Tangotiger Blog

Going forward, where is the preferred and supported location to get raw target tracking data?

Baseball Savant is the public facing site for typical users and research-heavy users, like myself.

Bill Petti has a THT article on using the Savant query:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/research-notebook-new-format-for-statcast-data-export-at-baseball-savant/

One question I had is this:

Don’t mean to complain because this is great stuff, and I’m grateful that MLB is willing to share so much data. But one thing I noticed is the umpire field is null in the downloads. Last year the umpire ID was there.

Is that an oversight or an intentional removal?

That would be… neither!

Let me give you a bit of background, so that maybe it’ll cover some other questions that pop up.

In the old world, Daren was deriving his data from… I don’t know how many different data sources.  Let’s call this number… quatlu.  So he stitched this data together.  It’s alot of quatlu to stitch together.

What I’ve been working in the offseason is to tie-in all these data sources.  Not only that, but to resolve any kind of inconsistency, make it go through extra quality checks, etc.  This is the data warehouse.  Think of it as analogous to Retrosheet, but with tracking data.

I identified all the columns that I needed, generated the warehouse.  And after each iteration, Daren and the rest of the team would say “can you add this field?”.  So the whole thing ballooned to have 2x the number of columns I started with.

UmpireID was never part of the requests!  It’s really that simple.  So, when Daren went to flip the switch, he noticed a few gaps.  That was one. There were a few others.

So, the next iteration, which, I dunno when that will be, say 2 to 4 weeks, will have more data in there.  It’s just part of the process of this transition, while spending half our time doing other work unrelated to this.  So we end up with a delivery window that is twice what we wanted.

Anyway, so that’s how it all works.