baseball – Analytics In The Outfield

Bat Speed = Contact?

A question popped up in my mind recently: How does bat speed affect contact rate? We know that higher bat speed leads to better contact, but the question here is on making contact. Intuitively we’d think that more bat speeds leads to a little more time to make a swing decision and the ability toContinue reading “Bat Speed = Contact?”

Who is Jack Kochanowicz?

Jack Kochanowicz bursted onto the scene at the end of 2024 for the Angels posting a 3.99 ERA, 104 ERA+, 1.19 WHIP, and 3.8% BB%. He came up as a high groundball pitcher with the occasional strikeout. In 2025 he sports a 5.53 ERA, 74 ERA+, 1.59 WHIP, and 10.4% BB%, all well below whatContinue reading “Who is Jack Kochanowicz?”

(R)Shiny AAA Pitch Data

I first made an RShiny app in graduate school when I first discovered it in a course I was taking. Simple, yet powerful applications. Of course, I used baseball data for fun outside of my assignments. The goal was to look at pitch data and break it down by location. I wanted to bring thatContinue reading “(R)Shiny AAA Pitch Data”

What happened to HRendon?

Anthony Rendon was an All-Star, Silver Slugger and 3rd in MVP voting in 2019 with the Nationals. His injury issues with the Angels have been well documented, and he is on pace to play in the most games (over 58) with the Angels in 2024. What has interested me though is his lack of powerContinue reading “What happened to HRendon?”

Isolated OBP

The other day I was thinking about the metric ISO (Isolated Power) which is SLG minus AVG and thought about what a metric of OBP minus AVG would tell us. Of course someone already thought of this, namely Michael Salfino of The Athletic here. It always seems like someone smarter thinks of the good ideasContinue reading “Isolated OBP”

Why are Angels pitchers struggling with two strikes?

Introduction Generally having two strikes is favorable for the pitcher. Hitters are hitting 0.171 in 2023 with two strikes but the Angels are giving up a BA of 0.187. For an 0-2 count it is tougher with hitters hitting 0.151 but the Angels are giving up a league worst 0.209 BA. The question is simple:Continue reading “Why are Angels pitchers struggling with two strikes?”

Clustering Starting Pitchers

My favorite machine learning algorithms are unsupervised clustering. I think there is elegance in finding patterns in data that we don’t know about. Clustering is grouping similar data together in a data set when the groupings are unknown. This is based on how far away data points are from other groups and how close theyContinue reading “Clustering Starting Pitchers”