HitTracker :: Home run tracking and distance measurement

Greg Rybarczyk, an engineer with an interest in the flight of major league baseballs, has created a rather amazing trove of information about last year’s home runs, including his special formula for determining the actual (he calls it “true”) distance a ball would have flown if it didn’t land above grade in the seats or hit a light standard or the glass wall of a right field dining establishment.

This sort of information is very important when we look at other people trying to track the steroid era or the juiced ball era or what have you based on homer distances.

Greg includes his weather and altitude correctors so that other adjustments can be made.

I’m not really sure how much real value this is going to have in its present form, but I hear that he’s hoping to enter this information for all batted balls in 2007. While that will duplicate at least some of the information that Baseball Info Solutions is keeping, it’s hard to argue that we don’t want multiple sources for what is inevitably less-than-objective data.

We’ll leave it to the next generation to figure out how to get all the data keepers interested in sharing.