Houston Astros Hitter Heat Maps
April 9, 2012 at 12:49 pm by Franklin Rabon under Atlanta Braves
Note that a lot of the Astros haven’t played much in MLB, which makes these maps not as smooth as you’d like. However, you should at least be able to get an idea. Marwin Gonzalez is not included, as he has only a few PA’s this year, which don’t provide worthwhile heat maps.
All data is fron 2009 to present, courtesy of ESPN Stats & Info.
How to use these heat maps:
Essentially these maps will give you a feel for the hitter’s plate approach and strengths. The swing % map shows how often a hitter swings at a given pitch location. From this, you can get an idea for how patient the hitter is, and what pitches within the zone he likes to wing at. With the slugging percentage maps, you get an idea of what locations a hitter can and can’t do damage on.
Ideally a hitter would like to swing at almost nothing outside of the zone (except in certain cases where a hitter is extremely good at hitting pitches in certain locations outside the zone). Additionally, a hitter should almost always swing at pitches in locations where his slugging map is extremely hot (ie red). He should take a decent amount of pitches, even in the strike zone, where his slugging map is blue.
If you see an area where the hitters slugging map is blue, but his swing % map is yellow or red, that is an area the pitcher should really attack, as the hitter will swing at that pitch, but not be able to do much at all with it. Obviously the pitcher wants to shy away from areas where the hitter’s slug map is yellow or red.
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Lulz at Jordan Schaffer.
I love this feature. I nice, quick and easy way to scout the other team’s hitters. Thanks for doing this.
Jordan Schafer’s SLG heat map is kind of hilarious. #PeanutButterWeedCups
Schafer feasts on flat mid 80s fastballs down the middle.
Good thing Jair isn’t pitching then!
All we need is a bit of situational tendency, and we have a usable scouting report. Actually just this bit of info can really change your approach against a particular batter especially if you have no experience against them personally.
Ok, off topic for a second after seeing the new poll.. I find the site to be hard to read with the new layout. I dislike the reply feature in the comments, instead of the old “@ 3 / Arun”. It’s more of a linear conversation that way, especially when the new layout doesn’t show you the time a comment was made only the date–most topics don’t receive a heavy amount of comments after the day they were posted anyway. The old layout had a simple, subtle feel that at least differentiated it from the other sites such as Talking Chop, because with the hierarchy of information you weren’t bombarded with an oppressively cluttered layout. Now CAC looks like a sloppier version of Bowman’s sad blog. Just looks like someone spent 30 minutes with a wordpress template. Maybe it should also sort of reference the Braves in some way since it’s a blog about the Braves.
Sorry for the whining. Just trying to help.
Thanks for the feedback. We really do appreciate it.
This is just a temporary situation. We are currently developing a custom website with developers to exactly fulfill our needs. We are hoping that it will be fully ready to roll by the all-star break or probably sooner.
However, in the interim, we did have to update from the previous template, because the previous template had a lot of issues with pictures (like the heatmaps above, for instance) and pretty much anything else besides pure text. At least this template allows you to put pictures in a post, and have some idea of where the pictures will actually show up in the blog. I’ve started a lot more of these “scouting report” type posts in the past, that I ultimately had to scrap because the old site just couldn’t format it correctly.
In addition, we may change the temporary template once more before the full site redesign goes into effect, to address some of the concerns you guys and us internally have brought up.
Again, thanks for the feedback and keep it coming. We are still int he development phase of the redesign, so particularly good ideas still have time to be implemented.
For just one example of what I am talking about, on the old site design when I did the Mets heatmap post, it took me 3 and a half hours to get the format half way right. This one took me 15 minutes.
ah ok. i assumed this WAS the redesign, which bummed me out since I like it here.
This temporary version is significantly better the old template. It’ll just take a little getting used to for most viewers to adapt I’d imagine, kind of like facebook.
Though I will echo one sentiment– time stamping comments would be nice.
I like the heatmaps, but since there will often be up to 16 different ones per series, maybe you could make them smaller and create rows/columns?
I agree. Maybe put the ‘Swing %’ and the ‘Slg’ side by side, think that would increase readability…
Just my 5 cents…
I would suggest the way you guys had it earlier today or yesterday when you had to click on the story to read it. That way some of the posts, like the heat maps, will not take up the entire page.
Yes if a Read More button could be implemented in some way that would be nice since some posts are long and picture heavy.
I think you should post the full feature story for the newest or next-to-newest article, even if they are long the long heat map ones. Then when they’re a couple days old, insert the “read more”. I use old posts for reference pretty regularly on this site…just my two cents.