Lind Finishing Up with a Bang
Last night Adam Lind capped a break-out season with a three-HR burst. Together with Marco Scutaro and Aaron Hill, he provided some excitement in an other wise forgettable year for the Toronto fans.
Lind has emerged as a major power threat. Those three bring his total up to 35 and his wOBA of .394 makes him one of the ten best hitters in the AL this year. Here I display his HRs in a way I started doing over at Baseball Analysts. Along the bottom I plot the horizontal location of the pitch he hit for a HR. Lind stands to the right of the image as a lefty. Then I connect that point to the horizontal angle of the HR. I color coded the lines by pitch type, with the same colors used here in the pitchf/x section. Just to make things a little simpler I grouped all fastballs (four-seam, two-seam and cut) into one group.
Lind has great plate coverage, hitting HRs on pitches across most of the plate. In addition he has power to all fields, hitting a number of opposite (left) field HRs. For the most part he pulls inside pitches and goes the other way with outside pitches.
There are some other interesting trends. The sliders (red) he hit for HRs were all on the inside half of the plate, while the changeups (yellow/orange) were middle-away. He pulls changeups more often, while going the other way with fastballs.
As Dave Cameron noted a couple months ago Lind’s trip to this point has been bumpy (with concerns of the dreaded AAAA tag coming into this year), but he has made it in a big way.
Dave Allen's other baseball work can be found at Baseball Analysts.
Good graph once again Dave.
Part of me wonders how much of Lind’s 3 HR’s came as a result of the Red Sox current pre-playoff catatonic state, to be fair though.
Here I display his HRs in a way I started doing over at Baseball Analysts.
I’m pretty sure Tofte would approve.
I like where you are going with this graph. My only problem is that it can be a bit deceiving as Lind took a fastball away and deposited it just right of center field, but on first glance it looks like he pulled it due to the steep angle of the line.
This graph may look a little better if instead of connecting the dots from plate location to outfield location, use a point and an angle. Have straight away center be a vertical line, right foul line 45 degrees to the right, and the left foul line 45 degrees to the left.
It is just a thought
Steve’s right. That would make the graph much easier and intuitive to read.
Then we’d be seeing the actual direction the ball went when Lind hit it.
http://www.hittrackeronline.com/
There should be a link to this site on the main page, and perhaps an image embedded in the article.
Another alternative: instead of drawing lines, why not simply show points in two dimensions. Let the x-axis represent pitch location and the y-axis show where it landed.
This is my try posted at the inside the book blog:
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=554098
However, if we are talking simply about the sensuous differentiation of one kind of subjectivity from another, bats from those without a sonar modality, sighted humans from ones that are blind at birth, it’s hard to see how the blank wall isn’t there from the start and forever. ,
Does this mean he is going to keep hitting bombs? The jump from his minors to his early majors to last season’s highlight reel is unreal. I guess he just bulked up and his the right age?
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