Pitchers who traditionally made pitches to induce popups will inevitably change to induce grounders (by pitch choice, location, and/or speed). The beauty of the sport is that the sample sizes can get large enough to make legitimate inferences from the data unlike many other sports. For those specifically curious about baseball and statistics, both http://www.f…

For those not too familiar with professional baseball, there are 162 games in a season. A player starting every game would likely see 600+ at bats. A starting pitcher pitches every 5-6 days and will face 600+ batters per season. League wide there are about 125k outs recorded per season on 700k pitches. That's a ton of data. It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a s…

> It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a strike on a 3-0 count in the 8th inning?" and get statistically significant results.

Does it though? medicine is learning that when you do data mining the bar for statistical significance needs to be much higher. When you do the traditional hypothesis/experiment loop and a result hits 95% likely that is good enough. However when you data mine from millions of data points anything interesting is much more likely to be coincidence. Modern statistics is trying to figure out how to handle this.

Data mining is good for generating hypothesis that you can then test with a controlled experiment. It can be used in meta-analysis to find small effects that were not significant in individual experiments but when you combine them they are significant. However it is dangerous to use it alone.

In more depth, if you look at 100 data points and find 5 things that meet the 95% bar - that is 5 out of 100, odds are that all of them are false positives since you studied 100 things and found 5. (this is a gross simplification of things like p-values, real statisticians will cry about it, but the average person has a chance of understanding)

Re: Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

#17

Post by pgodzin »

Lukeas14 wrote: post #7

>"The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago" This should be more prominent and is likely the root cause of guys swinging for homeruns more often. Every hitter will eventually fall into a pattern where they're hitting certain pitches to only a certain part of the field. With the increase in data it's muc…

I think speed will still be valuable as stolen bases continue to decrease across the league, as long as those hitters can still get on base at a .320+ clip. But speed is what makes players who can do it all, like Altuve, MVP candidates now.

Re: Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

#18

Post by jarrettch »

kodablah wrote: post #11
phamilton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those not too familiar with professional baseball, there are 162 games in a season. A player starting every game would likely see 600+ at bats. A starting pitcher pitches every 5-6 days and will face 600+ batters per season. League wide there are about 125k outs recorded per season on 700k pitches. That's a ton of data. It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a s…

For those wanting to play w/ the data, there are a lot of resources [0]. I personally have combined older retrosheet data [1] with modern MLB data to some neat uses, not the least of which to try out tech like Druid (big data, live slicing, etc). E.g. If you wanted data from Sunday's Houston vs Texas game, GDX has tons of XML for parsing at [2]. There are plenty of guides that tell you what is what of course. It has…

Thank you so much for these links. Recently I've thought about building something data viz and stats related using baseball stats.

I know MLBAM has a bunch of data they keep to themselves, but I should definitely be able to find something to play with here. Many thanks for sharing!

Re: Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

#19

Post by Lukeas14 »

bryanbuckley wrote: post #12
Lukeas14 wrote: post #7

>"The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago" This should be more prominent and is likely the root cause of guys swinging for homeruns more often. Every hitter will eventually fall into a pattern where they're hitting certain pitches to only a certain part of the field. With the increase in data it's muc…

Does it suggest that leadoff guys will be cheaper in the future? The next moneyball trend will be fast guys who can accurately place hits?

Possibly. My guess is that only the exceptionally good leadoff guys will make it to a team, making them more expensive. Other teams might rather have a slugger hitting first than an average fast guy. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Post reply on HN