Using raw Baseball Savant data in Tableau

In addition to my previous post on how to get Baseball Savant data out of the mlb website and into Tableau, the following shows the "code" for calculated fields in Tableau to use the BBS data more usefully.

To determine the team of the batter (reverse for pitchers):
IF [Inning Topbot] = "Bot" THEN [Home Team] ELSE [Away Team] END

Identify barrels (although BBS now provides this in a column as well):
IF [Launch Speed] >= 98 AND [Launch Angle] >= 26 - ([Launch Speed] - 98)
AND [Launch Angle] <= 30 + ([Launch Speed] -98)
THEN "Barrel"
ELSE ""
END

To determine At Bats we need to first group the events as follows:

Then create a calculated field:
IF [Events At Bats] = "AB" THEN 1 ELSE 0 END









Same for Hits, On Base, and Plate Appearances:

IF [Events Hits] = "Hits" THEN 1 ELSE 0 END

IF [Events On Base] = "On Base" THEN 1 ELSE 0 END

IF [Events Plate Appearance group] = "PA" THEN 1 ELSE 0 END

From here it is easy to calculate things like:

OBP: SUM([On Base])/SUM([PA])

Batting Average: SUM([Hits])/SUM([AB])

To calculate Slugging we need to calculate total bases first:

IF [Events] = "single" THEN 1
ELSEIF [Events] = "double" THEN 2
ELSEIF [Events] = "triple" THEN 3
ELSEIF [Events] = "home_run" THEN 4
ELSE 0
END

Slugging: SUM([Total Bases])/SUM([AB])

Let's double check if this is correct. I ran this for Josh Donaldson and compared it to his ESPN-page:

Now that I know using the raw data from BBS works in Tableau I can start focusing on doing some more interesting analysis and visualizations.