#advanced stats

[offsidenewsco]

"Are you new to hockey and confused about stats? Are you an old hat at this sport but still confused about stats and too scared to ask at this point?"

Read our guide to the NHL's Advanced Statistics here.

[hockeyknowitall]

Thanks for being so nice and answering questions! What is CORSI?

No problem! I love answering these questions.

Corsi measures shot attempt differential for each player and/or team. A shot attempt is basically any time a player takes a shot with the intention of scoring a goal, regardless if it is blocked, if it misses the net, hits a post, or it is saved by the goalie. Therefore a shot attempt differential, or corsi, is the amount of shot attempts made by a team, minus the shot attempts made against the team. The formula can be written as follows

Corsi For (CF) = Shot attempts for: Shots+blocks+misses

Corsi Against (CA) = Shot attempts against: Shots+blocks+misses

Corsi = CF-CA

source

[biteableplum]

Advanced stats are ruining the NBA

[hockeyknowitall]

could you possibly explain Corsi statistics? I've tried reading stuff about it but it all seems so complicated and I feel like I need a dumbed-down version...

Okay so i’m not an advanced stat scholar or anything i have a very very basic knowledge of it to the point where i know what’s good and what’s bad and they mean soemthing to me but i’m not super immersed with it.

Basically though, from what i understand, Corsi is a differential statistic meaning it takes negatives and positives and puts them together to create a number, that measures specifically shots. In the NHL they have shots on goal which is a pretty good stat because it tells you how many saves your goalie is making. However it doesn’t include blocked shots, or shots that go off the pipe. So Corsi measures every shot attempted while that player is on the ice and every shot against while tha tplayer is on the ice. and creates the differential between the two.

That’s really pretty basic and definitely the dumb downed version 

[nickalbano76]

Stats, Age, and Postseason Performance: Evaluating Bellinger vs. Tucker

First and foremost, I see many people trying to paint the picture that Kyle Tucker is a lesser superior defender than Bellinger, and I honestly just don’t buy it. I do think that Tucker has been a bit inconsistent in that department, and Cody is the more versatile defender. However, I will argue here that he is not the best long-term fit, in my humble opinion. I don’t put too much stock into…

View On WordPress

[jose-berojos]

Pitch Arsenal Analysis, Part 1: Introduction

The offseason is spreadsheets season! I'm gonna try to post on here more frequently as I attempt to bend Baseball Savant, Baseball Reference, and Fangraphs to my will as part of my year-round baseball absorption regimen.

I've been looking at Baseball Savant pitch arsenal data, tracking the usage of different pitch types by each pitcher. The Statcast leaderboard, which I imported to make my spreadsheets, shows data for every pitcher to throw at least 100 pitches in 2024, 712 pitchers total. This limit is low enough to capture players who were hurt nearly the entire season, like Strider, Bieber, and Graterol, but I'd still like to eventually import 2023 data to integrate significant players who missed all of 2024, like Ohtani, Alcantara, and Bautista.

Pitch Types

Statcast recognizes 12 different pitch types, 9 of which were thrown by more than two people this season: the four-seam fastball, sinker (two-seam fastball), cutter (cut fastball), slider, changeup, curveball, splitter (split-finger/split-change), sweeper, and slurve. This classification system has its limitations; it lumps together different variations on the same recognized pitch type, like Yu Darvish's multiple cutters and curveballs, and has trouble classifying hybrid pitches, like how Jhoan Duran and Jose Soriano's splinkers are listed as splitters, while Paul Skenes and Ben Joyce's are listed as sinkers. But it still provides an extremely comprehensive, workable baseline, and I've really enjoyed sifting through the data.

Pitch types fall into three families, representing their function in a pitcher's arsenal: fastball (four-seam, sinker, cutter), offspeed (changeup, splitter), and breaking ball (slider, sweeper, curveball, slurve). Technically, offspeed encompasses everything that's not a fastball, including all breaking balls, but they are usually discussed separately in terms of arsenals and pitching/hitting strategy.

Fastballs are the bread-and-butter pitch; pitching and hitting strategy is essentially based around the expectation of a four-seam fastball, a relatively undeceptive pitch that comes straight-on. Breaking balls (and to an extent the other fastball varieties) deceive by moving in an unexpected way, while offspeed pitches deceive by traveling with unexpected timing. The exact ways that pitchers create these differently-moving pitches involves very complicated physics around the spin of the ball and the angles of the pitcher's body in space, which a vast amount of research has gone into analyzing. We are not covering that here.

