Fangraphs just launched a new feature called FanGraphs Lab. They’re basically putting up some data visualization tools that people can play with and then asking for feedback on those tools, along with ideas for other things people might want. I thought I would go play with them and see what you can do so you can maybe come up with your own tool ideas.
First off is the PitchingBot Visualizer. You can take any pitcher and toggle through different pitches, counts, batter handedness, and dates to see location and outcome. Next to that, you can isolate different PitchingBot characteristics for that subset of pitches to see their command, stuff, or overall ranking. Here is Cole Ragans’ command last year for all pitch type/count combinations:
A danger miss is an in-the-zone pitch with low command and stuff scores, so it’s trying to measure meatballs. You can see Ragans is well below league average there. Waste misses, however, he is average in; a waste miss is a low-rated pitch outside the zone. Finally, we have “squandered,” which are pitches with good command and stuff ratings but outside the zone. All of these play into the overall command score there, a 50 on the 20–80 scale. Playing around with this, you can compare a player’s tendencies with different pitches in different counts or see if pitchers with high home run rates have correspondingly high danger miss percentages, and so on. For instance, Nestor Cortes had a high HR/9 last year, but not because he was throwing meatballs. Anthony Molina’s high HR/9, however, was in part due to a much higher-than-league-average 7.6% danger miss rate. In particular, his fastball and slider had rates above 8%. Go think of your own things to play with here and put them in the comments.
Next up are pitching heat maps, where you can look at pitcher or hitter heat maps and control all the types of things you would expect to see how they perform in different situations. It can be grid-based or contoured. For instance, here is a Bobby Witt ISO/BIP heat map against different handedness:
Toggling back and forth between the contoured view and the grid gives a more complete picture, I think. Righties want to avoid pitching him inside or in the middle. Against lefties, the two red spots are pretty clear, but the top one is a bit narrow in the grid view, while the lower one is just a large space that he tends to hammer on the inner half and even a bit below the zone. Take these maps and compare them to swing rate maps and you have an interesting way to think about plate discipline. How often are they swinging in those hot zones versus cold ones? Nice tool with a lot of options for things to do and think about.
On to the Squared-Up Explorer. This is the first tool I’ve seen even remotely like this. It shows how often a batter squares the ball up at different launch angles.
The gray curve is league average, so anywhere the green is outside the curve, Garcia is squaring up balls at an above-league-average rate. For him, that is basically anything below 33 degrees. If his launch angle gets above that, it’s not great. He clearly thrives in a launch angle between -10 and 22 degrees. You can overlay multiple players to see how they compare, both in where and how often they’re squaring things up. Maikel Garcia has a high rate on the x-axis here even compared to Bobby Witt Jr. or Vinnie Pasquantino, and there are some differences in the launch angles at which different players make solid contact. You can smooth the player curves and add the ideal home run band across it too (from 20 to 35 degrees). I do think adding some more layers would be helpful. If you could map average launch speeds and outcomes to each of the dots, it would be interesting. Right now, when you mouse over the dots, it gives you the coordinates plus something that says “% of balls,” though I do not know what that means. I also think being able to isolate home runs, doubles, fly outs, etc., on the coordinate plane could be fun, but that might be a separate tool.
Finally, we have the Hot Streak tool. You can map your team over time. You can look at the top nine hitters or all players or whatever subset you would like, and it maps daily wRC+ over whatever time period you select. Here is an abysmal 3–10 stretch from the beginning of June last season:
It’s kind of fun, maybe not my sort of thing. Freddy Fermin had the highest total wRC+ but only played in five of the games. Their analysis tool – I didn’t show the legend below – has Mark Canha “carrying the team,” as denoted by a beefy arm, so I’m not sure that part is dialed in yet. Michael Massey as the weak link checks out a bit more, though he did not play much. You can change it to a line graph version, and you can do OPS, AVG, OBP, SLG, K%, or BB% instead of wRC+.
You should think of this as a beta test. You can rate FanGraphs Lab, report bugs, and request features if you have your own ideas for what data would be fun to visualize. It’s worth playing around with if you like this sort of thing, though it’s not feature-rich yet. Still, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, I would play around with it just to let them know you are. If all they get is crickets, this will likely go away.
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