Use the BaseballSavant Site to Review any Nats Game

BaseballSavant.com

The BaseballSavant site provides an incredible array of data and graphs. Virtually anything you want to know can be found there. I had frankly forgotten how useful it is until I stumbled upon it yesterday looking for information on Cade Cavalli‘s pitch selection in his one major league game. Two different ways to access the site, specifically to review Nationals games are described below.

The site provides an incredible amount of detail on any specific game. You just need to tell it which game. The GameDay data uses a field called Game_PK to do that. Any database geeks among you will recognize the PK suffix (Primary Key) as a common way to identify that a field is a surrogate key.  It is a 6 digit number and identifies every game.  You can use a URL that looks like this

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/gamefeed?gamePk=662469

to review the game (see the image above).

Generating a list of the 162 Nationals games is not that hard to do. But it is a long list. And sometimes folks complain about having to scroll too much. So that is where the idea of collapsing and expanding part of a web page comes into play.  Without going into the geeky details, most browsers support an HTML feature that do just that; and the WordPress blogging software (which TalkNats uses) now honors it as well. You can see that below. Each month is listed with an arrow next to it. Click on the arrow or the month name to expand the list to see a link to the BaseballSavant site for every Nationals game in that month. Click on it again, to collapse the list.

So have some fun and look at any number of tables and graphs for any Nationals game by clicking away below.

Game Summaries

Search However You Want

But, yes, there’s more. The BaseballSavant’s search facility provides even more insights and results. The links below bring you to the Search page – for each Nats game. You can change any of the filters you want. For example, the links below show pitcher details. You can easily change that to batters. Lots of graphs and information is available. If you click on a player, you will see the details of every pitch. And note the video camera at the right side of the table – that will display a video of that pitch. You can review the video for every pitch thrown by a pitcher or seen by a batter.

You can also change the search criteria to see a summary from a series by specifying the date range for the games. You can also specify a player (or players). So, it is easy to see the details for any player for any date range.

In Conclusion

I have just touched on a couple of the things you can do with the BaseballSavant site. Go off and explore for yourself and share your discoveries here.

And yes, depending on the timing of when the data are available, we can add a link to a Nats game in the recap posts.