Author Archive

Using Count Data To Find Unsustainable Performances

In this project I attempted to find the counts in which hitters were most successful during the 2019 season, and then find the hitters that were ending their at-bats in these counts the most in an effort to identify which players could potentially be under- or overperforming both in the past and going forward.

The data for this project was gathered by scraping Baseball Savant, which I used to create a dashboard to assist me in my analysis. I could not analyze every individual outlier performance from 2019 in this post, but the visualization I created can be accessed here, and the Github Repository for my project can be found here so you can take a look for yourself!

As the chart above shows, MLB hitters performed their best in counts with one or no strikes and their worst in two-strike counts. Using this data, I then explored individual performances in each count on the dashboard I had built to attempt to find outliers and discover who was ending at-bats in each count the most. Once players were identified, I would investigate why their performances were outliers and if their performances were sustainable. This post will highlight two of the more interesting unsustainable cases in hitters I found: Paul DeJong and
Javier Báez. Read the rest of this entry »