Bill James Baseball IQ App

Thanks to a recommendation on The Book blog, I’ve been playing around with the Bill James Baseball IQ App today while staring out at the snow.

It’s yet another product that reinforces my view that graphical representations of data are often the most engaging way to present stats, whether it’s a heat map of pitch locations to a specific hitter, a Win Probability graph of a game that swung like a pendulum or another brilliantly idiosyncratic Craig Robinson special.

I was following the Pakistan-England Test match this morning and turned to this Bill James app while thinking about bowling and pitching. 

Pacemen in cricket are always being told to aim for the top of off-stump and there’s a clear similarity in the way that a pitcher’s bread and butter pitch is a good knee-high fastball on the outside corner.

Roy Halladay is the current gold standard when it comes to consistently strong pitching and this heat map of his pitch locations from 2007 to present to right-handed hitters shows one of many reasons why.

He pounds away at the outside corner, often just off that corner in fact, like Glenn McGrath used to metronomically hit the top of off-stump.

He tends to move about the zone more to left-handed hitters, although that doesn’t make life any easier for them.

Much as few batsmen miss McGrath, I’m sure there are plenty of hitters who will be glad to see the back of Halladay. Unfortunately for them, he’s not going anywhere any time soon, allowing the rest of us to enjoy watching, or using apps like this to analyse, a master at work.