A week ago today I was on my way to San Francisco for the 3rd annual PITCHf/x summit. The summit is put on by Sportvision, the company that developed the PITCHf/x system. I went last year, when I had a great time and was looking forward to this one -- it did not disappoint.

PITCHf/x summit is a bit of a misnomer because at this point Sportvision is expanding its f/x-family and this summit was largely centered around Sportvision's new FIELDf/x system. This camera-based system aims to track the the movement of all players on the field as well as the ball in play and throws between fielders. The system has been running on a test basis at AT&T park since April and Sportvision hopes to have the system in all MLB parks by next year. The availability of this future data to the public is at this point not known as Sportvision works out the business side of the project.

As part of this year's summit Sportvision released 13 games of the FIELDf/x data from AT&T to a limited number of analysts to analyze and present on at the summit. Although Sportvision is working on tracking the ball with the FIELDf/x system, that is still a work in progress and they released 'just' the player tracking data. About half of the talks at the summit were based on the FIELDf/x data and the other half on other topics. Here I present a brief recap of these talks. The presentations should be available to download in the future, and looks like they will be here when they are.

Part 1 non-FIELDf/x

Matt Lentzner and Mike Fast started off. Matt said that he has always been troubled by how movement numbers are reported, citing the often reported fact that according to PITCHf/x's spin deflection numbers (pfx_x and pfx_z) fastballs have a lot of spin deflection, or movement, while sliders have very little. Matt suggested the difference between these data and our expectations is because the spin deflection is defined, as Matt put it, from the perspective of the ball, while we think about movement from he perspective of the batter. Matt suggested that it would be useful to define two new values, the horizontal (x) and vertical (z) velocity of the pitch just as it crosses the plate. These value are affected not only by the pfx_x and pfx_z of the pitch, but also its trajectory, and could better represent the movement of a pitch as it is observed by a batter.

Matt had Mike run the numbers to see how well these metrics correlated with swinging strike rate, and also presented the leader and laggard boards for starters' fastballs' vertical plate-crossing velocity. The results were preliminary but very cool. Hopefully Mike and Matt will continue to develope this idea and share more results with us in the future.

Up next were Glenn (Doc) Schoenhals and Fred Vint of Scientific Baseball. Scientific Baseball is looking to "close the gap between the science and the game." They have leased the pitchf/x system, installed it in a training facility in Oklahoma, and combined it with a number of cameras that capture the motion of the pitcher at a high number of frames per second. They use this for player evaluation and development with players of all ages. Doc talked about the challenges of dealing with lots of PITCHf/x data, combining it with some of the visual data from the cameras, and finding a way to communicate all of that to young players, their parents and coaches who might not familiar with measures like horizontal spin deflection. Doc also has a very accurate pitching machine which he can use to fire pitches just on the edge of the strike zone, using that and the pitch/x system he has held little league (?) umpire training and practice sessions.

At that point Matt Lentzner was back up talking about an interesting pitch he has seen from Hideki Okajima. It is referred to as a rainbow curve, but is not held like a curve and does not have the movement of one. In fact, the pitch has pfx_x and pfx_z values close to zero: Matt thinks that it is a gyro ball.

Next up was Alan Nathan, who with Peter Jensen organized the summit. Alan presented the results from a series of experiments he conducted to measure the spin rate of batted balls. The pitchf/x system calculates the spin rate of pitched balls based on the fit trajectory, but not is much is known about the spin of the batted ball. This spin plays a large role in making the ball drop faster on line drives (front spin) or stay in the air longer on some fly balls (backspin). It also makes the ball slice towards the foul line (side spin). Alan directly measured the spin on the ball by firing a marked baseball at a cylindrical piece of wood bolted to a wall at 100mph and taking pictures of the ball as it came off.

