I checked out the Pitch F/X data for today’s Cardinals at Giants game to see if there was any new fielding information included, thinking that if it’d show up in the DB, that’s where it’d be since AT&T had the additional cameras installed late last season.
No dice.
However, the database has a few new features and is organized a little bit more nicely. The most interesting features that jump out are a “nasty” attribute to each pitch and a timestamp parameter, “start_tfs” to each event node. I’ll be interested in seeing what kind of observations “nasty” makes; it’ll be fun to be able to calculate which pitchers are the fastest and slowest working with the timestamps, among other things. These additions make the database more useful for other uses, too, and the overall re-organization makes it more user friendly.
A little bummed that the field f/x data’s not included. Once it is, I expect Gameday will start to look much like an old NES baseball game. I mean that in the best possible way.
Small update: Someone more knowledgeable than I pointed out that timestamps are present on all pitches for older data, too, in the sv_id attribute. Fantastic.
