Kosuke has been excellent so far. Heck of a way to debut with the home run on Opening Day (plus the first-pitch double), followed up by more solid baseball.
Here are his numbers for the first week of 2008
G 6
PA 24
AB 19
H 8
R 5
BI 5
2B 3
3B 0
HR 1
TB 14
BB 5
HP 0
SO 4
AVG .421
OBP .542
SLG .737
SB 1
CS 0
PO 17
A 0
E 1
Obviously, one week is meaningless, but this is fun. Here's how he ranks in various categories in the National League. Many of these are ties.
OBP 2
OPS 4
XBH 5
AVG 7
BB 7
SLG 9
TB 11
R 12
RBI 13
H 13
HR 19
He doesn't lead the league in anything, but he's on every leaderboard (to borrow a golf term).
From the PITCHf/x data, his plate locations
Looks very disciplined and doesn't chase a lot of pitches out of the zone(s). Kosuke does take some strikes, and has shown a slight tendency to strike out - but nothing troubling. Fukudome is seeing 3.21 pitches per PA, which is 66th out of 105 qualified NL'ers. Call him selectively aggressive, I guess.
Here's the spin movement (in inches). As with the above chart, this is from the catcher's perspective - so Kosuke is on your right.
So far, he's just seen a few fastballs from southpaws. That will change this week. He has already seen a pretty good variety of breaking stuff and fastballs from the other side.
2 comments:
Harry, are you using your own tools to parse the MLB XML data? I'm starting to play around with them and have been considering doing some significant web development.
One of the things I was curious about was what kind of licensing terms MLB Advanced Media has for use of those feeds. I mean, I'm not planning on anything commercial, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on this and then have the heart (the data feeds) ripped out at the end.
Anyway, I'm happy to have found another Cubs fan who is into the raw data provided by MLB, and Josh Kalk's work on Pitch f/x.
The tools come from a short lineage - Adler's book Baseball Hacks, Mike Fast and my own modifications. A lot of credit goes to Alan Nathan, too.
MLB let's people do exactly what many of us bloggers are doing, and they support it actively. However, they don't want someone republishing the data as a search-able database - beyond what Josh has created, they're cool with that.
So, download it, analyze it, publish your findings, but don't republish/reproduce the data, and the feeds will remain.
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