quote:
Originally posted by Nicholas25:
What is the best program we can get to put on our computer that we can plug statistics into and it totals them for us? If so, does it, or can it, include sabermetric formulas and figure them? Love to have one on my computer and maybe a palm pilot or something similar in the dugout. Thanks.
Being a programmer, an SK, a statistician, and someone right in the middle of converting a program that only stored data and kicked out stats to one that does all of the previous stated, but does it by keeping score so there’s very little data entry, I have a suggestion, and a couple of curious questions to see if I can make my program “better”.
Here’s my suggestion, given as a programmer who had to look for what people ASSUMED were errors in software, and a data entry person who has spent more hours entering baseball data than anyone can imagine. You should choose a piece of software like you’re talking about, that has as much error-checking routines built into it as possible! Chances are, if there is something “funny” with the numbers coming out of a program, its because of garbage in.
Let me try to give you an example of what to look for. Let’s say you’re entering batting data from a game directly into a standard spreadsheet like Excel. Johnny is the 1st batter, and the 1st entry is at bats and the 2nd is hits. He had 4 abs and 1 hit, and that’s what you intend to type. You enter the 4 and hit the tab key to move the cursor to the next field, but you aren’t paying attention and hit the caps lock instead, then press the 1. The spreadsheet is stupid and will accept the 41, and if you don’t catch it right away, chances are its gonna bite you in the butt later on.
In my programs, I make sure I check the input whenever possible. FI, if the field is supposed to be numeric, I don’t let the program accept alpha characters, or vice versa. You may think that’s not a big deal, but believe me, when you’re making 2,000 – 3,000 keystrokes entering data, its not at all unusual to hit an “O” instead of a zero, or to hit an “I” instead of a “1”.
Having been burned by folks who don’t do a lot of data entry, but use the number pad on the keyboard, there are fields I’ll check for unlikely entries. FI, on the number pad, 5 is right above 2, so it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to enter a 5 by accident. Its’ very likely a batter will get 2 doubles, triples, or HRs in a game, but extremely unlikely they’ll get 5. Rather than allow the 5, I’ll force the program to stop and ask the user if he’s sure he wants to put that number in. Those are just 2 very minor but typical data entry problems, and the better the software, the more they’ll validity check the input.
Another one to be careful of, is that the data agrees with itself. Let’s say you’re putting data into a program, and you want to enter hitting data, base running data, pitching data, and fielding data. The number of runs, hits, errors, SBs, walks, and everything else, show always match. FI, if your hitters get 7 runs on 9 hits and 3 errors, that’s what should show up for the opponent’s pitchers. And if things don’t match, there should be an error routine that at least flags that there was an error so you can take care of it ASAP.
I could go on for hours on that subject, but I think you get the idea. Its much easier to take a little more time entering valid data than either trying to find out late where the mistake was, or worse, to use invalid data to make decisions.
Now for my questions. I already have my program generating some of my favorite metrics, but to tell the truth, its very difficult to try to guess what may or may not be a useful metric during a game. Can anyone give me examples of metrics they’d want to see during a game, and why they believe it would be useful to know? For instance, I display the number of 0-2 counts, 3 ball counts, strike and 1st pitch strike percentages, for both the teams and the pitchers in the game. I do it because it gives me an idea if the pitchers are getting ahead of batters, and if they’re all over the place with their pitches. To me its interesting, but I can’t say I’d advise our HC to yank a pitcher only because of those numbers.
I have lots or room and lots of time to figger out how to display such things, so I’d appreciate any thoughts on the subject. IOW, what sabermetric formulae would you want to see run during a game, and why.
Thanx
