I'm sure everyone has seen the awesome work provided by Pitchfx gurus like our own Harry, but how many of you have asked yourself: "Mick, how in the world can I make something like that?" Well, today (and a few others) are your lucky days because I'm going to walk you through how to make a few of the charts.
First up: release points.
- Assuming you know how to pull data from Gameday, go here and grab you a pitcher's data. If not, go here, find a pitcher, hit "Extended Tabled Data", copy that, and paste special (text) into Excel.
- From there, find the column labeled "z0", highlight the numbers and hit the "chart/graph" button.
- Select scatter plot.
- For the x-values you will need to highlight the "x0" column.
- Fix the min and max data points on each axis (usually 0, 7 for y axis and -3, 3 for x)
- Add any extra touches you may want.
Now you can easily compare pitchers, pitchers pitches, and whatever else you could desire from release points using the same method. For instance, here's a look at J.P. Howell and sidearmer Brian Shouse.
Quite a change in eye level, eh?