Very cool stuff there. I'd be curious to see how much BABIP gets affected by movement. I'm sure it's there somewhere, but I'd don't have the time right now to poke around.

i love how the michael jackson thread gets 300 posts, but this one about genuine baseball stuff gets just one comment.

i love how the michael jackson thread gets 300 posts, but this one about genuine baseball stuff gets just one comment.

::shrug::

I've been following the game more or less intensely since Mazeroski's home run... I reveled in James's Abstracts and truly appreciate the analytical work being done in so many quarters...

that said, the graphs don't do much for me, most probably because the work is beyond my competency.

that's my comment.

you know, it's cool, but there's an element of pseudo-precision about it (or, about the rhetoric of the prose used to explain the work)

Well, this is the sort of topic where most of the posters interested left the site to discuss elswhere, like Tango's blog.

This pitchfx stuff is pretty new; I have no idea what to make of it and little background knowledge with which to form an opinion. I have no idea what sense it makes to study pitches in this manner. I don't really see in the post or the comments how they account for the context of the curveballs (adjusting for batters, parks, other pitches in the sequence), but I assume they tackle this somewhere.

I would like to see more data on this one:

I think that the horizontal movement is important in same-handed at-bats and vertical in opposite-handed.

I thought the classic, traditionally sought-after curveball was the Koufax-style 12 to 6, whether you're a lefty or righty. So if more data bore out the author's conclusion, that would be an interesting finding.