What is the KBO Wizard?
The KBO Wizard is my answer to the lack of advanced stats and pitch-by-pitch data that is available for the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). As MLB fans, we are spoiled with the sheer amount of information at our fingertips, whether it’s Baseball-Reference, FanGraphs, Baseball Savant, or any of the other countless sites that do fantastic work for MLB data. But I, like so many others, started watching the KBO in May when ESPN started to air games and I quickly got frustrated when I tried to write about games but couldn’t find very much information.
The KBO Wizard is an R Shiny app that provides that information, whether it’s more advanced stats or pitch-type information and location data, based on the 28,000+ pitches that I’ve charted. If you’ve been here before or are just interested in the app, click below, otherwise, keep reading and I’ll share some more background info on the Wizard and my process.
In November 2020, I had the opportunity to present the KBO Wizard and some KBO research at the Ohio State Sports Analytics Conference. You can view my presentation (about 10 minutes total) below or on YouTube.
What does the KBO Wizard include?
The KBO Wizard has a plethora of features and options for exploring KBO data and players. Over the past month or so, I’ve compiled about 28,000 pitches on KBO pitchers, tracking pitch locations, pitch velocities, and the result of the pitch. The KBO Wizard provides visualizations of pitch locations and pitch velocity, as well as calculations of advanced stats like Whiff%, Zone%, and more that are impossible to calculate without rigorous play-by-play data.
There are sortable data tables for the advanced pitching and hitting stats, which are also displayed on the individual pitcher/batter display pages. These individual player pages allow you to view pitch locations thrown and faced, velocity numbers, and more of those advanced numbers. The last feature (at the moment) is a batter vs pitcher tab, where you can select a pitcher and see how he has pitched against a specific batter. All of these features are very exciting and should only grow as I chart more games and get more data.
Why did I create the KBO Wizard?
As I mentioned earlier, I was frustrated at the lack of publicly available data on the KBO to supplement my analysis of KBO pitchers. When doing MLB, or even college baseball, evaluations, there are so many resources available. Thus, the purpose of the KBO Wizard is multi-faceted: I wanted to create a tool that housed my data and provided the kinds of visualizations and stats that I’ve grown to rely on and it help me. As someone interested in working professional baseball, this is a phenomenal project to display my baseball and coding knowledge. Initially, the resume/experience piece of covering the KBO was a big driver but I’ve grown to love the league (go Kiwoom Heroes!) and I’ve learned a lot about baseball from the KBO and become a better baseball fan overall.
How am I collecting the data?
I have spent the last month and a half collecting the data that is powering the Wizard by watching and charting the KBO broadcasts on both ESPN and Twitch. I plot pitch locations with a separate R Shiny tool that I built for my private use and keep track of things like pitcher, batter, pitch velocity, pitch type, result, and batted ball data in an Excel sheet. From there, I clean up the presentation of the sheet and throw it into R to clean it further into the standard nominations that I’ve landed on and the data enters the Wizard.
Can I see the data?
One awesome feature of Baseball Savant is the ability to run searches and queries for specific data points from the last few MLB seasons. At the moment, I am not making my KBO data itself publicly available, instead choosing to use the KBO Wizard to display the visualizations and data tables that are a result of the data that I’ve collected. If you are interested in seeing a sample of the data for a certain pitcher or acquiring the data, shoot me a DM on Twitter @benhowell71 or an email at ben.howell@utexas.edu.
Contact Me
If you have further questions about the KBO Wizard, the data I’ve collected, or features you’d like to see, please shoot me a DM on Twitter @benhowell71 or send me an email at ben.howell@utexas.edu.