No Maas: Interview with Pitchf/x guru and Hardball Times author, Josh Kalk

Don’t have time to read all of this now (wha?...you think tracking down all Eddy Current Suppression Ring cuts is easy?)

2) The system is obviously still a work in progress. How accurate do you feel the basic tracking data to be at this point? Is the 2008 data more reliable than 2007?

We physicists like to talk about accuracy and precision a lot when talking about data. The PITCHf/x data is very precise, but not very accurate. What I mean by that is the PITCHf/x data is very consistant if you are looking at data in just one park but not very accurate when comparing data from park to park. It turns out that this is a very common problem to have and there are known ways of correcting data like that to make the data accurate and precise.

The 2008 data is better than the 2007 data in several ways. First, the operators of the system will sometimes mess up and actually grab the catcher thowing the ball back to the pitcher and that has happened much less in 2008. Second, in 2007 there are many games where PITCHf/x tracked an inning or two and then nothing for the rest of the game. In 2008, outages like that are much less frequent and when they do occur they last for a much shorter period of time. The data doesn’t appear to be more precise however (though that really isn’t a problem with the 2007 data) and the park to park accuracy is only minimally improved.

Thanks to Friar Forecast.