Spray Charts for both batted balls, and fielded ball location are now available for all players from 2012 to 2013. All data for these charts is provided by Inside Edge.
Source: FanGraphs
There are a variety of different spray charts available and a number of filtering options for each. A little tip is you can click on any of the items in the legend to make them disappear / reappear on the chart.
Hang Time: A plot of the bucketed hang time of batted balls. Home runs are broken out separately, but all fly balls are categorized by hang time.
Batted Ball Type: A plot of all batted balls by the type of batted ball (fly ball, line drive, etc…)
Hit Type: A plot of all batted balls by the type of hit (single, double, etc…)
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Made Plays: A plot of all the plays a fielder successfully made and the rated difficulty of each play by Inside Edge scouts.
Missed Plays: A plot of all the plays a fielder failed to successfully field and the rated difficult of each play by Inside Edge scouts.
Made / Missed Plays: A plot of made plays and missed plays combined.
Please feel free to export / embed the charts for use outside FanGraphs.
If you notice any problems, or any potential funny looking data points, please let us know and we will investigate and get things fixed as quickly as possible!
Oh my, this is quite the Christmas present.
FanGraphs: Removing Your Superfluous Baseball Statistic Bookmarks One at a Time
Awesome comment, and so true.
First stop is Andrelton Simmons’ page to look at “plays made.”
you have to use your horizontal scroll bar to view that one
Fair enough. It’s glorious.
Second Stop is Raul Ibanez
These are great! Any plans to add ballpark dimension overlays?
FG: the gift that keeps on giving… and giving… gives some more
This is fantastic- thank you. Do you plan on releasing/is there any publicly available spray data for seasons prior to ’12-’13?
This is awesome. Thank you Dave! Fangraphs always pulls through in the clutch.
THIS IS AWESOME!
One request, would it be possible to filter batted balls shown by difficulty? For example, if I wanted to look at balls fielded without a ton of routine plays getting in the way, or see how many really easy plays the player missed.
This is the comment that I came to make.
The roughly 8000 plays that Simmons made on 90%+ balls, kinda overwhelm the more difficult plays that he made.
Would there be a way to use Hang Time and Distance data to arrive at a statistical likelihood of a ball falling in? While obviously the location the ball lands is a factor, all else being equal a ball with a low ratio of Hang Time to Distance should be more likely to be a hit since that indicates the ball is traveling at a high rate of speed in the horizontal vector.
I very much think so. I think there is a lot of fun to be had here.
The problem is that we have plots and not raw data, and computing with plots is a heck of a lot harder than computing with raw data. And to arrive at any sort of reliable likelihood, you’d have to use league averages for all batted ball types within a certain hang time to a certain area.
Just to add to my freneticism, we actually DO have the raw data in parsable form (it can be seen by viewing the frame source). Now the question is how downloadable/conclusion friendly it is. There also could be an easier way to do this that I’m not aware of yet.
an easier way would be if they (being FG) would release it in csv. Why not?
Yeah CSV would be wonderful. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t, but all I can tell is that as of now they haven’t.
I can’t find it either, but I’d sure like to see the data properly in csv or some other R-parsable form. Pretty please, rulers of Fangraphs?
How is that done? (As someone with as much interest in correlating some static aspects of the data with traditional offensive stats as you…just with less computer know how!)
It’ll take some computer know-how, basically you just have to view the HTML source code and then write a little custom parser for interpreting the data. Not really doable without at least a little scripting know-how.
Well, I might be updating UZR to incorporate hang time, rather than just the type of batted ball and the approximate speed (soft, medium, hard).
Ooooh, interesting….
Great stuff. A nice addition would be some sort of count for each of the categories to go along with the charts.
That’s cool, I didn’t have an exam to write or anything else to do this week.
This is awesome! Now I get to make a bunch of imperfect attempts to utilize this data.
Ian Desmond’s chart appears to be missing the 90-100% data
This should be corrected now.
Holy black dots, Batman! Is Chris Davis conspiring against us with the Penguin?
Thanks, Fangraphs!
Thank you, Overlord.
Wait.. these dots are where outfield balls are fielded, not where they land?
If you get time, take a look at Mike Trout’s fielding chart. Practically the only plays he misses are unfieldable or “red” rating.
http://www.fangraphs.com/spraycharts.aspx?playerid=4727&position=OF&type=fielding&pid2=4727&ss1=2013&se1=2013&ss2=2013&se2=2013&cht1=fielding_made&cht2=fielding_not&pos1=CF&pos2=CF
Jacoby Ellsbury. Fielding. Missed plays for 2013 as CF. Two yards up the third base line. Single. Bunt? Tough play for a center-fielder to make. 0% chance seems like a fair assessment. So why is it included in his missed plays?
Hi!
Is it possible to allow filtering by batted ball type (ground ball, flyball, line drive) and by rated difficulty? The entire spray chart graphic is a little overwhelming and makes it difficult to discern data points when populated with a full season’s worth of data.
This is neat.
Since it includes H and A together, it would be nice to have distance on FB and LD, or at least indicate on the chart with rings. Splits by stadium would also be nice. Obviously, there are many things that can be done to improve the usefulness, but it’s a good start and can’t argue with the price.
For fielding spray charts, ideally would like to compare 2 different players side by side … e.g. Bourjos “plays made” in CF versus Choo “plays made” in CF.
I can’t tell for sure … but doesn’t look feasible currently.
Sorry I’m confused–how do I access the charts?
Through the player pages, there’s a tab for spray charts
I’m confused about Manny Machado’s fielding chart – it has some dots in shallow RF. Are those from some wonky fielder shifts or what?
http://www.fangraphs.com/spraycharts.aspx?playerid=11493&position=3B&type=fielding&pid2=11493&ss1=2012&se1=2013&ss2=2012&se2=2013&cht1=fielding_made&cht2=fielding_not&pos1=3B&pos2=3B
Yea it looks like the product of a shift, since he has a lot of made plays over there and the Orioles are a shift-heavy team. I haven’t watched many O’s games specifically though, so I can’t give details on just how they shift.
I scrolled through the comments but didn’t see this request.
Is it possible to get the likelihood of an out being made data for batters?
It would be great if we could see the UZR (or DRS) run values for each of the fielded and missed balls.
The distances look in scale at a glance but the lines are not perpendicular. Is this an artifact of the display, or a flaw in the data gathering? If an artifact, is it possible to lock the aspect ratio on the display diagrams to preserve the proper scaling and orientation of the diagrams?
Yeah, this is just a display thing. I can re-size the charts to try and get things to look 90 degrees.
You can actually mess around with sizing the graph here (or by clicking on the menu in the graph and hitting the embed button)
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphframe.aspx?config=1&static=0&type=spray&num=1&h=450&w=450&players=9272&position=1B&mt=battedball&ss=2013&se=2013&cht=hittype&pos=&vs=ALL
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/u/images/scoresheet_fld_diagram.png
What are the chances this type of overlay could be added to this Mr. Mark-Appel-man? I realize this has already been asked on the comments, but I wanted to also post this link in order to give an example of the BP/BIS type of overlay the video scouts use…
Thanks!