Hang time

I've been playing with the Hit F/X data from Sportsvision for a little while now, and I think I finally have something worth sharing with the class. If you check out the first THT Annual, you'll find an article from Robert Dudek about the importance of hang time in how easy it is to field a fly ball (which, for these purposes, I am using to encompass everything that isn't a ground ball). This is a huge, important thing. But the data providers have never recorded hang time for us; instead, we get the three bins "fly ball", "line drive" and "pop-up." (There are a few more bins, like "fliner," in the BIS data.) So we've had to make due with that. This is one of the chief reasons that outfield defense is harder to measure than infield defense, for instance.Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.