Baseball in the Information Age

Cappy · Aug 31, 2011

Pretty cool article from ESPN: Information Age Changing the Way Game Is Played

Here's a snippet:

In the beginning, you didn't need a Ph.D. from MIT to understand the art of pitch selection. If you had a good fastball, you threw it. And if there was a big strong dude 60 feet away who could hit it, more power to him.

Boy, what a dumb concept that was. Want to get a feel for what pitch selection involves now, here in the year 2011? Listen to how Rockies video coordinator Brian Jones -- who says he and the Rockies were the first to use iPods to customize personalized video content for players five years ago -- describes it. You won't believe we're even talking about the same sport.

Say you're a pitching coach or a catcher, and you have a right-handed pitcher starting tonight against the Astros. You get out your iPad, tap your favorite app and type out, say, "Carlos Lee." Here's how it would go from there:

"You have all these boxes you can change," Jones says. "Say you want to look at all right-handed pitchers versus Carlos Lee. It will pull up a strike zone and a guy standing there, and it will show you, like, every pitch. Then you can break it down by date. You can change the date range, and it will give you his stats, the pitches thrown, swing-and-miss percentage, everything you can think of, for those dates.

"Then you could change it to where you say, 'I want to see all pitches low and away.' And it will change every piece of data [to] every pitch low and away. You can draw a custom area you want to pick on that strike zone, or out of the strike zone, and see all the pitches in those locations. Then, once you draw that, it shows you the data, all his stats and numbers, for that area you've selected, on that type of pitch.

"Then you can change it to runners in scoring position, ahead in the count, behind in the count, two strikes, seventh to ninth inning, anything you can think of. Any situation that you want to break down is readily available to see."

But you think it stops there? Oh, no -- all those stats are synced to a video database of every one of those pitches. So if you want to see how Lee reacted to every slider, low and away, that a right-hander has thrown him in a 1-and-2 count since 2006, that's now possible. You don't just have to read about it. Tap the screen on your iPad and watch it. hmy:

And if you don't think seeing all those pitches gives a pitcher a whole different sense of trust in a pitch than reading a scouting report or a computer printout, we can only respond: Are you kidding?

"Now, you can watch for as long as you want, watching a guy swing and miss at a certain pitch," says Derek Lowe, one of just five active starting pitchers left whose career began in 1997 or earlier. "So now, when you get ready to throw that pitch in a game, you have that mental image of watching a certain guy swing and miss at a slider 20 times. It gives you an added boost of confidence, like, 'Hey, if I throw this guy this pitch, I know he can't hit it, because I just watched it for like 15 straight minutes on the video.'"
Click to expand...

Jake · Aug 31, 2011

I'd assume it goes both ways: hitters can now study pitches more than ever before, whereas pitchers can study hitters' reactions and swings as well. Cool article.

Cappy · Aug 31, 2011

It probably does, but if I had to guess, I'd still say the pitchers/defense have the advantage in this shift, partly because they are the initiators and the ones deliberately executing their move. The hitter, even if he knows the tendencies of pitchers, is still playing what is basically a reaction game (which is why the shifts are effective when you have the data on hitters).

Baseball in the Information Age

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