Alan found a number of interesting things. The spin direction of the ball off the 'bat' was largely independent of the spin direction of the incoming ball (Alan varied the spin direction of the incoming ball). Also it in the moments when it hit the bat the ball experienced sheer deformation, causing it to 'grip' the bat. As I could understand it this stopped the spin of the ball which is why the spin of the incoming ball did not play a big role in determining the spin of the ball coming off. This 'gripping' and deformation caused the ball to come off the bat with a huge spin rate: Alan observed balls coming off with over 4000 rpm, much higher than previous estimates. Alan was very surprising by how high these values were. He is hoping to incorporate these results into a model of the bat-ball collusion.

Part 2 FIELDf/x

Vidya Elangovan, a sportvision engineer, introduced us to the fieldf/x system and some of the technical challenges of capturing the data. As noted the system is up and running at AT&T and has been since April, the hope is to have the system in all parks by the 2011 season. Vidya said that the full tracked and recorded data is ready within 20-30 minutes after the game, but at this point is not completely 'real-time' like the pitchf/x system.

The system has two to four cameras placed up high above the field and trained on the entire field of play. At AT&T they use two cameras, one between 1st and home, and the other between 3rd and home, both very high, it seems placed on stadium lights. The cameras are higher resolution than the pitchf/x cameras and take pictures every 15th of a second. A computer algorithm picks out the players, coaches and umpires, turns them into a blob and finds the center of mass of each blog and attaches a location to that point. The system also records events: pitcher releases the ball, batter hits the ball, fielder gains possession of a ball (fields it, or catches it from a throw) and fielder throws the ball. The time of each of these events is recorded along with the identify of the fielder. In the future the system will also track the location of the ball in play and throw, although those data were not released with the 13 games.

Vidya highlighted a number of the technical challenges. Shadows over part of the field during day games are challenging because they push the limits of the dynamic range of the cameras to pick up both shadowed and non-shadowed areas. Shadows of players can also artificially increase the size of player blobs, resulting in incorrect player centers. Green uniforms blend in with the grass, tricking the algorithm that picks out players from background. Similarly if players stand too still for a long time the algorithm can lose them. Finally the system picks up ridiculously large amounts of data. If Sportvision kept all those high-resolution pictures taken every 15th of a second for every game of a MLB season they would end up with petabytes of data. With just the location data for all players every 15th of a second they get one million lines of data a game. Effectively storing, transmitting and analyzing this data will be a huge challenge.

Maybe the bloggers could give us some hope.

Peter Jensen showed how he took this huge quantity of data, moved it into a databased and then into an excel-based simulation which could replay the movement of the players and ball (extrapolated from player events). Peter's simulation was well done and while it ran it also displayed some of the important pieces of information (throw speeds, distance between base runners and the next base, etc.). Whoever gets this data, teams bloggers, etc. will need to do something like Peter did to make sense of this data.

John Walsh spoke at the beginning of the data, by Skype because he was in Italy, but his talk fits in better here. John analyzed grounders. Since we had just 13 games worth (and only bottom halves of innings) and less than a month to work with the data it was hard to do more than just descriptive looks at the data. Still the descriptive look was very cool. John calculated how long each fielded grounder took to get to the fielder: the average play to 3B took about 1.5 seconds, while those to SS or 2B took about two seconds. So middle infielders get, on average, about half a second extra to get the ball. John also showed that with the data it is possible to break down the time it takes to make a double play into its consistent parts: time it takes for the ball to be fielded, time the fielder holds the ball, the time it takes for the ball to get to the next fielder, and so on.

At that point I was up. I looked at fielders' routes to balls in the air. With the data you could see how direct, or not, paths to the ball were. I showed some plays where the paths were particularly direct and some where they not so direct. Ultimately I showed a graph of hang time versus distance the fielder was from the ball for fielded balls in the air. With the trajectory of non-fielded balls as well we could add those to this graph, adding how far a fielder was to the ball and how long he would have had to get there. I noted that this would be a great basis for a fielding metric, Greg will talk more about this in his talk.

