Back to player cards

The first thing listed is the player's name, the last team he has played a game for, what hand he throws with, and what hand he bats with. Only players with a minimum of 100 pitches seen while PITCHf/x was on are listed. Be a little careful looking at the numbers below as some of them have very small statistics.

The first table labeled Pitch Averages shows how the player faired against different types of pitches. Each row represents a different pitch as classified by my clustering algorithm. The first thing listed is the type of pitch. If a batter hasn't seen a certain type of pitch it isn't listed in the table (e.g. if a batter never faced a knuckleballer no knuckleball row will be displayed). The number of pitches seen of that type follows and the percentage of that type the batter has seen. Next, right left splits for each type are shown. The league average percentage is reported after that. This is intended to give an idea of how teams are working a certain batter. If a batter has seen a certain pitch 10% more than league average that probably is what teams think his weakness is. The next column is "In Play/Strikeout" which is the total number of that type of pitch the batter put in play or struck out on. His batting and slugging averages are then calcuated with this as the denominator. It is a little bit unfair to add in strikeouts to his in play outs but it is also a little bit unfair to leave them out. Hopefully, this will get resolved with the next update when I add some sort of contact percentage.

The next table is labeled Pitch Type by Count and it is a breakdown of the type of pitch thrown to the batter on each count. A few things to look for here. First, if the batter is a first ball fastball type hitter you might see a lower perecentage of first pitch fastballs. If the hitter has trouble with a certain off speed pitch you might see that more when the count gets in the pitchers favor. Again, some of these statistics are pretty small so small sample size warnings apply.

Lastly the plots are shown. Unlike the pitchers where I moved into a uniform reference frame here the real final position is used. Each plot shows all the pitches that batter faced for a certain type of pitch. These plots can get messy (especially the fastballs) but there is tons of useful information here. First, is the batter swinging at stikes or not? I have added the strikezone as MLB rules indicate but as John Walsh points out, the called strikezone is slightly different. Hopefully in the next build of the code I will add a modified strikezone. Anyway, besides what the batter is swinging or not swinging at you can also see where his happy zone is. If he is hitting a lot of doubles and home runs on balls near the bottom of the strikezone that is very useful information. Again, hopefully in the next build I will be adding a table trying to quantify where each batters happy zone is.