There’s not much information about a major league game that can’t be
found online from one of a few sites these days, but minor league data is stuck
back in the dark ages, so I’ve scraped everything MiLB tracks from every minor
league game over the past 5 years to create the most complete minor league stat
page to date
The Problem
Thanks to PITCHF/x, Statcast,
MLBAM, and other stat tracking companies, baseball fans can learn every piece
of information about a major league baseball game, from how fast pitches were
thrown (or hit), to an outfielder’s reaction time and route efficiency on a fly
ball to the gap. Sites like Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference offer park and
league adjusted stats to compare and analyze major league players, and further break
down performances by every split you can imagine. However, when it comes to the
minor league side of the game, unless you go to the game with your own
calibrated radar gun, you’re not even guaranteed to get reliable pitch
velocities, and no tracked pitch information (type/speed/location) is available
for free online (possibly at all?). Also, Baseball-Reference has a few splits,
but they only track the basic stats for those splits, and you can’t compare players
by split. Similarly, while Fangraphs posts FIP for minor league pitchers and a
league-adjusted wRC+ for minor league batters, they don’t share the constants
they use, or offer any minor league splits. Statcorner and Minor League Central
offer a little more batted ball information (although Minor League Central
hasn’t updated since 6/18/2015), and you can get spray charts from MLBFarm, but
no site brings it all together… until now. Introducing the Astromets Mind Minor League Stat
Page, which is my attempt at bringing the best from the aforementioned stat
sites into two Tableau worksheets – one for batters, one for pitchers.