Next up was Mike Fast, who analyzed base runners. First he showed the base-running trajectories for a number of plays. When players go between two bases they take roughly the straight line between the two, but when they are going for two bases they take a rounder, almost circular approach. Based the on data Mike looked at he didn't see a lot of variability between the paths take between different players taking two bases. Mike also looked in depth at two runners, plotting their instantaneous speed at each 1/15 second interval. He showed how the runner sped up or slowed down when the pitcher started his windup, released the ball, the ball was hit, and so on. One of the runners Mike showed got up to a top speed of 18 mph.

Baseball Analyst Jeremy Greenhouse was up next. He presented two models he had parameterized with the FIELDf/x data. The first was a model to predict stolen base success probability based on a number of parameters: length of lead, amount of time it takes the base runner to get to the next base, pitch type, pitch speed, catcher pop time (time between when the catcher gets the ball to when he throws it), amount of time it takes the catcher's throw to get to second (or third). Jeremy noted that his model would not account for the baserunner's sliding ability or the fielder's tagging ability. The released FIELDf/x data had only four steal attempts so a complete parameterazation of his model was not possible, but with a larger set of data it would be very cool to see what this model would show. Jeremy had a similar model for estimating the success of fielding a fly ball.

Matt Thomas uses a DSLR to take pictures of the field of play from the press box at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. From what I understand he captures the initial position of players as each play begins and then the position when the ball is fielded. It is very cool to see the amount and level of data that Matt can collect with a consumer-level camera and his photometry skills. Matt showed distributions for the initial locations of fielders for each position based on batter handedness, batting order, inning and a number of other game states. He also showed the probability that an infielder fields a grounder based on the difference between the angle where the fielder is positioned and the angle of the grounder, it follows a relatively nice Gaussian centered just off of zero.

Max Marchi, all the way from Italy by way of NYC, Cooperstown, Syracuse, Buffalo, South Bend and Chicago, gave us examples of how you could use PITCHf/x, HITtf/x and FIELDf/x to scout players. He had a number of examples from the blogoshpere (his work, Jeremy's work, my work). It was a very cool talk to see all of the ways these data can be used to measure players' abilities.

Greg Rybarczyk was up next. Like me he looked at fielders playing balls in the air, but he added the next step to the analysis. He went through 13 innings and looked at all balls in the air and found the landing location and hang time of balls that dropped in for hits. With this he could do want I wanted to do and plot both hits and fielded balls in hang time/distance between fielder and ball space. With enough data points one could assign a probability that the average fielder fields a ball based on these two values (another value that Greg noted was important was the angle the player had to go to get the ball). Then each fielder could be assessed based on the probability the average fielder makes plays that he made or didn't. Most agreed this would be more accurate than the current zone-based methods, but it is still a question whether this method would make fielding metrics converge any faster than current methods

All presenters did a tremendous amount of work in their presentations and this is just a small sample of each presentation. If you are interested further I suggest you download the slides and look over them. Also if I mis-stated anything here please note any corrections in the comments.

If you are looking for more recaps or liveblogs you can check out Colin's, Ben's, Rob's or Dan's.

I had a great time at the summit, it was lots of fun to see some of the other members of the PITCHf/x-community. Thanks to Sportvision for putting on the conference and Alan and Peter for helping to organize it.

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When Marlon Byrd signed his 3-year, $15 million contract with the Cubs this past off-season, it was seen as yet another indicator that Jim Hendry was out of touch. Why add a 32-year old center fielder with a flimsy track record of success to a team with a $144 million payroll and legitimate championship aspirations?

Here is Christina Kahrl of Baseball Prospectus reacting to the acquisition:

My initial response on Twitter (@ChristinaKahrl) was that Byrd won't slug .420 away from Texas, and while that was a flip comment*, the more I think about it, the more I'm comfortable with the idea. It might cost less than half as much as signing Gary Matthews Jr. did, but that doesn't make the signing less than half as dumb. That's the basis of comparison I'm operating from, because we've heard this story before: toolsy 31-year-old ex-fourth outfielder has big year in a superheated bandbox, gets big money, and becomes a permanent punchline on his general manager's highlight reel. No doubt Jim Hendry's moved beyond the laughter, since he's on the downslope of the Milton Bradley experience.

