My hopes for this thread is that it will serve as a breeding grounds for ideas on how to apply Statcast data to generate incredibly lifelike player ratings. It is inevitable that this data will one day be the framework for how player ratings are generated. There is no reason the O.S. community can't be the pioneers who come up with the foundations and formulas for these ratings.
For example, a future post in this thread might look something like this:
ARM STRENGTH rating proposal:
Amongst all outfielders that registered a competitive throw in 2017, Yankees OF Aaron Hicks registered in with the fastest average competitive throw. Based on the same data, we also know that Oakland OF Khris Davis has the worst arm strength. This February article by MLB Statcast writer Mike Petriello provides us with some of the first publicly available data on player arm strength, and gives us a top 5 list of current MLB outfielders:
http://m.mlb.com/news/article/215475982/twins-project-for-strongest-2017-outfield-arms/
99.4 -- Hicks, NYY
97.0 -- Starling Marte, PIT
96.8 -- Santana, MIN
95.8 -- Carlos Gomez, HOU / TEX
95.7 -- Jake Marisnick, HOU
Arm Strength Rating: On a scale of 0 - 99, a player is graded based on the velocity of his average *Competitive* throw.
We can now map these values to ratings - once we get the full pool of MLB starters plotted out onto a graph, we can figure out a clever way to group these players into distinct rating buckets: Players over the 100 mph get a 99 arm strength rating. Players over the 97.5 mark get a 90+ arm strength rating, players over the 96 mark get am 85+, etc. etc.
Arm Strength data isn't fully available to the public yet, but in the next few years we will have access to data on virtually every competitive throw for every single player.
Please feel to post your ideas for other ratings categories below!
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