Re-creating some graphs
I have mentioned FanGraphs a ton on here. It’s such an amazing resource for anyone who enjoys baseball and advanced statistics. But there is another website that’s equally as amazing: baseballsavant. They do an amazing job with displaying not only the data, but visual representation of the data. They also have a number of stats that can be found there and not anywhere else, including expected stats.
Two of the charts I love the most are their spray charts and their OAA charts. Showing how they hit the ball and how well they field it in a visual is fantastic. My only problem: I can’t seem to look at both at the same time! So, I set out to do that. I also wanted to make a few changes/additions.
The hit spray chart has a wonderful color coding. I really enjoy it. Each color is associated with an outcome. But I wanted to use the coloring to display the the exit velocity instead. I needed to then figure out how to show the different outcomes. I liked the idea of the bigger the symbol, the better the hit. So I went that route.
The OAA charts have been slightly more work and are still a work in progress. For them, I wanted to also include the “route” that the player took as well as where they ended. I copied the awesome folks at baseballsavant and used the size as the number of attempts and the coloring as the OAA in that spot. In my particular plot right now, it makes it a bit muddled with the start, end, and route. So I just have the start and route. Looks slightly incomplete, but I do also like it.
To help with some of muddled deal, I created a GIF so that the routes pop up after the start. Here’s an example for Riley Greene 2022:
Not too bad! I think for a start it is looking alright. The OAA chart does definitely need work though.
AS much as I liked that, I was curious about what else I could. My first thought — what about splits by batting left handed or right handed. Seemed easy enough, so I added the little bit of coding. And, really, this makes sense for players who are switch hitters. But it was fun to do. Here’s Jeimer Candelario in 2022:
My final thought: what about viewing batted ball type? What’s it all look like for balls on the ground? Line drives? Fly balls? This is interesting because you can compare this to how shifts are performed on specific people. Once again, here’s Riley Greene from 2022:
I would like to spend a few sentences on this final plot. Riley Greene really seems to like to pull the ball when on the ground and his fly balls go the other way, with line drives covering the whole field. So I want to compare this to a couple of others, Miguel Cabrera in 2016 and Mike Trout in 2018.
I want to bring these up because they seem like they could be pretty good indicators of what Riley Greene is capable of doing. If he can pull the ball in the air just a little bit more, he could be in for some really big years. But that might be a post for another day.
