3 September 09
Lure Of PitchFX
We came home this evening and caught the final bit of the Giants game on the radio. They were playing the Phillies, and Brad Penny, who was pitching for the Giants for the very first time, was throwing a gem, shutting the Phillies out through 8 innings, the Giants going on to win 4-0. I was following the early part of the game using MLB Gameday, which has very nice visualizations of the trajectory of each pitch thrown. (“Whoa. Penny’s pitching well”, I thought).
A company called Sportsvision has been capturing this pitch-by-pitch data for a little over two years now; they have a set of high-speed cameras installed at every major league ballpark to track the flight of each pitch and compute the trajectory parameters. This system, which they call PitchFX, generates the data for the Gameday visualizations and for similar graphics shown on TV.
It turns out this PitchFX data is freely available from the MLB Gameday site (in tedious XML format), and at something like 500,000 pitches thrown each season in the major leagues, that is a lot of data. By now there are a number of good websites featuring this data — for instance, here is a set of graphs showing Brad Penny’s performance this evening.
If they gave PhDs for sabermetrics there’s room for hundreds of dissertations using the PitchFX data; it’s fun to think of what analyses one could do with the data. Once they get their image processing algorithms worked out, the folks at Sportsvision are aiming for a complete digital record of every game event, including where the ball gets hit and where the fielders move to on each play. Then we’d have thousands of baseball dissertation possibilities.
29 August 09
Consistency Out Of Change
Yesterday evening we went with Barbara to see the Sacramento River Cats play the Fresno Grizzlies. The River Cats lost the game 6-3, but ended up clinching the division then when the one team that had a mathematical chance of catching the River Cats in the remaining games of the season also lost. The River Cats have been playing in Sacramento 10 years now and have won their division 8 times. They have also gone on to win the Pacific Coast League championship 3 times so far. I am marveling at their success. This is Triple-A baseball: the whole point of the league is to develop players to go on and play at the major league level. You can’t have a classical team dynasty because the rosters at Triple-A are changing all the time, a hundred plus times each season. Any superbly talented player doesn’t stay at the Triple-A level for long to contribute wins for the team; instead he quickly gets promoted.
So how have the River Cats done it? I don’t know. They must have a very effective managerial office. But we can’t forget the loyal fan base. Go River Cats!
9 August 09
A Fine Day By The Bay
We went on an wonderful outing today to the Giants game in San Francisco, escaping the heat for a pleasant sunny SF day with the fog content to hang just outside the Gate, taking a lovely ferry ride from Vallejo direct to the ballpark, meeting up with our friend Barbara at the game and returning back to Davis with her, and best of all, watching the Giants come from behind and beat the Cincinnati Reds 4-2 in convincing fashion! The bullpen was solid, unlike last night’s meltdown.
I hope everybody’s Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbors’ Porch Day went according to plan.
30 April 09
What To Do About No Run Support
One of the things I love about baseball is the way quirky events occur with regularity. Today the Milwaukee Brewers were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates with the young pitcher Yovani Gallardo on the hill for the Brewers. Gallardo pitched extremely well, allowing only 2 hits with 11 strikeouts over seven innings. He was however getting no help from the Brewers’ offense and the score was 0-0 in the seventh. So Gallardo takes things into his own hands and hits a solo home run in the bottom of the seventh. Nobody scores any more runs, and the Brewers win 1-0.
We had dinner this evening at the taqueria and were watching ESPN Baseball Tonight there who had a story about Gallardo’s day. One of the stats they flashed was that only two other pitchers in the modern era had struck ten or more batters and had hit a home run to win the game 1-0: these would be Early Wynn for the White Sox in 1959 and Red Ruffing for the Yankees in 1932. These are the sort of figures that the various stats agencies take pride in pulling out of their databases, but I’m amazed at how much of this detail is available on the web through sites like Baseball-Reference.com. Here for instance is the complete play-by-play action for that Early Wynn game in 1959 (White Sox 1, Red Sox 0, with Wynn striking out 14).
20 December 08
New Band and Some Beisbol
I’m on my holiday break now and am among things doing some radio. I just got the necessary bits to get my Buddipole antenna to work on the 80 meter ham radio band and tonight was the first chance I had to try it out. Success! I had two contacts on 80 meters Morse Code, one to Idaho, another to Banning, California, the latter signals being especially strong.
Tuning up from there, I heard what sounded like a baseball game in Spanish on Radio Rebelde on 5025 kHz. Pica confirmed my identification of the sport. Cuban baseball! Very cool to hear, especially since we are deep into the off-season here in the United States.
