Purpose

The purpose of catcherpop is to provide players, coaches, parents, and instructors insight beyond just a pop time alone. There are two main components of pop time: exchange time and ball flight time. By using two easily measured metrics (pop time and arm strength), you can be better informed as to the specific areas of strength and weakness on a more granular level. As such, this app serves as a viable starting point for player development decisions when addressing overall pop time reduction.

All calculations and comparisons in this app are based on Major League averages gathered from the Statcast Pop Time Leaderboard.

On a personal note, I used this project as a learning exercise. Since I was around 11 years old, I have tinkered with web design and development at a hobbyist level. This app challenged me to learn concepts that had previously intimidated me. It's not perfect (whatever that means), but it's been a perfectly valuable experience getting my hands dirty and working on something outside my comfort zone.

Limitations

Pop time is a small piece of the catching puzzle. My personal opinion is that pop time is a vastly overrated metric, and too much time is spent obsessing over it. Please do not define your overall defensive value as a catcher on pop time.

The biggest limitation of this application is its backend exchange time calculations. The calculated exchange time is derived from an overall ball flight time estimation. Predicting true ball flight time requires inputs beyond the scope of this application (such as air temperature and spin rate), and complex differential equations to account for the interrelationship between many of the intermediate variables. As such, a linear weighting is used to retroactively adjust ball flight time in order to more closely match the normal ratio of exchange time to ball flight time. For a deeper explanation of this, and to see what ratio I used as a model, see Breaking Down Pop Time by Anthony Brady and Alex Caravan.

As far as the design and development process, I can assure you there are inefficiencies in my code, design mistakes, and plenty of best practices that are completely ignored. Don't hesitate to rip this app apart - it will help me learn!