Derek Jeter vs. Troy Tulowitzki
8 Comments Published by Colin Wyers on Friday, April 25, 2008 at 11:32 PM.
An extension of last night's fun with graphing.
I'm not saying. I'm just saying.
Labels: Baseball, Defense, Derek Jeter, Enhanced Gameday
Cool stuff. So are you saying that Tulo's a better fielder than Jeter? ; )
Just to make sure, each dot is the location of a ball turned into an out, right? Both pop flies and grounders? What exactly does the heat-mapping represent?
Thinking about it more, what I really want to know is how do these charts show that Tulo is a better fielder than Jeter and not just that he got more chances?
sky, Colin mentioned in his previous post that for his purposes, these dots were where the ball was fielded. No consideration was given to what happened after that. I would imagine a graph representing where the ball was fielded and only including plays resulting in outs would be much less dramatic a difference than this one even though Tulo is a significantly better fielder than Jeter.
Do you think the fact that A-rod might have better range than atkins could affect which balls jeter doesn't take to his right because a rod could be in a better spot to field them? Just a thought. Seems like your 3rd baseman could have an affect on the validity of this sort of data.
That's really cool I've always wanted to see a graphical representation of range. Although the dots on the right side, where the 2nd basemen would have been. I'm assuming that's where there was a shift for a lefty pull hitter.
It appears Jeter plays too shallow.
I think we need this graph for a team, then compare the infielders that way. Make each position a different color.
Then we can see the Akins/Tolo
and Jeter/Arod comparison easier.
Also how accurate is this data from the Pf/x. Is it just some guy guessing where the dot is? If it's the same guy that follows a team then that creates a bias. If it's the stadium's person then it shouldn't have much bias.
Lot of good questions/points here. I won't get to all of them just yet.
The "heat mapping" is a measure of how many plays were made at that spot - blue means more, red means less. It's hard finding a color mapping in ColorBrewer that both stands out well enough at the edges (where all the detail really matters) and makes some sort of intiuive sense. It's something I'm still doing a lot of playing around with.
As far as whether or not this means Tulo is better than Jeter, this doesn't prove it. All this measures is how good a player is at getting to batted balls, and even then we haven't looked at opportunities or other fielders.
Figuring out the impact of the third baseman's fielding on the shortstop is something I've looked at briefly in the past, but it certainly could bear more studying.
Pitch F/X stringers are by park, provided by the home team. Lacking any sort of a "reference" data pool to validate against, I have no idea how to even begin to test the data for accuracy. Everything has passed the basic smell test so far, at least.
As far as the shift - that's something I'd like to look at. Hitters I can think of that frequently encounter the shift are Giambi, Hafner, Ortiz and Thome. Is there someone I'm missing?
The Brewers seemingly put the shift on for nearly every player. They even put an extreme shift on with Derrek Lee at the plate. I haven't watched the Brewers as much this season as last year, but they do it more than any team I've ever seen by a very wide margin.