We live in the information age – we have for a very long time, actually – and as the world of baseball slowly, slowly settles into that reality, we’re soon going to be hit with the most significant change to our statistical understanding of the game this side of sabermetrics.
That significant change is the release of a new stream of data from the stuff teams gather in their ballparks using video and radar and other collection tools – a way to granulize everything that happens in a baseball game. You can read a better description of the new stream here. Particularly as it relates to evaluating defense, this is big, big stuff.
This week, MLBAM (MLB Advanced Media) released more information and some video on what this data is going to be able to show us. And it’s beautifully, nerdily cool:
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It’s easy to look at those videos – very small parts of what this system can do – and see how much this could change the way we think about defensive evaluation.
Each of Jeff Passan and Dave Cameron dig in a little bit more into what MLB is telling us so far about the new data stream, which they are calling StatCast. Passan notes that this system collects 7,000 gigabytes (LOL) of data per game.
It’s important to keep in mind that we still don’t yet know how much of this data will be made available for public consumption/dissection/analysis, but it’s very likely that some will be. And it’s probably going to change the way we think about a whole mess of things.