The Statcast pitch arsenal leaderboard offered three metrics for each pitcher's pitches: average velocity, average spin, and use percentage. I don't know enough about spin rates to get actionable information from that data, so I downloaded the other two and made a nice spreadsheet to torture, with rows for all 712 pitchers and columns for pitch type, subdivided into velocity and percentage. To ensure the percentages added to 100 for every pitcher, I smashed together an "other" column for Matt Waldron's knuckleball, Brent Honeywell's screwball, and the two forkball pitchers on the leaderboard.

Pitch Arsenals

To answer the baseline question of whether a pitcher has a particular pitch in their arsenal, I chose a threshold of >3% usage. A pitcher's true arsenal from season to season should accurately represent the pitches they threw on a regular basis, not ones they tinkered with for a single start or broke out in a handful of at-bats for an emergency. The >3% number was chosen through feel and sanity checking—asking whether a closely-following fan of a player's team would be surprised to know they threw that pitch. It includes Craig Kimbrel's sweeper (4.9%) and Gerrit Cole's changeup (4.0%) but not Marcus Stroman's curveball (2.6%) or Emmanuel Clase's four-seam (1.2%).

Based on this definition, the average number of pitches in an arsenal is 4.03, and 597 of the 712 pitchers throw 3-5 pitches. Only one of the 52 2-pitch pitchers in 2024 is a starter, Ben Brown of the Cubs, while only 15 of the 63 6/7/8-pitch pitchers are primary relievers. This fits the conventional wisdom that starters want at least 4 pitches, while relievers can get away with 2 main ones, due to facing far fewer batters in a game and thus relying less on varying their strategy for success.

Unsurprisingly, the four-seam is the most commonly thrown pitch, found in 631 pitchers' arsenals (88.6%) at a 36% average usage, for an average of 32% usage across all pitchers. That average is not weighted by how many pitches each pitcher threw, that would require a different dataset, only average use percentage. The breakdown of every pitch type is as follows:

Four-seam: 631 pitchers (88.6%), usage 36.1%, overall use 32.05%

Slider: 495 pitchers (69.5%), usage 25.9%, overall use 18.07%

Sinker: 429 pitchers (60.3%), usage 26.2%, overall use 15.92%

Changeup: 415 pitchers (58.3%), usage 16.4%, overall use 9.70%

Curveball: 324 pitchers (45.5%), usage 16.0%, overall use 7.37%

Cutter: 260 pitchers (36.5%), usage 20.7%, overall use 7.62%

Sweeper: 214 pitchers (30.1%), usage 20.8%, overall use 6.31%

Splitter: 91 pitchers (12.8%), usage 19.9%, overall use 2.56%

Slurve: 9 pitchers (1.3%), usage 17.6%, overall use .222%

Other: 4 pitchers (.6%), usage 28.9%, overall use .162%

There's some interesting patterns to be found in just this overview. Sweepers are thrown by half as many pitchers as changeups, but thrown more often by their users. There are four clear tiers of pitch use frequency within a pitcher's arsenal: four-seam, slider/sinker, cutter/sweeper/splitter, changeup/curveball/slurve. These tiers seem to transcend pitch type families, but beyond that I'm not really sure of their significance.

Next post, we'll take a deeper dive into the arsenals of those 2- and 6/7/8-pitch pitchers to understand the different strategies they employ.

[sensnews]

Jake Sanderson Will Put The NHL On Notice This Season

Jake Sanderson StatisticsJake Sanderson Advanced StatisticsJake Sanderson’s PartnerHelping Out The Special Teams The Ottawa Senators need Jake Sanderson to reach another level this season. The star defenseman has already established himself as the number one defender on the team, but if Ottawa has true aspirations to be a competitive team, they will need him to take another step forward. When…

Jake Sanderson Will Put The NHL On Notice This Season

[jose-berojos]

Caleb Thielbar getting yeeted off the team in 2015 was one of the greatest crimes of that Twins era. Most underrated reliever on the team right now. Love ya, birthday twin, hope you keep crushing it this year.