As good as these metrics are from statcast, we needed to do more to paint the whole picture. Throughout this reading, we will be taking you through our steps to building our swing path “optimizer”. We will cover the reconstruction of the full signal bat path, optimizing with feasibility constraints, real world examples, and our findings.
Since all the data is at contact, we are able to model the relationships of the attack angles and the depth of contact in the Y direction (from home plate to the mound). By using contact points to represent the barrel’s position, and attack angles as the direction of the barrel’s velocity, we are able to generate a proxy for full signal bat paths.