Tuesday, August 07, 2018
Time to 90 Feet, with Decoil time
?A couple of months ago, I talked about Time to 90 Feet. 90 feet is synonymous with baseball, but no player actually needs to run 90 feet to be safe.
Knowing a player's time to 90 feet is useful because it gives us a standard. The NFL Combine for example uses the 40 yard dash time (120 feet). Naturally in baseball, we'd use 30 yards, or more naturally, 90 feet. In baseball, the "starting clock" only makes sense in tagging up a base (think a sac fly). That's because everyone starts at the exact same spot, leaves at the exact same time, and runs the exact same line. Unfortunately, we don't have enough data in this particular situation. So we rely on the abundance of data from a batter-as-runner.
However, for a batter, none of these conditions is true. First you have the LHH/RHH difference, so it's clearly two different track lines of different lengths. But even within the universe of RHH only and LHH only, where you stand in the batter's box gives you a different length. Finally, a slap hitter like Ichiro or a power hitter with a big cut or follow through like Stanton start running toward first at different times.
So, that's what the previous thread was about, getting everyone measured against 90 feet. That satisfies a particular objective just to get the fastest player on a common scale. In practice, we sometimes want to include baseball things, like the swing. If Ichiro takes less time to decoil than Stanton, then that's an advantage that we don't want to wash away. In other words, if Ichiro can get a 0.4 second head-start, then all the more power to him.
While we can't directly measure it, we can estimate it. Since the first step (3 feet) that a player takes is not really that wide a distribution, or even a pure speed component, we can take a player's time from point of contact to moving 3 feet toward the base, and subtract out this "constant" time. While there is a margin of error, this is swamped by the decoil time distribution. That is, if we assume every hitter takes around the same time moving 3 feet (0.40 seconds +/- 0.02 seconds), the remaining time, what we call the Decoil Time results in a range from 0.16 to 0.59 seconds. And, we get the unsurprising answer that the leader in 2018 in Decoil Time is Ichiro. Aaron Judge is near the bottom at 0.57 seconds. The two combined, which is what we DO measure, we call the Key Step. So for Ichiro, it would come in at 0.56 seconds, while Judge would be 0.97 seconds. As you can see, whether we remove 0.40 or 0.38 or 0.42 for either player, the conclusion won't change.
?
In a straight run to 90 feet, Buxton would be neck and neck with a few runners at 3.73 seconds to run 90 feet. Indeed, he might even finish behind a runner or two. But with his swing, when you include Decoil, he's hard to beat at 3.92.
Unless of course you are a LHH, in which case, those 5 fewer feet a LHH has to run would be enough for Dee Gordon to potentially take over. We'll talk about that next time.
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