Statcast a ‘coaching tool’ for Royals’ Wakamatsu

KANSAS CITY — Royals bench coach Don Wakamatsu has the daunting task each season of taking the mounds of data provided daily by the Royals’ analytical department and transforming it into knowledge his coaching staff can use to win games.

That’s why Wakamatsu is very curious about MLB.com’s revolutionary Statcast™, the state-of-the-art tracking technology capable of measuring all aspects of player movement on the field as well as exit velocities and launch angles of batted and thrown baseballs.

“We’re always mining for new information,” Wakamatsu told MLB.com. “This technology is fascinating, especially if it provides us information we can utilize.”

Wakamatsu seems most intrigued by the ability of Statcast™ to track a defender’s movement.

Previously, baseball has relied on the highly subjective statistic of Defensive Runs Saved used by the sabermetrics community to evaluate defenders. Statcast™, through its tracking devices, can replace that with an objective measure of route efficiency based on the flight of the ball and the defender’s route to …

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