It’s died down a bit, but last season there was a lot of hand-wringing by some baseball folks about “Analytics” gaining too much power in baseball. I want to discuss this topic and hopefully convince you that both “gut feel” and analytics have an important place in the game. In Continue Reading
General
Things that don’t neatly fit into the other topics
Ideas about Youth Baseball
This will be a departure from my usual talk about baseball aerodynamics. I am not a rare person who thinks baseball is good for kids. I heard the president of the Lobo Little League talk about what baseball teaches us on opening day in March, 2013, and I bought it Continue Reading
Seam-Shifted Wake Timeline Part 4
SSW moves to MLB Link to Part 1 Link to Part 2 Link to Part 3 March, 2020, I was invited to Blue Jays Spring training camp by Matt Buschman. I met separately with the MLB side and the MiLB side. There was an MiLB coach who I didn’t get Continue Reading
How to “Dial In” a Hack Attack to desired RPM and Velo: Post 75
Our high school owns a Hack Attack pitching machine. These machines have 3 solid wheels. We own the huge one that can do nearly anything. BUT, when you are operating it, any adjustment to the knobs alters RPM and velo at the same time, and often in the opposite way Continue Reading
Post 72b: Separation upstream of a seam.
In post 72, I presented the map below (this post won’t make a lot of sense if you haven’t read that). This post will be about the blue region. A seam in this region (roughly from -10º to -28º) can sometimes cause laminar separation farther forward. The average location is Continue Reading
Training Kids with Smart Baseballs: Post 71
Say you are the parent of a 14 year old pitcher and you want to explore the world of pitch design. You have seen the “smart baseball” ads and are curious about them, but what could you do with that information if you had it? I’m glad you asked. First Continue Reading
The Cubs and Seam Shifted Wake: Post 70
I identify strongly with the Cubs and Seam-Shifted Wakes, so it’s a good day. Sahadev Sharma published an article in The Athletic on April 11, 2021 about how SSW affects the Cubs pitchers. He had noticed something I had also noted: that compared to a lot of teams, the Cubs Continue Reading
PitchTracker: Post 69
Nice. One of the first challenges we encountered was a means to detect Seam Shifted Wake in pitches. Doing so requires a measurement of vertical and horizontal movement as well as spin metrics. Right now, if you are anyone other than a major league team (meaning you have a HawkEye Continue Reading
UMBA future
UMBA 2 is simply a first pass at solving a fairly complex problem. Unfortunately, I don’t believe the rest of the solution can be solved only on a computer. The research we’ve done so far has filled in one or two locations in our parameter space. That means that, of Continue Reading
Baseball’s Tower of Babel: Post 67
My dad is a preacher and I’m prone to religious references. Baseball has a lot of technical terms. Unfortunately, many quantities are know by 2-3 names and the problem grows every time we obtain a new metric. I’ve been at this for about 2 years and I am amazed how Continue Reading
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