Byrd's performance record is entirely unmysterious.

Kahrl thought the one silver lining of the move would be that Sam Fuld, a 28-year old who hasn’t managed a .400 SLG in the PCL in 2010, might be able to get some playing time more quickly given Byrd’s ability to shift to the corner outfield positions. Christina was not alone. There was a guy named Sullivan right here at Baseball Analysts who wrote the following:

It's hard not to think back to the Milton Bradley episode and how much it distracted Chicago when looking at their moves this off-season. Losing Bradley and picking up Carlos Silva and Marlon Byrd, wherever you come down on the argument that they just had to part ways with Bradley, amounts to wheel-spinning. Byrd is no better than Bradley, Silva is just awful.

Ouch.

So how has Byrd performed? He’s hitting .302/.358/.446, good for a .356 wOBA and a 119 wRC+. Byrd ranks 3rd among National League center fielders in Runs Above Replacement. When you factor defense, his season looks even more impressive. He sits 12th in Fangraphs WAR among all National League position players. By any measure whatsoever, the Byrd signing has been a masterstroke for the Cubs, albeit a bittersweet masterstroke for Cubs fans as they ponder what might have been if their team’s other pieces were up to par.

A lot of Byrd’s success offensively has been tied to a high in-play average of .338, but then again his career figure is .325. He’s murdered lefties to the tune of a .953 OPS, and in case you think his output is tied to Wrigley, he’s been much better on the road than he has at home. Defensively, as you can deduce from his WAR number, he appears to have been terrific this season. Just five months into a 3-year deal, the complete story of the Byrd acquisition is as yet unwritten. He is hitting just .245/.268/.340 over the last 28 days. Nonetheless he's been good enough to date that it warranted attention.

I wanted to post this for a couple of reasons. The first was simply to point out a ray of light in an otherwise miserable Cubs season. Byrd seems to have exceptional make-up and character – check out his blog here – and has quickly become a fan favorite. When I attended Wrigley in late June to watch the Cubs take on Pittsburgh, I noticed how much the fans seated in the bleachers adored Byrd, cheering wildly as he took the field in the first inning. And Byrd impressed me by how much he seemed to be relishing the opportunity to patrol the Wrigley outfield in front of such appreciative fans. Byrd would be one of the great stories of 2010 if Derrek Lee and Aramis Ramirez had come to play this year.

Another reason I wanted to post this was to consider what it means when the saberists get it so wrong. A 32-year old whose offensive value had been tied to hitting in Texas, who had not even experienced real Big League success until age 29...well that’s not a guy worth inking to a guaranteed 3-year deal, right? That’s how my thinking went anyway. But there are considerations that teams take into account, granted inaccurately at times, that performance analysts do not.

I don’t know if what follows is true, but I bet a lot of it is, and I also bet this represents much of the case for Byrd that refutes the reasons not to sign him that Christina and I exclusively considered. Here goes:

Byrd is a guy with outstanding character who works hard and has never been in better shape. He will be a remarkable influence on his teammates, and the opportunity to play for a team with a rich tradition like the Cubs will not be lost on him. Whatever drop-off a move away from Arlington entails, consider all of these factors enough to counteract it. He’s a mature player, a true professional who got a late start but is now ready to take his game to a new level into his mid-30’s.

I bet there’s a scout out there, probably working for the Cubs, who had written something precisely to that effect on Byrd. That scout was dead right, and I know as a result of the Byrd case I will be looking into factors I previously had not considered when analyzing player movement.

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This article is cross-posted at Red Sox Beacon, a site I started with Baseball Prospectus writer Marc Normandin. We're not sure where it will go but for now it's just a repository for a handful of us to jot down our thoughts on the Boston Red Sox. I will still be contributing here at least every Wednesday, and occasionally on weekends as well.

