September 26, 2016

Defining Pops and Flies

What is a fly ball and what is a pop up? It always bothered me that Joe Buck would say, “That’s a pop up,”, and it would wind up 300 feet from the plate in the outfield. To me that’s a fly ball. Tom Tango looks at home StatCast will help define that, and for whom:

But analytically? SS and 2B position themselves normally 130 to 160 feet from home plate. SS and 2B are infielders. So, an air ball that is in the air for 5 seconds that travelled 150 feet would need to be an infield air ball of some sort, whether you call that an infield fly or infield popup or whathaveyou.

Alot of what we do is ORGANIZING data. That is what Barrels was all about: how do we organize well-struck balls? Everything we do is to try to organize data into some set of manageable categories. Without that, we are left with 100,000 unique batted balls (which they are, like snowflakes). But, that doesn’t help anyone.

So, first figure out if your audience is the VIEWER or the ANALYST. Then categorize appropriately. And if you have two masters, then you need two definitions. That’s just the way it works. As best you can, try to get them to overlap as much as possible. But sometimes, you can’t. And that’s when you need to create dual sets non-dueling metrics.

I’m reminded of genetics, with phenotype and genotype. The phenotype is what we can observe with the naked eye, height, body shape, etc. The genotype are the various underlying combinations that produce that result. We see batted balls as line drives, grounders, and flies, but there is overlap. StatCast can provide the DNA for each of those batted balls.

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