The Rays Tank: Brooks Baseball Is Amazing; Justin Ruggs Sign With Astros

I can't believe I forgot to pass this along yesterday, but on Friday evening, three fantastic Pitch F/x'ers (Dan Brooks, Harry Pavlidis, and Lucas Apostoleris) released the next hot resource for Pitch f/x analysis: player cards at BrooksBaseball.net. They are, in short, amazing.

I've been addicted to the Joe Lefkowitz player cards for a while now, but Brooks and Co. took things to the next level. Now you can easily parse the data any sort of way you want (by month, year, count, and handedness), and you can also view a pitcher's career or season total results. I do think there are some things that are easier to view on Joe L still -- like analyzing how a pitcher attacks lefty or righty hitters over an at bat -- but the functionality of the Brooks Baseball player cards is superb. That's going to be a huge help going forward.

Not only that, but the Brooks Baseball data is also a bit more accurate. Dan, Harry, and Lucas went through every pitch in the database and fixed pitch classification issues, so although some of the pitches movements may be displayed weird due to park differences, the pitch classifications are (most likely) accurate. This is way more than we could say before, and it makes me more confident in the numbers on their site.

My one nitpick? I wish they had an option for exporting data to Excel. But I can understand that they'd want to keep their data private after putting all that work into it.

Anyway, if you're looking for the full explanation of how and why these guys put together this resource, they explained their madness over at The Hardball Times. And if you're curious on what these player pages look like, here's David Price's card. Considering the way he's changed his repertoire over the years, it's good to know that their classifications are likely accurate.

• In Rays-related news, Justin Ruggiano signed a minor-league deal with the Astros yesterday. It's still a minor-league deal, but hey, Ruggs has a better shot of reaching the majors with the Astros than he did with the Rays. Here's hoping he manages to crack their roster.
• Carson Cistulli asks the questions: what made Michael Pineda such a success, and why was his success such a surprise? It's a good read, and highlights how unique it is for a pitcher to have both command and a high fastball velocity.
• Baseball Prospectus will be releasing their PECOTA forecasts tomorrow, so in prep for that, the BPro staff looked at 11 players they were wrong about due to small sample size issues.
• R.J. Anderson took an in-depth look at two-strike hitting over at BPro, and there are some interesting results in there. The Yankees, Red Sox, and Blue Jays are among the top 5 teams at two-strike hitting (makes the Rays pitching staff looks even better, yes?), and Carlos Pena and Evan Longoria are both considerably worse hitting with two-strikes. The more you know.