Thursday, March 17, 2016
wOBAcon
?Several years back, I ran DATA101 and DATA201 online classes. I had 21 students in all, some of whom you will know from the Straight Arrow readership, some were from MLB front offices, and others were just interested readers, from as far away as Korea if you can believe it. Once I joined the Cubs on an exclusive basis, I shut that down. Things have changed now as I talked about a few months back, so my Data classes are now back on the table as possibilities. I'm waiting to hear back from another opportunity first, as I don't want to reopen the Data classes just to shut them down. So, I'm in a bit of a holding pattern on that front.
Glenn Healey was one of those students. I don't take any credit for anything Glenn does or will do, as a lot of what Glenn does is beyond what I'm able to do (indeed, I would take a class from Glenn for some aspects of knowledge and expertise). I just find it cool that we intersected when we did back then, and here we are a few years later, and Glenn is going some great work that he can share with the public.
One of the challenges of having a function that uses more than two parameters is how to present that information. I find, and you can see it in Glenn's presentation, that showing it as two-dimensions, or a as a series of charts with 2-D will convey the idea in a more effective manner.
Take for example this one, which is based on an exit-speed (or rather exit speed as tracked by Sportvision, which really means speed 10 feet from home plate after launch) of 93mph:
First, he uses wOBA which is definitely the right choice in most of the cases of processing data like this. You can see where the HR are going, where the outs are going, and how they coincide with the standard fielder positioning.
He then shows different views of the data. I like the LHH/RHH one to show how fielder positioning is affected. Anyway, terrific stuff all-around.