In this post, I am talking at length about the creative process for the Bullpen Chart Program I just released.
If you are looking to download the program you can click here - and if you are looking for the video that explains the program's functionality you can click here.
A Brief Get to Know Me:
As some may know, but many probably won't, I coach a 15u travel team in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
This is my third season coaching the team and am currently serving as the Pitching Coach. This past Fall I dropped out of College and quit my collegiate playing career to focus on coaching - more detail on that can be found in a two-part blog series I did covering that decision, Part 1 here, Part 2 here.
My very first blog post entitled Who the Hell am I? goes into a bit more detail on my background and what makes me tick.
As a coach just like I was as a player, I am obsessed with development and helping athletes achieve their maximum potential.
Why Did I Create This?:
I knew I had to adopt a more data-driven approach this Off-Season to fully maximize the development of my players.
In the past few years, I had dabbled in data-driven - but never fully embraced it. I would sporadically track velocity and chart some bullpens - and honestly, it was mostly due to a commitment level on my part. Still a player, I came to practices without a lot prepared and wanted to clock out after the practice ended.
This year is entirely different. I have approached coaching the same as I approached playing - relentlessly finding ways to improve that would help my players develop and pursue their dreams.
Coming out of the off-season last year it seemed like our pitching staff was well prepared - guys were throwing well and everything was looking good. But without any hard data to back that, I soon realized how unprepared we were once games started.
With that in mind, I built this years off-season throwing program with more mound work. Learning from past mistakes I knew that I had to track bullpens to see if guys were heading in the right direction. Some kind of bullpen charting then seemed like the best way to hold myself and the athletes accountable for their progress or lack off week to week.
The Early Stages of Creation:
Now let's be fucking real I did not just roll out of bed one morning and decided to create this kind of template. No - this evolved over the course of several months.
At first, circa December, it just started as a simple one page print off that had a space to track pitch type, velocity, location, etc. But, it was a hard copy and I soon realized that transferring that data onto a computer to actually do anything with it would be a literal nightmare.
Around this time I also started looking into the Diamond Kinetics Pitch Tracker ball and decided that I was going to implement the smart ball into bullpens throughout the year.
With those changes in mind, I then went in and created a template in excel where I would manually enter every piece of data on a laptop throughout bullpens. It was bare bones but It was what I had in mind at the time.
I left it alone for a few weeks, until, Baseball Development Group came out with their free download of the Throwing Card template. This was a big game changer as it opened my eyes to the potential that excel has and the user-friendly tools you can create in a workbook to more efficiently enter data and interpret it.
This is where the drop-down menus for stuff like the bullpen focus and athlete name idea came from.
I then also tidied the layout up a bit by applying some conditional formatting to see numbers easier. I also created a couple of rudimentary formulas to track average velocity, strike percentage, etc. This is when I also added the ability to automatically track Bauer Units on every pitch.
For those that are unfamiliar with Bauer Units, it is a measurement of raw spin - basically a way for coaches and athletes to compare spin rate independent of velocity. This way we can look at the Bauer Units of 70mph fastball and compare it to the spin of a 95mph fastball. For more on Bauer Units check out this article by Driveline Baseball.
I ended up leaving the bullpen chart in this state for over a month or two.
What Inspired the Iteration of the Bullpen Chart:
It wasn't until my trip to Orlando as a Guest Coach for another team in my area got axed that I started working on what is now the Bullpen Chart available for download.
As I sat around the house moping about not being down in Florida in nice weather coaching some ball and watching some spring training games I got bored, then feeling sorry for myself and then finally - inspired.
Inspired.
Inspired to revisit that old bullpen chart I created and make it better. "Make it a poor-mans version of a Rapsodo Report", I thought.
The first thing I tackled was separating the preexisting formulas for average velocity, strike percentage, etc, into formulas that tracked that data for specific pitch types.
I then got an email from a fellow coach Jordan Prosper (@jprosp23) asking about the old bullpen chart I had and asking about a heat-map of sorts to track location. After having a quick conversation with him and realizing how advantageous something like that would be I literally ran to the computer and started working on that - I figured it wouldn't be that hard to create. It took some time but I found a way to do it and format it appropriately to display a great visual representation of location.
I then started getting to the idea to create heat maps for each pitch type over a long period of time. To do that I would need to find a way to export or copy the data from the tracking sheets into another sheet to house the data.
And thus began a three-day process of working on coding in Excel Visual Basic. And holy fuck man, I literally spent north of 8 hours each day on figuring that out. Now, this could have been done quicker - and what ended up working was a lot more basic than what I was trying to do at the beginning. So really that time spent is not a testament to my intellect but more my stubbornness and haste. But, one thing I can take from that experience is that I truly cannot stop working on something until it is done. I remember waking up a couple of times in the middle of the night thinking about what I could do differently - inching myself closer and closer to lines of code that would accomplish the end goal.
That was by far the hardest part about the project. Spending hours researching and watching YouTube videos teaching myself VBA (very reminiscent of the early days in my playing career I might add).
It was some kind of roller coaster over those few days, constantly shifting from feeling victorious to defeated. That teeter totter went on pretty much every hour those days. But man, at the end of the day, it was fun as shit and a truly interesting journey personally.
The Final Stages of Development:
Once I finally found a way to get data copied to another sheet in a usable format, I began working on the Data Report.
And although I am still not satisfied with the way the Data Report came out, I do think it serves its purpose.
I hope to revisit it in the future and iterate on it once I learn more with Excel.
It was a pretty straightforward process to developing that - mind you - I had to rejig how data was presented on the pages to make it usable for graphs in Excel.
I'm a pretty big perfectionist so towards the end, it was a process of combing over every detail and making sure it worked as intended. More importantly, though, making sure that everything was as user-friendly and adaptable to people's needs as possible.
This is when I added in a dynamic calendar for people to plan out bullpens or just general throwing work, making sure that it would work for every possible month and year.
I also added in a 5th pitch option, and while I don't know how many people actually throw 5 pitches at the level that this sort of program is intended, I figured I might as well.
I also then added in a Previous Sheet navigation tool to be able to quickly go back and forth between pages if needed.
Concluding Thoughts:
I sincerely thank everyone who has downloaded the program and hope that they get as much use out of it as I will over the next year.
And even if this template becomes a bust and more of a hassle than a convenience, it was fun to work on and helped me grow more as a coach and as an individual.
Thanks for reading!
Lennon.
If you require any service or have questions regarding the bullpen chart program please reach out to me via email at lennon@richardsbaseball.com
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