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Baseball’s Top Staffs Have Come Around On The High-Spin Fastball

When baseball welcomed the new Statcast technology to every major league stadium in 2015, the system’s Doppler radar began tracking an underlying pitching skill: spin rate. Teams and players were suddenly armed with new data to study and optimize. They were able to quantify long-held beliefs about pitch characteristics, like “late life” and “rise,” and […]

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Bryce Harper Is Hitting Like An MVP Again

The early-season noise around such unexpectedly great hitters as Brewers stud Eric Thames has pulled attention away from the return of another prodigious slugger: Washington Nationals right fielder Bryce Harper. Harper is making his triumphant comeback from the injuries that plagued him in 2016, and the advanced metrics show he’s ready to deliver another MVP-level […]

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Bryce Harper Is Hitting Like An MVP Again

The early-season noise around such unexpectedly great hitters as Brewers stud Eric Thames has pulled attention away from the return of another prodigious slugger: Washington Nationals right fielder Bryce Harper. Harper is making his triumphant comeback from the injuries that plagued him in 2016, and the advanced metrics show he’s ready to deliver another MVP-level […]

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Baseball’s New Pitch-Tracking System Is Just A Bit Outside

There’s a good argument to be made that MLB launched the new sports–data revolution in 2006, when it introduced PITCHf/x. The technology used cameras to measure the velocity, position, and break of every pitch in real time, transforming how sabermetricians analyzed the sport. But this season, PITCHf/x was phased out in favor of Statcast, a […]

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Baseball’s New Pitch-Tracking System Is Just A Bit Outside

There’s a good argument to be made that MLB launched the new sports–data revolution in 2006, when it introduced PITCHf/x. The technology used cameras to measure the velocity, position, and break of every pitch in real time, transforming how sabermetricians analyzed the sport. But this season, PITCHf/x was phased out in favor of Statcast, a […]

Continue reading