Gapminder is an independent foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. Its mission is “to debunk devastating myths about the world by offering free access to a fact-based world view“. They provide free online tools, data (more than 400 datasets freely available!) and videos “to better understand the changing world“. The initial development ...

In my last two posts, I have tinkered with the 'gam' package to create heat maps for individual umpire strike zones. I went ahead and grabbed Joe West's data (which has a lot more pitches than Bruce Froemming in it, since Froemming's data is only from...

J-Doug at Rational Pastime has some cool posts looking at umpire strike zones at his site (and cross-posted at Beyond the Boxscore). I was curious about this issue as well with some work I've been doing here in the office (which I'll refrain from talk...

So after a long hiatus, I'm back for today. I've been crazy busy with a number of different things--including getting engaged and helping plan out wedding dates and things of that sort--and unfortunately have not kept up here on this blog (or on Fanta...

After my recent posts fiddling around with heat maps for pitch location, Jason at It's About the Money, Stupid contacted me to ask if I would contribute some location maps for Yankee pitchers. Obviously, I couldn't pass up the chance to contribute to ...

I tried using my own little palette with more traditional looking heatmap colors (red and pink are the densest, blue and green are less so, yellow in the middle, etc.). I also included the actual points, but would recommend it for more than a single g...

I have a new post up over at Fantasy Ball Junkie looking at the value of closers in H2H leagues from here on out. I simply simulated in the same way as the Stolen Bases and Home Runs articles from before. Saves are an interesting bunch, and it really...

Over at The Book Blog, Tango has a post about standardizing Pitch F/X graphs to be catcher/batter/umpire view. While I don't think this should necessarily be the case for all Pitch F/X graphics, it brings up another issue that I've had with some graph...

As a followup to my last article at FBJ, I took a look at the distributions of weekly totals for Stolen Bases to gauge win expectancies in the SB category in H2H fantasy baseball formats. The study is again pretty simple, as I just subtract one hypoth...

I recently got all the Pitch F/X data downloaded from Gameday, and have been fiddling around. I certainly don't have the physics knowledge to really talk about the movement at this point, and I'm still acquainting myself with the data format and what e...