19 November 08
Local Boy Makes Good, Part 2
Last year around this time we reported that Dustin Pedroia, Yolo County native who graduated from Woodland High in 2001, won the AL Rookie of the Year award. This year he did one better and won the AL Most Valuable Player award, hitting .326 with 17 home runs and 83 RBIs for the Red Sox. At a height of 5’9” at best he’s not your typically-sized ballplayer, either.
One of these months I’m going to have to browse through archives of Woodland’s local rag, The Daily Democrat, and read about some of Pedroia’s high school batting feats.
30 October 08
Soggy Victory
The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series this evening, resuming Game 5 of the series after a two-day rain delay, conditions getting too wet on the field in the middle of the 6th inning in the game on Monday. The Phillies have been around as a team for 126 years and have only won the World Series once before, in 1980. Indeed, the Phillies have lost more games over their history than any other professional sports team (something like 10,098 games at last count).
I am happiest most of all for Jamie Moyer, the soft-throwing Phillies pitcher who after 22 seasons in the majors finally gets a World Series ring. Age and guile beats youth and strength and all that — Moyer is just about to turn 46. He grew up a Phillies fan near Philadelphia, and when the team won the series in 1980, he skipped out on school to go to the victory parade! Now he will be in the Phillies’ second such parade.
22 October 08
It's All In The Name
The Tampa Bay Rays are going to the World Series, having clinched the American League pennant by beating the Boston Red Sox 3-1 in the seventh game of the ALCS Sunday. This game was quite a pitching matchup, and ended in thrilling fashion when the Rays brought in a young pitcher named David Price who had only seen action in five previous major league games to get out of a bases-loaded jam in the 8th inning and get the final four outs.
Not only was this the first time Tampa Bay has made it to the World Series, it’s the first time they’ve had a winning season, the team having finished in the cellar of the AL East 9 out of the 10 years the team been in existence. (The one year they weren’t last, 2004, they finished second-to-last.) It must have been their name: in all those prior years they were the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. This season they dropped the devil from their name, and major success follows.
On the other side of the theological divide, the Angels’ name has gotten clunkier over the years. Initially they were the Los Angeles Angels, then in 1965 they changed their name to the California Angels, then became the Anaheim Angels in 1997, and most recently changed their name in 2005 to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Ka-chunk. I suppose that’s to differentiate them from their cross-town rivals the Los Angeles Angels of Fontana. :)
4 September 08
Front Row Seats
We took our friends Fernando and Belen to their first baseball game ever this evening. Fernando is a postdoc from Spain I’ve been working with this year, and Belen is his sweetie; they’ll be headed back to Spain at the end of the month so we wanted to make sure they had the cultural experience of seeing a baseball game.
The game we went to was the Sacramento River Cats playing the Salt Lake City Bees in the first round of the Pacific Coast League playoffs. We ended up with seats in the very first row, on the right field foul line about 100 feet back from first base. It couldn’t be better for a field level view of the action.
It was hardly a pitcher’s duel though. There were many hits and a good number of home run — by the time we left the River Cats were losing 9-13. We were cheated though: our plan was to stay through the seventh inning stretch but they replaced “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” with “God Bless America” played on the sax. The horror of it all. That was very unfair to our guests.
30 June 08
One-Nil
Lots of sports action these past couple of days decided by the score of one to zero. In Oakland last night, the San Francisco Giants beat the Oakland A’s 1-0 behind the stellar pitching of Tim Lincecum who struck out 11, giving up 5 hits. The Giants only produced two hits, but that was enough to win. Lincecum’s record is now 9-1 with an ERA of 2.38.
Also last night, the L.A. Angels lost to the Dodgers 1-0. The Dodgers however never got a hit in the game. The only run came on a fielding error by the Angels’ pitcher. This is only the fifth time since 1900 that a major league team has won a game without getting a hit. The Angels however made up for it this afternoon and beat the Dodgers 1-0. Both teams got hits.
Best of all, Spain beat Germany today 1-0 in the finals of Euro 2008. We watched the match over at Mariachi’s. About 25 others were paying attention to the match in our favorite taqueria, most of them rooting for Spain. The decisive moment of course was striker Fernando Torres getting by defender Phillipe Lahm and getting his foot on the ball just before the arrival of goalie Jens Lehmann. Torres is 24, Lehmann is 38, playing in his last European championship — we thought that the age difference might have been a key factor, Torres having just more speed than the goalie. Pica has been thrilled the whole rest of the day by the result; the Spanish team just achieved something which hasn’t happened since she was growing up in Spain. And the team is young and talented — what’s next?