Absolutely Kalk does great work. He’s doing all of it blind and for everyone which makes it very difficult. The limitations I was referring to were due to the scope of the task and not the fault of the algorithms that Kalk developed.

Take Doc, for example:
http://baseball.bornbybits.com.....laday.html

It has him as a three pitch guy – sinker, curve, and slider. The sinker is definitely correct. But the “slider” covers three of his pitches – changeup, cutter, and half of his curves. So it’s not totally useful if you’re going through with your eyes closed. But if you’re paying attention, it’s pretty easy to see what a certain pitcher throws.

The only thing where it can get very dicey is 2 seam versus 4 seam fastballs, where your k-means clustering has worked well in the past, especially on Bonderman. Some pitchers barely have a difference between 2 seam and 4 seam. Others are pretty wide, like Garland (fastball and “splitter,” which is his 2 seamer). But for identifying fastball, cutter, slider, curveball, changeup, and splitter, it just takes a little bit of observation experience from watching a ball move on television to tell what pitch is what.

I can’t speak to whether or not Garland throws a cutter. I will say though that there are problems with the pitch f/x pitch classification system. And Kalk is trying to do the same irrespective of the scouting reports. In their defense they are trying to do it for everyone and come up with some broad algorithms and it is a decent attempt.

I prefer to look at an individual pitcher, get the scouting report for the number of different pitches he throws, and then do K-means clustering on the individual pitcher to identify the pitches.

Dear god that was a horrific game.

Dre is that me or did he piss his pants on the right side after giving up a HR to their pitcher?

It looks like that to me anyways from that photo angle.

I don’t hate guy(Jackson) or really really hate the trade but a #2 starter come on…

I also love how it says at the top

Best of new Tiger Edwin Jackson

what is MOM spelled backwards? WOW WOW WOW!

Still we officially signed Everett today, YAY! at least something great finally became official.

and while i don’t always take KLaw as gospel, i took his explanation at face value. (he was asked about the young pitching propsect the sox got in the swisher trade and whether they would teach him a cutter. his answer was “they probably will, since they do that with all their young pitchers”)

“Drew Sharp is a sports writer and professional dumbass for the Detroit Free Press.”

Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me, being able to separate fact from fiction every time

at least by staying in the AL he’ll likely avoid such embarrassing moments as this:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.....=Itemnr=14

if you’re the Freep, why include that into the “Meet Edwin Jackson” photo spread?

It has him as a five-pitch guy: fastball, curve, slider, change, and split. But Kalk’s algorithm has no idea what a split looks like, because Garland’s “splitter” is 1 mph slower than his fastball, with a little less vertical hop and more boring action into a righty. That’s a sinker, not a split. There are a few pitches at 91 mph or so with little horizontal movement, and those may be cutters, but he threw about six of them. His slider, which pitch f/x sometimes gets mixed up with a cutter (see Doc or James Shields’ graphs) is about 82 mph, so it can’t be that, either.

Maybe he ditched the pitch in 2008, but his 2007 graph doesn’t look much different. What makes you think he throws a cutter? Did he say it? If so, it might be the case of him calling his slider a cutter, like CC does. But when you say cutter, most people understand a pitch that’s maybe 2-3 mph slower than that pitcher’s 4 seam fastball, like a sinker but backwards.

This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Sharp

says it all LOL

Actually Garland does throw a cutter, and maybe it’s something they teach most of their starters as opposed to “everyone”. At any rate, it’s an organizational philosophy they have. I noticed that a few of their guys threw them and thought it was a coincidence, but it was actually a Keith Law chat where he explained that as an org, that’s what they want to do.