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Fresh off a series loss in St. Pete and with their playoff chances inching from slim towards none, there is a new narrative taking hold here in Boston . It's difficult to follow but the best I can boil it down to is "The Red Sox knew this was a ‘bridge year’ all along and are not going for it.” Those who hold this belief - ostensibly at least - point to the lack of deal-making at the deadline and to Theo Epstein's terribly misunderstood "bridge year" remark before the beginning of the year. That the team continues to rely on the likes of Daniel Nava and Darnell McDonald to claw back into the most competitive division in baseball means the front office is content to let the season slip away, or so it goes. Some examples:

Tony Massarotti, August 30th

At any point, to blame it all on the injuries is rather elementary and downright blind.

Fenway Park has gone from among the most fashionable places to be seen to just another ballpark, and the timing could not be worse for a Red Sox administration that might have been planning for another lean year.

Seriously, might not that be, above all else, the reason the Sox put in a claim for Johnny Damon? The Sox lack star power. The Sox lack appeal.

Joe Haggerty’s Twitter feed, August 28th

Hawpe is just an example. The main point is that the #redsox lack of movement toward any players = not going for it

Chris Gasper, who basically took to Boston.com to throw a temper tantrum yesterday

Last night's defeat at Tropicana Field and the series weren't just lost over the weekend. They were lost in the last month, when fatal flaws went unfixed by the front office. While teams like the San Diego Padres (Ryan Ludwick and Miguel Tejada) and Minnesota Twins (Matt Capps and Brian Fuentes) have addressed needs, the Sox have preferred to stand pat and apply internal patches. The Padres and Twins look playoff-bound, the Sox do not.

Actions speak louder than words. Francona's actions tell the tale of a team that waited for reinforcements from its front office that never came.

Dan Shaughnessy in today’s Boston Globe

It’s not like they didn’t warn us. Remember Theo’s comments in December about the “bridge period’’? He said that’s not what he really meant, but it was a moment of truth. The reality is the Sox figured they were in for a soft season.

A number of reactions come to mind as I read mainstream writing along these lines, but the first is to spell out exactly what the Red Sox have been through this year. Let's start with the obvious. Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis, conservatively, are two of the 20 best position players in baseball. They’re probably two of the 15 best and possibly both top-10. Combined, they’ve missed 85 games in 2010. Imagine if the Brewers were without Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun, the Rays without Carl Crawford and Evan Longoria, or the Yankees without Robinson Cano and Mark Teixeira. You could stop right there and forgive the Red Sox for merely being a .565 team playing in baseball’s (sports’?) toughest division.

Of course the story of Boston’s misfortune runs much deeper. Jacoby Ellsbury, an established 3-win player entering his 26-year old season, has played in just 18 games. Victor Martinez, one of the best catchers in all of baseball, has missed 33 games. Since health is a skill, it’s hard to get too upset about Mike Cameron’s plight in 2010, but nonetheless the fringe Hall of Fame candidate who was coming off consecutive 4+ win seasons according to Fangraphs, has not been healthy all year long. At 37, some durability issues could be expected, but Cameron has managed just 180 largely ineffective plate appearances.

On the performance side, key Sox players have struggled. Josh Beckett has been terrible in his limited action this year. John Lackey has not pitched nearly as well as he is capable. J.D. Drew has managed a couple of hot streaks but he has not been able to piece together a typical Drew offensive season despite remaining healthy as his teammates fall all around him.

The Red Sox have endured as much adversity as any team in baseball. Just a few of the items mentioned above breaking their way and Boston’s in the thick of this race. This was a bridge year in the sense that Boston needed to ink some veterans to short contracts in order to remain a top-flight team while they waited for their youngsters to develop. Marco Scutaro, Cameron and Beltre all fall into this camp, but how do any of those signings indicate that Boston's front office thought they would have a soft year? They would probably be baseball’s best team with any luck at all in 2010. I look at the 2003, 2004 and 2007 clubs and I don't know - I think this may have been the very best Red Sox roster of the Theo Epstein era. This team was designed to compete and all year long, it has.

