Unified Pitch Graphs for Diagnosing Pitching Strategy

2026-09-03

AI Summary

为了解决棒球投球策略分析问题，本文提出了一种新的分层图表示方法——统一投球图（UPG），该方法能精确记录每个投球事件的三维轨迹及其上下文，并通过自适应支持机制提高路径覆盖率和执行重构精度。

Abstract

Pitching strategy in baseball is expressed through both physical execution and the ordered context in which pitches are used, yet common representations collapse pitches into discrete types or aggregate statistics. We present Unified Pitch Graphs (UPG), a hierarchical graph representation for retrospective analysis of sequential spatiotemporal events. UPG preserves each pitch as an exact event with reconstructed three-dimensional trajectory and context, connects consecutive pitches through directed sequence edges, and organizes the same events across semantic and temporal resolutions. A support-adaptive mechanism backs off from fine, long sequences when repeated evidence is insufficient, while retaining exact event lineage. We evaluate UPG on 3.94 million MLB Statcast pitches from 2021 to 2026. Nominally identical pitch sequences exhibit distinct physical executions, and ordered structure becomes increasingly evident in longer context-conditioned paths. Support-adaptive backoff increases held-out path coverage from 18.9\% to 94.9\% while improving execution reconstruction from $R^2=0.495$ to $0.685$. UPG also reliably localizes controlled execution changes that discrete pitch-mix and sequence representations cannot detect. These results demonstrate that UPG provides a traceable, multi-scale representation for identifying recurring strategy patterns without conflating retrospective associations with causal or future-performance claims.

Problem

• Pitching Strategy
• Spatiotemporal Events
• Hierarchical Graph Representation
• Sequence Analysis
• Execution Reconstruction

Innovation

• Unified Pitch Graphs
• support-adaptive mechanism
• spatiotemporal events
• hierarchical graph representation
• pitching strategy