Change in Velocity

Dave Cameron finds out why velocity readings on pitches are up one MPH compared to last season. It is a technical issue:

I asked Mike Petriello of the MLB Statcast team for some clarification.

Mike noted that MLB hasn’t actually changed the point at which they’re measuring velocity, but that this year, the conversion from PITCHF/x to Statcast has been completed, and all the tracking data in Major League stadiums is now coming from the Statcast system. For the last two years, PITCHF/x cameras continued to capture data as they had previously, and since sites like ours and BrooksBaseball had been setup to collect data from the MLB logs during the PITCHF/x era, our sites continued to pull PFX data up through last year.

This year, however, with Statcast officially replacing PITCHF/x in the big leagues, the data being pulled publicly is now from the Trackman radar. While PITCHF/x velocity numbers were reported at a defined point along each pitch’s trajectory — usually at the 55 foot mark — so that velocity didn’t have to be calculated at every x/y point along the pitches path, Statcast outputs the highest velocity that Trackman records along the flight of the pitch, which due to physics, is going to be immediately after the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand.

So if you look at FanGraphs velocities this year compared to previous seasons, make a mental adjustment to bring them into sync.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2ozdLKh