I’ll be honest here: Most of my articles tend to be pretty long, pretty much because I love hearing myself talk. (Or, to be even more pathetically accurate in this case, I love reading what I have typed.) This leads to complicated, ambitious, and most of all infrequent entries to the articles section of NSBB that drone on and on about correlation coefficients, persistence, and sample sizes. Let me assure my beloved fans – if I have any, and if I do you guys really should get out more – that I’ll still probably write the occasional long, complicated, and droning article. There will just be a bunch of shorter, mostly informative (as opposed to analytical) articles in between. What’s the impetus for the sudden change in my work quota, and what will these articles entail? Read on.

Here’s a sample of what can be done quickly & easily with this data. While these prospect/player reports will become a regular addition to the site, the format of these spotlights is very much a work in progress. With that in mind, I’d welcome any and all feedback about the layout and/or content. Would you like to see more tables and fewer graphs, or vice versa? Is there some information or breakdown I’m ignoring that you’d like to see included, such as the same info split into platoon advantages? Is there a specific player you’d like to see a report on? If so, feel free to hop in the forums and let me know. Anyway, without further fanfare, here’s the beta test for the prospect spotlight:

Above you’ll find two graphs plotting a few key batting stats (OBP/SLG/OPS and K/BB ratios) for top Cubs prospect Felix Pie as the 2006 season has progressed. (Click the image thumbnail to view the full-resolution image.) For the most part I’ll leave the comments to a minimum and let you guys draw your own conclusions, but I will say a few quick words now and then. In this case, I’d say that there seems to be some cause for concern over Pie. His overall stats have been slowly but steadily declining since mid-late April. Of particular worry is the fact that his K/BB ratio is quickly deteriorating, mostly due to rising strikeout totals.

Here are a couple graphs concerning Pie’s patience at the plate and his pitch recognition. The first one shows a series of percentages: How often Felix makes contact on his swings, how often he swings at pitches in the strike zone, and how often he swings at pitches out of the strike zone. The second chart tracks his take/swing ratio, as well as the total percentage of pitches thrown to him that were in the strike zone. As you can see, Pie’s contact ratio has pretty much remained constant around 80% all season, and there hasn’t been much change in the rate at which he’ll chase a pitch out of the zone. What has changed, however, is his T/S ratio. The good news is that it’s going up; the bad news is why it’s going up. Felix is taking more pitches, but most of those extra takes are pitches in the strike zone.

The final “tracker” graph shows how Felix’s GB/FB/LD/PU split has progressed. As you can see, there isn’t a lot to say here, though it is interesting to note that his BABIP has gone down as his LD% has gone up slightly.

One really interesting thing we can do with this data is see how a player uses different parts of the baseball field: How often does he go the other way? What’s his batting average when he takes a pitch back up the middle? Where is he hitting with the most power? Rather than make several different graphs with all that information, I put it into a table. Hopefully the meaning of each field is clear. If not, feel free to ask me on the forums.

The first thing to note is that Felix does most of his damage when he pulls the ball. The vast majority of his hits go to right field, thankfully so considering that’s where almost all of his power is concentrated. It doesn’t look like he’s doing too well in the gaps just yet, though it’s interesting to note that he fares slightly better to the LCF gap than his pull gap.

Strike Zone Information

The final two graphs show the frequency at which Felix swings and makes contact, respectively, in the various regions of the strike zone. It looks as if he’s locked in on anything belt-high but not as great with pitches high or low. This could just be bias in the way the data is collected, however. (The person recording the data may fudge any pitch put in play towards the center of the zone and do the opposite for pitches missed or not swung at.)

-- Matt Christenson