Moving the mound back is a proposed solution to the ever-increasing rate of strikeouts in the modern game of baseball. The effect of moving the mound back one foot will be tested in the Atlantic League from August this year. Without the results of this test, we don’t know much about how this rule change could affect the delicate balance between pitchers and hitters. There are many unknowns such as:

• How much will the perceived velocity decrease benefit hitters?
• Will the added break on pitches benefit pitchers?
• Will throwing a further distance add injury risk or cause a loss of pitcher control?
• Will batters change their approach if it is easier to make contact?

In this article I aim to use my model of predicted pitch outcomes to investigate how moving the mound back may change the game. I’ve written previously about modeling the deadened baseball and I shall take a similar approach here. Read the rest of this entry »

ERA, FIP, xFIP, and beyond…

There are a wide range of pitching stats available to the discerning baseball fan. From Wins and ERA to DRA- and xBACON, there’s something for all tastes. In this post I’ll introduce a new stat, xxxFIP, which is definitely NSFW (Not Safe For Wise decision-making).

Before diving into the details of xxxFIP, let’s discuss its predecessors and what they are trying to measure. Read the rest of this entry »

Much has been made of the “juiced ball era” which we currently inhabit. Decreased drag on the ball along with an increase in-ball bounciness means that fly balls are carrying further, rewarding hitters with more home runs than ever before. This change has coincided with increases in strikeout rates which can be partially explained by pitchers throwing harder, but also may be due to more hitters selling out for a home run. There are now fewer balls in play than ever before, and many fans no longer enjoy this Three True Outcomes style of baseball.

Deadening the ball is a proposed solution to ballooning home run rates. Introducing a deadened ball along with measures to limit the dominance of pitchers (such as shrinking the strike zone) could increase the number of balls in play, improving the aesthetic value of baseball for many viewers as discussed on this site in a recent article. But what would baseball with a deadened ball actually look like? How much would the ball have to be deadened to return home run rates to those seen in past years? Would deadening the ball disincentivize strikeouts more strongly than the juiced ball? Which hitters would be the biggest winners and losers in a season with a deadened ball?

I aim to investigate all these questions in this article, so without further ado, let’s dive right in. Read the rest of this entry »

People have always been looking to understand what makes a good pitch. With advances in pitch tracking technology and computing power, we can begin to use large amounts of data to answer this question more definitively. I’ve created a model called PitchingBot which uses machine learning to try and find what makes a good pitch.

Machine learning describes a general class of algorithms that are very flexible and “learn” patterns from large amounts of data. This means I don’t have to tell PitchingBot what I think a good pitch is, but instead I can give it a load of pitches (and the results of those pitches) and it will train itself to recognize a pitch that gives good results.

I intend to investigate a couple of key questions:

Does PitchingBot reach the same conclusions as conventional wisdom about what makes a good pitch?

Naively, I would expect a good pitch to have the following qualities: high velocity, plenty of movement, and good location in the corner of the strike zone. I will look at whether these are true for PitchingBot and how the definition of a good pitch changes with the ball/strike count.

Can we meaningfully compare and evaluate pitchers using PitchingBot?

Are the pitchers who are best according to PitchingBot those who get the best results? PitchingBot isn’t very useful if it does not agree with real pitcher performance. Read the rest of this entry »