Comments on: A Little Help From His Friends

By: Matthew Carruth

Matthew Carruth — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:23:55 +0000

Or that he’s a fly ball heavy pitcher (who naturally see lower BABIPs) who has pitched his entire career in two home parks that are both fly ball pitcher friendly.

Probably does not account for all of it, but…

By: Dave Allen

Dave Allen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:23:23 +0000

All of the batted ball location data comes from GameDay. Here it is for this game:

http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2009/month_07/day_06/gid_2009_07_06_balmlb_seamlb_1/inning/inning_hit.xml

The images were made in R.

By: Dave Allen

Dave Allen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:20:44 +0000

That is a good point. Over that many innings it is clear Washburn has the ability to depress his BABIP.

By: Josh Wexler

Josh Wexler — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:40:07 +0000

Over ~1800 career innings, Washburn has only seen 28% of his balls in play go for hits. So, perhaps we can give him a little more credit than we otherwise might.

By: joser

joser — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:56:03 +0000

At least nobody (here) is trying to hand some of the credit to Rob “Catcher ERA” Johnson….

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:29:21 +0000

yeah…..but. Sure the graphics are pretty neat AND Seattle does seem to have assembled a great defense. But by watching the game, you’d see he pitched great and induced weak contact over and over again. It’s not fair to the pitcher to insinuate luck and great fielding had so much to do with it.

By: Nick Kapur

Nick Kapur — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:59:18 +0000

This visual of Safeco is pretty much my favorite thing ever. Thanks for all the hard work this must have entailed!

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:31:01 +0000

Hey, i got to admit, I read this site every day and thought I was used to most of the tricks you guys pull….. ;)

But I’m really impressed by these visualizations – both here and on the Chris Davis post yesterday. Well done!

By: Decatur

Decatur — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:08:57 +0000

Most casual Seattle fans have no love for Washburn (though probably not USSMariner/Lookout Landing level hatred). Geoff Baker, the M’s excellent beat writer, wrote about this (and he writes from the more conventional wisdom, traditional fan perspective).

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2009427730_jarrod_washburn_sets_the_tone.html

By: Davicio

Davicio — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:08:32 +0000

Phenomenal graph/map, can you give some insight into how you built this? Data sources, software, etc.?