Ike’s Baseball Blog: PITCHf/x summit

Out-geeking all other Saber-geeks!...A look inside the 1st Annual PITCHf/x Summit.

The purpose of my visit was to attend the 1st Annual PITCHf/x Summit, an event where sabermetricians, Sportvision, MLBAM, and team reps gathered to discuss the uses of this great new data set, and potential future data sets. I gave a talk largely centered around my previous post on corrections, and how measurements of C_d can be an indicator of data quality and a quantity from which we might be able to derive corrections, perhaps even on a game-to-game basis. I was really impressed with the willingness of Sportvision to discuss every aspect and gave us the chance to see it in action, which was really key for me in understanding how things work.

...HITf/x, a potential new system to track batted ball trajectories was also discussed, at great length. This would be another giant leap forward in available quantitative baseball data. Being a former pitcher, I’m philosophically less interested in such a system as I am in pitched ball trajectories, but as a physicist, it is highly intriguing. Having such a system as a compliment to PITCHf/x would be an enormous boon to the field of Sabermetrics.

Thanks to Rob Neyer