Just like the fearless founder of this blog I am a huge Mets fan. I love baseball, and recently I’ve been absolutely awed at the advances being made in quantitating every aspect of the game. High-tech cameras in ball parks have enabled detailed measurements of every pitch. Not only can you measure pitch speed, but also location and flight path. You can follow horizontal and vertical movement of the ball from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove. The technology that does this is called PitchFX, and if you watch baseball on TV you may be familiar with some of the graphics that use it. But I am not the only person who finds it most useful for analyzing pitcher’s performances.

Today I am linking to an article demonstrating PitchFX analysis of a rookie Mets pitcher, Jon Niese. PitchFX is used to sort each pitch he made during Sunday’s game according to vertical movement, horizontal movement, and speed. The resulting graphs demonstrate that Niese’s pitches are classified into 5 separate types. Compared with analysis from previous Niese starts, we can see that he has added a new pitch (he had 4 types last time). He throws the new pitch at fastball speed, but it moves the opposite direction horizontally from his other pitches. Thus far, the use of additional pitches mirrors Niese’s progression through the minor leagues and his increased success in the majors. It will be interesting to compare these PitchFX results to those from future starts, to see if the pattern holds

I’ve also started to see mention of a technology called HitFX that does the same thing with batted balls. I am looking forward to seeing what new tools are developed next. The combination of science and baseball is an awesome thing.