Minor League Splits Blog

Major improvement to batted ball tables: now, mousing over any entry in a table gives you a percent for that entry.  In other words, if you’re looking at Sean Smith’s batted ball table, all you see at first is a bunch of raw numbers: 376 total batted balls, 85 to them right, 34 of them groundball hits, etc.  To see the percentage equivalents, mouse over any number.  In the “Overall” column, you might see GB%, outs per fly ball, hits per line drive, etc.  In every other column, the percent given is the percent of balls (in that column) to reach that destination.

It’s simple, it’s fun, and it saves you an excel query!

I had just about forgotten about this until I found a note on a weeks-old list of possible improvements to the site.  All along, my databases have contained batted ball tables (like Corey Hart’s, here) for each team and league.  I just hadn’t made them available on the site.  It’s great data to have available–if you’re going to analyze the nuances of a player’s batted ball results, it’s much better to have aggregate league numbers to compare them to.

Now, you can see aggregate batted ball data for both pitchers and hitters for each team and league in Minor League Baseball.  For example, see team pitching data for the Altoona Curve, or total batted ball data for the Midwest League.  For some reason, total batting and pitching data doesn’t match up exactly–in the case of the MWL, it’s off by about two hundreths of a percent.  This happened when I first aggregated league splits, as well; I’ll eventually figure out what’s amiss and fix it up.

Also, I just fixed the script to generate a player’s cumulative stats (see Ryan Braun’s, here).  The way my data is stored, if a player has accumulated any stats for a certain split (say, batting as a leftfielder, or pitching in the third inning), there’s still a blank line.  All along, the regular team-specific splits table scripts edited out those blank lines before showing them to you.  I forgot to include that in the cumulative stat script.  It’s now fixed, so you’ll have far fewer useless zeroes to distract you next time you look at a player’s overall numbers.

Enjoy!

A couple of days ago I introduced a new feature to player splits tables: if you mouse over GB, LD, FB, or Popup totals in any row, you see GB%, LD%, HR/F, and IF/F, respectively.  Also, I pointed out something that had been there all along: for all rate stats, mouse over the stat and see the league average.

Today’s incremental improvement: the league averages are now available in team splits tables, anad the batted ball percentages are available in both team and league splits tables.  Now it’s as easy as moving your mouse to find out what percent of fly balls turn into HRs in the Texas League, or to compare Brevard County Manatees pitchers’ K rates to the FSL average.

And yes, I know how much you’ve always wanted to do that.

If you want to get the full site experience here at Minor League Splits, it’s very important that your browswer recognizes the HTML acronym tag. To check whether you’re getting the benefits of that tag, check out Philip Hughes’s Trenton splits page. In every row, every number from BAA all the way over to Popups should have a dotted black line (or something simlilar) under it. When you mouse over the numbers with the dotted black lines, another number should appear.

In other words, it should look something like this:

(For some reason, when I took a screenshot, the cursor disappeared: in that example, the cursor is hovering over the “9″ in the “L” column.)

The league averages have been part of the splits tables for a few weeks now; just this morning I added several new tools for batted ball analysis. Mouse over the groundball total, and you’ll see the player’s groundball percentage. Line drive total: line drive percentage. Fly ball total: home runs per fly ball. Popup total: infield flies per fly ball [P/(F+P)].

I haven’t yet included any of those acronyms on team or league pages, but that’s on the list.

If you can’t see the dotted black lines, and nothing happens when you mouse over those numbers, you should switch to Firefox. Actually, you should switch to Firefox anyway. I don’t completely understand which browsers recognize the acronym tag, though, because some friends in IE6 have reported that it’s working for them, while on the copy of IE6 on my machine, it doesn’t work.