Pitch type is broken on statcast side

[rensmacneill]

When generating a statcast query, there are now a number of pitches which are returned with 'pitch_type' set to what seems to be a date-string.

The easiest way to look at this is to use something like: data['pitch_type'].unique()

After a quick look, the vast majority of these pitches also return with blank fields in the following:

• pfx_x, pfx_y, pfx_z
• vx0, vy0, vz0, ax, ay, az
• release_pos_x, release_pos_y, release_pos_z
• pitch_name

However this doesn't cover all of the cases, the remainder seem normal except for a blank 'pitch_name' field - though there are plenty of pitches with blank pitch types that also return a blank 'pitch_name' field but are otherwise normal.

This is an issue on the statcast side: I've replicated the behaviour using a simple 2-day query from baseballsavant. With that in mind, this isn't really an issue with pybaseball as I don't think a cut & dry fix exists on the pybaseball end, but it's more something for people to be aware of.

For what it's worth, in case others want to remove these entries like I did, I used something like this:

mask = np.in1d(data['pitch_type'].astype(str).str[0], '1')
data = data[~mask]

Which covers you for these entries occurring across multiple years.

Thanks again for the hard work James.

Cheers,
Rens

[rensmacneill]

I have contacted the statcast guys and they are investigating.