But that first point – that the Red Sox intended to try to win the World Series all along - is only partially responsive to the complaints circling the Boston airwaves and filling the broadsheets. The notion that they’re not “going for it” by failing to make trades is preposterous on its face. Whom would you like to have seen the Red Sox acquire?

If only the Red Sox had managed to get Brad Hawpe, then at least they’d be making a go of it. Had the Red Sox traded for bats like Ludwick or Tejada, then at least we’d know they were serious. Their bullpen has been so bad. How could they NOT add Matt Capps or Brian Fuentes. And for goodness sake, things have become so dour down in the baseball ops offices, the marketing folks are now calling the shots. How else to explain the attempt to acquire Johnny Damon?

It’s hard for me to unravel the logic of these complaints but for our purposes, let’s consider the Los Angeles Dodgers. On July 31st, they sat 5.5 games out of a playoff spot, just like the Red Sox. Ned Colletti was aggressive, acquiring Ted Lilly, Ryan Theriot and Octavio Dotel at the deadline for a number of promising pieces in the Dodgers farm system and a couple of established Big Leaguers. For the short-term, the moves have worked out really nicely. Theriot has managed a 109 OPS+ as a Dodger, and Lilly is 5-1 since arriving on the west coast. Dotel has been spotty at times, but he’s only tossed 11 innings.

So the Dodgers made moves and were rewarded with very good productivity from their new acquisitions. Meanwhile, the Red Sox did virtually nothing at the deadline. After looking at potential moves – say Scott Downs for Casey Kelly as an example – the Red Sox decided that the market just wasn’t shaping up the way it would need to in order to compel them to deal. A month later, LA’s playoff odds have dwindled to 4% while the Red Sox chances are also slim, but still two times that of the Dodgers. Making trades for the short-term guarantees nothing.

But even when the Red Sox gave it an honest shot with the Johnny Damon waiver claim, they were not insulated from this line of attack. Damon chose not to join the club, but you can’t say the Red Sox have not been active. But folks like Mazz claim that the Damon attempt was driven by the business side of things, since, you know, the Red Sox aren't really going for it. I’m still waiting for any actual reporting on the subject. It’s speculation, and flies in the face of how the Red Sox have operated under John Henry's ownership group. Baseball Ops has total autonomy once made aware of their budget.

Boston is on pace to win 92 games in 2010. This despite as bad a non-New York Mets injury season as I can recall. Oh, those poor 2009 New York Mets. After winning 89 games in 2008, they had high hopes last year. Like the Red Sox, they got crushed by the injury bug, losing Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana among others. Unlike the Red Sox, they won 70 games.

I understand that you have to fill space in newspapers but the simple explanation for the 2010 Boston Red Sox is “shit happens.” It’s unsatisfying, but it’s the truth. They had a plan, assembled a great roster and on any number of fronts they’ve run into just awful luck. 92 wins might cut it in any other division in baseball, but in the AL East it means you might not qualify for the playoffs. And as a result, while Kevin Youkilis looks on in a splint and Dustin Pedroia gets set for surgery, an entitled, spoiled, silly media gets to spend the final month of the season grasping at straws assigning ex post facto blame as to why the Red Sox didn’t win a handful more games.

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Let me preface today's post by stating that I love a good baseball story as much as the next fan. But I've developed a pretty good b.s. detector over the past 50-plus years. I can usually separate the fiction from the facts. My antennae tend to go up when I hear a former player recall an incident from long ago.

On Friday, August 27, the Cincinnati Reds were hosting the Chicago Cubs. I was watching the game via MLB Extra Innings. I'm not sure why I even had the game on other than to keep tallies on Joey Votto, who is on my fantasy baseball team.

With the Reds beating the Cubs 6-1 in the bottom of the sixth and Thomas Diamond facing Ramon Hernandez, play-by-play announcer Thom Brennaman asks color analyst Jeff Brantley a question out of the blue. "Cowboy, do you remember the first home you gave up as a major league pitcher? Do you remember who hit it? Do you remember the year?"

