APRTW wrote:

artie_fufkin wrote:

Chapman should be picking Yadi's elbow skin out of his teeth right now.

My guess is Jonny Gomes gets plunk next time around.  My personal pick would be bouncing one off of Cuto's helmet.

I'm not sure Cueto will ever pitch against the Cardinals, and I doubt he'll ever pitch in St. Louis. The Reds had to make up some story last year about a "family emergency" when the Reds went to St. Louis. Cueto wasn't even supposed to pitch, and he couldn't even handle sitting in the dugout. And the family emergency was suddenly resolved and never spoken of again after the series.
Cueto got bombed in a rehab start this week when the Reds were about to go to St. Louis. Coincidence, or does this guy just soil himself every time he thinks about the Cardinals?

"did you somehow miss the crux of the latest kerfuffle"

No, I got it. And I'm trying to avoid it by being funny. Or at least trying to be funny.

Here's the response from Dan Brooks:

"I would say, yes, Boggs' fastball does have quite a bit of movement. Horizontal movement is the amount, in inches, that the ball deflects off a straight "no-spin" course due to the magnus force, which is the force exerted on the baseball caused by how it spins.

There's no general rule for lots of movement or little movement, but I would say that shows pretty sizable movement, in the sense that it should be easily observable with the correct camera angle.

When you watched the game live, was the camera angle offset? An offset camera angle (which is common in many baseball markets) can often cause pitches to appear deceptively straight. Compare it to a start, say, at Fenway, which uses an over-the-head camera angle, and your perception might change dramatically. "

So it might be that I was wrong in this case, and that at least three of the pitches that looked hittable on TV actually came with a lot of horizontal motion.  I'm still interested to know how cameras and computers can reliably and accurately measure "the amount, in inches, that the ball deflects off a straight "no-spin" course", but I will tentatively conclude that Boggs's fastball might not be as straight as I was thinking.

here's more:

"If you want to know how it's done, Alan Nathan will be giving a very detailed talk at the Sabermetrics conference in Boston next month (saberseminar.com)... or you could just look on his website, "The Physics of Baseball". The basic idea is that two asynchronous cameras take pictures of the ball and fit a least squared trajectory model to those pictures. The more detailed description of how those numbers are calculated can be found at his site.

The error is fairly low, and this is easy enough to see with your eye when ESPN or Sportvision overlays the output of the algorithm with the video, as they have done in broadcasts numerous times.

Camera angle really only effects human judgments of these things and not so much the information computed by the PitchFX system.

It's true that he does leave some pitches over the plate, but most pitchers do from time to time. I suppose it's tough to know whether they were truly "meatballs" without more context.

You should know that these numbers do not really measure "break", as you are describing it in that thread. Because curveballs "break" in the direction that the ball will head due to gravity, their vertical and horizontal movement due to spin deflection often appear exaggerated. For example, a fastball with a lot of vertical deflection will not really rise, but it will appear much "straighter" from a first-base view than a fastball with less vertical deflection. "

artie_fufkin wrote:

APRTW wrote:

artie_fufkin wrote:

Chapman should be picking Yadi's elbow skin out of his teeth right now.

My guess is Jonny Gomes gets plunk next time around.  My personal pick would be bouncing one off of Cuto's helmet.

I'm not sure Cueto will ever pitch against the Cardinals, and I doubt he'll ever pitch in St. Louis. The Reds had to make up some story last year about a "family emergency" when the Reds went to St. Louis. Cueto wasn't even supposed to pitch, and he couldn't even handle sitting in the dugout. And the family emergency was suddenly resolved and never spoken of again after the series.
Cueto got bombed in a rehab start this week when the Reds were about to go to St. Louis. Coincidence, or does this guy just soil himself every time he thinks about the Cardinals?

I normally would call any talk of revenge on Cueto BS.  In baseball the key to revenge is hiding it so it can be denied.  In this case Cueto ended a players career.  I think TLR will go directly after him.  The pitching staff liked Larue. If TLR doesnt order they will take care of it anyway.  If Carp is pithcing that day it will be war.

"In this case Cueto ended a players career.  I think TLR will go directly after him.  The pitching staff liked Larue. If TLR doesnt order they will take care of it anyway.  If Carp is pithcing that day it will be war."

If he can't even summon the courage to travel to St. Louis and sit in the dugout, I'd perpetuate the notion of revenge until the moment he stops looking over his shoulder. Then I'd sign Mike Tyson (the boxer, not the mediocre shortstop) to a 1-day contract and have him bash in Cueto's skull.

artie_fufkin wrote:

"In this case Cueto ended a players career.  I think TLR will go directly after him.  The pitching staff liked Larue. If TLR doesnt order they will take care of it anyway.  If Carp is pithcing that day it will be war."

