Tools for Harnessing 'MLBAM' 'Gameday' Data and Visualizing
'pitchfx'
Description
With 'pitchRx', one can easily obtain Major League Baseball Advanced
Media's 'Gameday' data (as well as store it in a remote database). The
'Gameday' website hosts a wealth of data in XML format, but perhaps most
interesting is 'pitchfx'. Among other things, 'pitchfx' data can be used to
recreate a baseball's flight path from a pitcher's hand to home plate. With
pitchRx, one can easily create animations and interactive 3D 'scatterplots'
of the baseball's flight path. 'pitchfx' data is also commonly used to
generate a static plot of baseball locations at the moment they cross home
plate. These plots, sometimes called strike-zone plots, can also refer to a
plot of event probabilities over the same region. 'pitchRx' provides an easy
and robust way to generate strike-zone plots using the 'ggplot2' package.