Statcast

Statcast is an automated tool developed to analyze player movements and athletic abilities in Major League Baseball (MLB).

[2] This "arms race" of new data that is becoming available from Statcast is a rapidly growing field within Major League Baseball teams and can be identified as the "analytics" group.

For example, on the first day of spring training, Tampa Bay Rays hitters are told they will be measured by batted-ball exit velocity, not batting average.

A third base coach armed with this information should have a heightened degree of situational awareness, which ultimately affects their decision to hold a runner at third or send them home.

This should reduce the number of runners needlessly cut down at home; but one must also take into account the fact that this information may lead to overly cautious decisions during situations when the reward outweighs the risks.

[7][8] This technology integrates doppler radar and high definition video to measure the speed, acceleration, and other aspects for every player on the field.

By combining the camera and radar data, dozens of physical metrics relating to every aspect of the game (pitching, hitting, baserunning, and fielding) can be obtained.

[7] As Major League Baseball Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman explains "We’ve been in the tech business for 13, 14 years.

[20] Nomar Mazara hit a 505-foot (154 m) home run with the Texas Rangers to set the record for the longest distance measured by Statcast in the major leagues.

[27] In 2018, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jordan Hicks tied Chapman's record (105.1 mph) with a sinker against Odúbel Herrera of the Philadelphia Phillies.

A study conducted by Hank Snowdon, a student at Claremont McKenna College, found evidence “that umpires made more advantageous calls when their race was the same as the person receiving the advantage.”[29] Thanks to analytics collected with the help of Statcast, he gathered “the entirety of data from the pitch tracking era, which amounts to millions of pitches with data from 2008-2020,” creating one of the largest and most accurate studies to ever occur in MLB.

[30] “Thanks to Statcast...we know an astonishing amount about whether a given pitch should be called a ball or a strike to begin with,” says Robert Arthur of Baseball Prospectus.