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The Rays Tank: Brooks Baseball Is Amazing; Justin Ruggs Sign With Astros

I can't believe I forgot to pass this along yesterday, but on Friday evening, three fantastic Pitch F/x'ers (Dan Brooks, Harry Pavlidis, and Lucas Apostoleris) released the next hot resource for Pitch f/x analysis: player cards at BrooksBaseball.net. They are, in short, amazing.

I've been addicted to the Joe Lefkowitz player cards for a while now, but Brooks and Co. took things to the next level. Now you can easily parse the data any sort of way you want (by month, year, count, and handedness), and you can also view a pitcher's career or season total results. I do think there are some things that are easier to view on Joe L still -- like analyzing how a pitcher attacks lefty or righty hitters over an at bat -- but the functionality of the Brooks Baseball player cards is superb. That's going to be a huge help going forward.

Not only that, but the Brooks Baseball data is also a bit more accurate. Dan, Harry, and Lucas went through every pitch in the database and fixed pitch classification issues, so although some of the pitches movements may be displayed weird due to park differences, the pitch classifications are (most likely) accurate. This is way more than we could say before, and it makes me more confident in the numbers on their site.

My one nitpick? I wish they had an option for exporting data to Excel. But I can understand that they'd want to keep their data private after putting all that work into it.

Anyway, if you're looking for the full explanation of how and why these guys put together this resource, they explained their madness over at The Hardball Times. And if you're curious on what these player pages look like, here's David Price's card. Considering the way he's changed his repertoire over the years, it's good to know that their classifications are likely accurate.

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Comments

When do the Rays release the lineup for the Summer Concert Series?
Typically not until early May

They like to release them all at once rather than bits at a time

Or late April, around the 20th.
all grateful dead cover bands
Not being able to export to Excel is a significant handicap

Also, it would be nice if you could enter dates instead of months. As is, you can only look at things on a monthly basis instead of running a range. The range is nice for looking at periods of time longer than a month.

Not exporting is a bummer.

The biggest obstacle to multi-season analysis is that the pitch classifications are different for each year, so the first step always has to be to reclassify every pitch yourself, which is a huge bear. If they make it downloable, it will instantly become THE place to get quick data.

Until then, it’s still a pretty nifty tool.

.

Holy crap, that's a huge bear!
One less dangerous bear off the streets.
Attn: Randy Glass

My feelings on Reid Brignac, Sean Rodriguez, and the 2012 offense:
http://theraysway.com/articles/better-to-hit-for-contact-or-power-a-look-at-the-2012-rays-offense

Your axes are very clever.

I looked at something like this once, but didn’t think to peg my axes to league average.

Also, how do you make those nice standard deviation ovals. I’ve not yet figured out ovals.

It's not very scientific, but if you get your standard deviation numbers (mine our on the google doc link) you can insert a shape into the excel sheet

Simply move the four points of the shape to align with your StDev figures, I then rotated so that the left and right points of the shape were on the trendline. Kind of a workaround and probably not 100% accurate, but I think it’s fine for this sort of thing. Especially when it basically gives you utility curves to know if two players that excel at different things in the same quadrant are equal, better, or worse than each other.

this doesnt seem like much of a look at reid vs. s-rod, but it was still interesting.
It started out that way, but I realized that the bigger picture was much more interesting/important than a silly fight over the 25th spot on the Rays roster
true true. it's an interesting look. reminds me of one of my fave graphs (K% vs GB%)
i enjoyed this article
Regarding 2 Strike Hitting

I don’t know what the statistics show, but from having played baseball it seems to me that the skill can be learned with experience. With us it was all a matter of shortening our swing when we hit 2 strikes, and honestly I don’t see that much with Rays hitters. I do see it from people like Swisher and Jeter however so I’m not surprised to see NYY ranked highly.

We did the same in little league so I don't see why these guys making millions of dollars can't do the same thing.

Probably just laziness

Gammons says that Davis has unhittable stuff in the back of a bullpen

He said even if they trade Niemann, and keep Davis in the rotation, dont be suprised to see Davis pitching in relief in September for a playoff run with a guy like Cobb in the rotation. Also said it almost seems guarenteed that rays will be playing in october. Good to see him and Olney on the Rays train.

"guarenteed"
But seriously it's a little ridiculous for him to say that given that it's the AL f'in East
all of my posts are mobile, so im pretty proud of myself in that respect ha

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