If he can't even summon the courage to travel to St. Louis and sit in the dugout, I'd perpetuate the notion of revenge until the moment he stops looking over his shoulder. Then I'd sign Mike Tyson (the boxer, not the mediocre shortstop) to a 1-day contract and have him bash in Cueto's skull.

I would think a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick would be more fitting.

artie_fufkin wrote:

"If you want to know how it's done, Alan Nathan will be giving a very detailed talk at the Sabermetrics conference in Boston next month"

Ooooh. Sign me up.

"The basic idea is that two asynchronous cameras take pictures of the ball and fit a least squared trajectory model to those pictures."

We had pork chops for dinner three times last week.

i was in grad school taking a seminar covering some papers that had some pretty hairy math.  3 or 4 of us were prediscussing the discussion in the computer lab, one of the students who is now tenured at U Hawaii, Manoa, made some remark about my rudimentary math skills and my inability, therefore, to understand.  faceplant.

it was humbling and partially true.  along the lines of what TK was getting at, sometimes if you understand the big picture and how it relates to your specific pondering, that can be good enough, especially if you have done due diligence to make sure that the stuff you don't understand was done by super-reputable people and is known to be replicable. 

to me, while i have had to work through a least square method in a stats class, nowadays it is a button you push in a statistical package.  i'm not sure why the cameras have to be asynchronous, and not simply in two slightly different positions.  in any case, i am sure that the precision of the cameras' ability estimate location is debatable, just as different radar guns estimated the speed of chapman's pitch last week to be either 103 or 106 mph.

APRTW wrote:

I normally would call any talk of revenge on Cueto BS.  In baseball the key to revenge is hiding it so it can be denied.  In this case Cueto ended a players career.  I think TLR will go directly after him.  The pitching staff liked Larue. If TLR doesnt order they will take care of it anyway.  If Carp is pithcing that day it will be war.

i'd like to go to more games just to hang up sings, if nothing else.

"if it quacks like a girl, and kicks like a girl, call it a girl.
Cardinal Nation welcomes Janey Cueto to Busch Stadium"

(with a big bullseye target painted on his head)

if that's not clever enough i'm sure we could brainstorm something.

"one of the students who is now tenured at U Hawaii, Manoa, made some remark about my rudimentary math skills and my inability, therefore, to understand.  faceplant."

I can see why you were embarrassed. I'm sure this person has gone on to do great things in the mathematical analysis and development of better suntan lotion.
I love baseball statistics. They're useful tools. But I don't think they'll ever entirely replace observation and experience. A couple of decades ago, there was some geek in a white coat who sought to prove a curveball is an optical illusion because, scientifically, his calculations concluded the human arm is not equipped to throw a baseball with enough force given the weight and density of the ball, the height and shape of the laces, the distance between the catcher and the mound, the prevailing wind currents in the northen hemisphere between the Tropic of Cancer and the 30th parallel, blah, blah, blah.
I don't know what ever became of the study or the scientist, but there are probably 20 million men in this country who have stood in a batter's box and can tell you a curveball is real.

tkihshbt wrote:

Max wrote:

tkihshbt wrote:

I am not a computer wizard or a physicist so I have no clue, but I don't think it's to be viewed skeptically just because. I also have no idea how the Hubble Telescope captures pictures of the Horsehead Nebula. I just go with it.

This is clearly the root of one of the issues that you and I argue about, and frankly I suspect that it might have had something to with your issues with Mags, as he was also an academic who liked to acknowledge that there are multiple ways to view an issue.  One thing we are supposed to do is to encourage critical thinking: don't believe something just because a famous scientist or expensive machine says it is so.  There are plenty of cases where scientists and machines are wrong, where data are fudged one way or the other, and even outright fraud.  Examine only the most rigorously supported science, and there is still a curious phenomenon known as the decline effect. 

There is a good article for the educated layman here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

I fully acknowledge that MLB's system could have some flaws and maybe someday we'll have technology that gets it down to the millimeter. But, this is the only thing we have right now and since all I can do is watch on my television, I think it's superior than my eyes and I'd rather go off that.

And if you wanted to show examples of bad science, all you had to do was link to something from Heritage or the American Petroleum Institute.

those are pseudoscience organizations, that start with a conclusion and then cherry pick evidence that fits.  or, as i tell me students, all of the evidence for intelligent design could fit comfortably in one trash can.

"i think i hit on her once, at the end of a party when i was a bit drunk"

This is what's known in my profession as "burying the lede."
Sadly, it appears that would be the only thing you buried with this woman.

Most of the people I've talked to who are heavy into sabermetrics were kids who loved baseball but never got a chance to play, and I was that person in high school.

Why high school baseball, of all sports, leads to stereotyping and confirmation bias is lost on me, especially when sportswriters go out of their way to make the Aaron Miles' of the world feel more special. It requires less athleticism than any other team sport and is the only one where a fat drunk or an albino midget can be World Series MVPs.

Last edited by tkihshbt (4/26/2011 9:51 am)