Evaluating the AFL All Stars: An Audio/Visual Experiment

November 3, 2014

At the Winter Meetings a couple years ago in Nashville, I happened to be sitting next to Kiley McDaniel — now himself the lead prospect analyst for this site — while he was looking over some video he’d recently taken of then-amateur prospect Lance McCullers, a right-hander now in the Houston system.

As a person who is both an idiot and also curious, I began asking McDaniel a number of simple-minded questions about McCullers and for what, specifically, McDaniel was looking as he went frame-by-frame through McCullers’ windup. I learned a considerable amount during that five- or ten-minute exchange — and ultimately asked questions that would have never previously occurred to me.

This past Saturday, I sat next to McDaniel again — in this case, behind home plate at Salt River Fields in Scottsdale, AZ, for the Arizona Fall League All-Star Game. Once again, I asked a number of idiot’s questions and, once again, McDaniel answered them (mostly) patiently.

What follows is an attempt to reproduce certain moments of that exchange. For five different pitcher-batter encounters during the AFL All-Star Game I’ve reproduced animated GIFs of relevant pitches. I’ve also included several minutes of audio of McDaniel commenting on particular aspects of the footage in question. For each of the encounters, the reader can push play for the corresponding commentary.

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1. Nick Howard, CIN (Profile) vs. Eddie Rosario, MIN (Profile)