Brantley laughs, "Oh, yeah," but doesn't answer quickly. Brennaman interjects, "Let's start off with the easy part: the year." Brantley says, "The year was '88." Brennaman responds, "You're one for one." He offers Brantley a hint by saying "the guy at the time was playing for the Montreal Expos." Brantley guesses Delino DeShields. Brennaman gives him a hard time and basically hands him the answer by telling Brantley it was a slugging first baseman. Brantley asks, "Andres Galarraga?" Brennaman then chimes in, "You got it."

That discussion was all fine and dandy. No reason to question the truth here. I figured Brennaman or a staff member looked up that piece of trivia before the game. The good stuff immediately followed when Brantley proceeded to spin a tale about another home run he allowed.

Brantley: The one that I remember the most was the home run by Eddie Murray and the reason I remember it the most is because I had thrown him a split-finger on the first pitch and he swung and missed it by a mile. I mean, he looked like a clown, and I thought this guy was, like, really good.

Brennaman: (Laughing) He was pretty good.

Brantley: Yeah, and I'm thinking to myself, 'This guy just missed my pitch by a mile.' Terry Kennedy, our catcher at the time, came to the mound and he said, 'Don't throw him that pitch again.' I said, 'Why not?' I said, 'He just missed it by a mile.' He goes, 'He's going to be sitting on it.' So I threw him a bunch of fastballs and he kept fouling them off, fouling them off. Kennedy kept calling fastball. I was like, 'Forget that. This guy's not gonna hit another split-finger.' I threw it and he hit it in the upper deck in Candlestick. The upper deck.

Brennaman: That's a long home run.

Brantley: Oh my gosh.

Brennaman: Was that in '88 as well?

Brantley: No, that was in '89. I learned that one. But I learned a very valuable lesson that day.

Here is the two-and-a-half-minute clip of the foregoing conversation:

As it turns out, the valuable lesson Brantley learned that day wasn't about telling the truth. Instead, I presume he never threw Murray another split-finger again. Maybe. You see, while Brantley gave up a home run to Murray at Candlestick Park in 1989, he didn't get Steady Eddie to look like a clown by swinging and missing a split finger. Nor did Terry Kennedy come out to the mound and tell Brantley not to throw that pitch again.

How do I know, you ask? Well, thanks to Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference.com, we can look up exactly what took place on that Saturday afternoon. A fact-finding mission moments after Brantley finished his tall tale detailed the real story. It's not quite as interesting as the one Brantley told.

Brantley indeed got ahead in the count. However, the first pitch wasn't a split-finger that Murray missed by a mile. Rather, it was a *called* strike. It's pretty tough to look like a clown when you don't even swing at the pitch. But, hey, it makes for a nice story 21 years later.

Murray fouled off the second pitch. Score one for Brantley. That said, Brantley didn't throw him "a bunch of fastballs," nor did Murray keep "fouling them off, fouling them off." Heck, Brantley only threw him three pitches. A called strike, a foul ball, and the offering that Murray presumably hit into the upper deck. Murray did slug a home run. That's not being questioned. And, for all I know, he may have hit one of Brantley's split-finger pitches. And it may have landed in the upper deck. Who knows at this point?

Just a matter of not recounting the type and number of pitches? Well, not really. Terry Kennedy didn't even play that day. Kirt Manwaring started and played the entire game at catcher. As a result, there is no way that Kennedy "came out to the mound" and told Brantley not to throw that split-finger again. If the truth be told, it was this bit of information that led me to question what happened. Look, why in the world would Kennedy (or Manwaring, for that matter) take a trip to the mound to tell his pitcher not to throw the same pitch that the batter had just swung and missed by a mile while looking like a clown? It doesn't make sense. In other words, it didn't pass the "smell test."

I don't know if anybody else caught this gaffe. More than anything, it reminds me just how valuable it is to access old box scores, as well as play-by-play and pitch summaries. Thank you, Retrosheet. Thank you, Baseball-Reference.com.

And thank you, Jeff Brantley. Nothing like some good ol' Cowboy folklore.

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