New Heatmaps!
I’m pleased to announce that we’ve rolled out new heatmaps to the site!
There are a number of ways to customize each heatmap:
– Options to choose either a traditional 5×5 grid or a more granular 10×10 grid.
– Choose a heatmap from the viewpoint of either the pitcher or the batter.
– For the 10×10 grid, you can choose your own level of smoothing, which will change the weighting of adjacent buckets.
– Filtering on single or multiple years, handedness, and count.
– A variety of different stats to choose from.
The color grading on the heatmaps is always compared to an MLB average player for the selected time period and handedness.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Baseboner.
I’m hard as a diamond right now.
Any chance you’ll add an export functionality like with spray charts and comparisons?
Be still my heart! This is awesome!
thanks for always improving the site! i don’t even go to espn anymore.
can you add batted ball distance?
I second the batted ball distance suggestion. The final piece needed to have my undivided attn
Color me confused. When I look at something like swing %, what does the color mean? That he swings more? What about outside the zone? If it’s blue, that means he doesn’t swing at pitches outside the zone, so blue is sometimes good? Or is red always good, so it’s sometimes more and sometimes less…
One day we will have access to velocity data from point of contact. Many if not most front offices already use this (the Rays have for years) and it really might be the best performance indicator available both for sorting out results-oriented measurement problems (e.g. “at’em balls” for hitters and DIPS for pitchers).
In the meantime, this is pretty great.
Thank you for yet another excellent tool! 🙂
There seems to be a bug. Take a look at A.Mccutchen’s heatmaps. The buttons “Ahead” and “Behind” seem to be mixed up. Maybe you forgot that the “Ahead” for hitters is the “Behind” for pitchers and did not incorporate that.
It seems very unlikely, that Mccutchen swings A LOT more when ahead in the count compared to when he is behind in the count.
This should be corrected now. You were right that ahead / behind were not getting flipped properly for batters.
This bug seems to exist for other riders, too. As far as I have checked all outcome stats seem to be flipped ahead/behind in the count.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by this. The ahead / behind in the count should be corrected for batter & pitchers. Can you give an example.
Great Job! Thanks.
any more info on the color grading? for instance, does the bright red represent something like 50 % better than average, 2 SDs better average, etc…
It’s a percentage of the average, so it’s the box / league average.
2 is the very red, and 0 is very blue. White is exactly 1.
Wow. Just wow. This is the best thing since Banknotes Harper.
Whoever came up with this deserves aaaallll the medals.
This is amazing. it would be great it there was a league average heat map, just to give us a baseline with which to compare players to. Also are the run values per 100 pitches dependent on the count i.e. does a 3-0 home run count less than a 0-2 home run?
I think this is the first step toward analyzing pitch sequencing. I wonder if it’s possible to observe a hitter’s heat maps vs. certain pitches in certain parts of the zone… You could also observe their heat map against pitches with a certain amount of vertical/horizontal break if you wanted a closer match to the expected RAA that throwing said pitch would have. Fascinating addition to this website!
This should be not only Featured but Essential
So is there a way to use this for Daily Fantasy Baseball purposes? Like where a specific pitcher is targeted and we can see what hitters on the opposing team hit well in that area/against that type of pitch?
I’ve looked at 50 hitters and every single one likes the ball middle-in and down. Not one likes it up and away. Is this true, and if so shouldn’t teams scrap the “keep the ball down” mantra that they’ve been chanting for (at least) 50 years?