James Madison High School in Vienna, VA, has the definition of an elite high school baseball program. Coach Mark “Pudge” Gjormand has been at the school for 22 seasons, collecting 20 or more wins in 10 seasons, including in each of the past five years. (VA high school teams rarely play more than 25 games in a season.)
Obviously, these are excellent accomplishments. Madison consistently sends players to Division I colleges on scholarship, and one of their players--Andy McGuire—was selected in the 2013 MLB Draft, although he upheld his scholarship to the University of Texas. This season, as far as I know, was the first that the Madison High School team used advanced statistics in their baseball program. Lucky for me, Gjormand sought me out to collect data not found in the general scorebook. For hitters, I collected information such as batted ball tendencies, including where they hit it, how hard they hit it and the type of batted ball it was (ground ball, fly ball or line drive); average number of pitches hitters saw per at bat; and BABIP. For pitchers, I looked at strike and ball rates; first pitch strike rates; and batted ball tendencies against. Click here to read more on Beyond The Box Score.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |