Welcome to the Georgetown baseball analytics group! We are a newly formed team of students with a passion for baseball and numbers. Under the leadership of the Georgetown University baseball pitching coach, Eric Niesen, we hope to help the coaching staff make informed decisions to improve team success both now and in the future.
A huge part of our early impact has been achieved through the substantial investment made by the program in the technology and tools that help us do our job. This fall, we implemented and experimented with a number of systems, including hitting and pitching Rapsodo units, a Flightscope, and, ultimately, a Trackman system, making Georgetown the first Big East program with the cutting edge technology. Having access to ball flight metrics for every pitch thrown at Shirley Povich field far extends our analytical capacity, enabling deeper investigations of player performance. We are excited to collect more data throughout the year and identify salient trends and performance indicators. With data obtained from Trackman, we are able to extract and visualize relevant data using R. Using a series of code, we can create reports for our pitchers and hitters for every game, as well as reports that display a defined period of time. Our staff utilizes the reports to improve in four key aspects: player development, recruiting, scouting, and in-game decision-making. The coaching staff can use information from player reports to help identify what athletes need to improve. For example, pitch reports show the release point of every pitch thrown by the pitcher, which Coach Niesen can use to aid a pitcher in improving their release point to avoid injury and better disguise the pitch being thrown. Additionally, hitters can visually observe what pitch types and locations they perform well against, along with what they struggle against. Based on this information, the coaching staff can observe the strengths and weaknesses of each player, and the staff can determine what they need in a recruit when a current player leaves the team. We also utilize R to provide team and individual player scouting reports for opposing teams. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of opposing players can be a big strength to our coaching staff as it provides them with the information to make informed in-game decisions. We also hope to aid the Georgetown offense by creating an algorithm that determines each opponent’s likelihood of throwing a certain pitch in a specified count after a specified result. In general, we hope to discover trends in opposing teams that our coaching staff can exploit. This leads into the decision-making aspect of our team. By knowing our team’s skills as well as those of our opponents, our coaching staff can make informed decisions in every aspect of the game, from batter approaches to a certain pitcher, to defensive shifts, to what pitch each opposing hitter struggles with. As we improve our coding and analytic skills, our team hopes to expand to some new projects, such as predictive modeling of opponent pitch calls, or quantifying injury probability by looking at release point consistently and velocity trends through games. We hope to be able to support Coach Niesen’s daily arm health rating system with data collected from the Trackman, reinforcing our ability to spot worrisome signs and keep our guys on the mound. We cannot wait for the baseball season to be in full swing, and we hope you stay tuned to watch the growth of our team. Hoya Saxa!
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August 2020
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