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Variations in pitching performance during a major league baseball game: what can we learn from ball tracking data?
1 : University of Michigan [Ann Arbor]
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Website
500 Church Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1090 -
United States
| Subject : | : | Oral |
| Comment | : | Response to reviewer's comments. The PITCHf/x system is mentioned in the abstract and first paragraph of methods, but not referenced until page 2. I would suggest removing this from the abstract (just say “ball tracking data”) and moving the reference forward to the first mention of PITCHf/x in the paper. This has been changed, as suggested. Methods, first paragraph Three websites were used to collect data. Explicit URLs should be provided for these sites, either in-text or in the Reference list. URLs for the three websites have now been inserted. Page 1, last line. “pitching parameters were scraped from the Brooks Baseball website”. Is the word “scraped” appropriate here? Is that a baseball term? I would consider using an alternative that doesn't sound so colloquial. “Scraping” is a computer science term that is defined as the extraction of information from a source catalogue/database (In this case websites). The authors are confident that it is the most appropriate wording in this particular case See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping Page 2, line 1 It is not clear what is meant by “fielding independent pitching (FIP)”. This seems important, as pitching effectiveness is obviously the number 1 criteria and therefore is appropriately emphasised in your conclusions. At the same time, it is not described in the methods and there are no results presented to justify your discussion that effectiveness does not change across innings. The authors have clarified what FIP is in the methods and also inserted what the variation in FIP values were across the nine innings (unfortunately there was simply not enough room to include the FIP value for each of the nine innings in the results, nor was this warranted since there was no significant difference between innings). Page 2, 5th last line The term “zone percentage” is used here, with no explanation what it means. There obviously isn't room to completely describe everything in a four page paper. I wonder whether a few variables could (should??) be dropped to make use for a more complete description of those remaining. The authors have clarified what zone percentage is in the methods (it is the percentage of pitches that passed through the strike zone). Additionally, the authors have entirely removed the movement results from the manuscript. Results I would have preferred to see actual values for your results (proportion of pitch types, ball speeds, etc), rather than just the changes from inning 1. I can see, however, that the way you've presented these data makes the changes more apparent and there isn't room to provide both. Please take this as a comment only, not a request for change. The authors appreciate the reviewer's comment. Indeed, the difference in speed between the different pitch types made it extremely difficult to scale a graph of absolute values for each inning. Discussion, line 1 Here is the first time we see pitching effectiveness results. With no description in the methods and no results presented, it is difficult to guess exactly what has been measured. I suppose the lack of results comes from your decision to report only changes from inning one and, if there were no apparent changes, then space is taken up with nothing to report. Could you squeeze in a line in the results telling us what the effectiveness of pitching was? As noted above, the range in the FIP values across the innings has now been inserted in the first line of the results. |
| Topics | : | Throwing |
| Keywords | : | analytics ; sport ; PITCHf/x ; MLB ; biomechanics ; injury |
| PDF version | : |  PDF version |
