Over the past few years, Darren Willman has made some of the pitch-by-pitch data generated by Statcast available on his baseballsavant.com site. We have only gotten a taste of the kind of data that Statcast can produce, but even that taste is interesting and useful to work with.
The easiest way to get the data is through the Statcast Search query tool. After running a query–say, for all pitches thrown on April 24, 2017–you have the option of exporting the data as a comma-separated values (csv) file. As of April 24th, the query output has changed in some not so subtle ways. Daren was kind enough to share with me the changes he was making ahead of time so that I could quickly update the scrape_statcast_savant series of functions in my baseballr package (which I’ve done, FYI).
I thought it would be helpful to outline what those changes are for people that have been working with the original data exports and plan on working with the new ones.
You can read the rest at The Hardball Times.