Biola Baseball alumnus Jarvis Greiner introduced his Quality of Pitch metric yesterday at the Society of Baseball Research Analytics Conference at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix.

The conference is a gathering of some of the top minds in professional baseball and was a showcase for Greiner and his team to introduce his newly developed system of quantitative pitch analysis.

鈥淚t always had bothered me how subjective the art of pitching analysis was,鈥 Greiner said. 鈥淭here鈥檚 really no way to compare pitchers鈥 breaking balls to each other. That guy has a good curveball. What does that mean? The only way we really had to measure was you had to throw hard. That鈥檚 the only way we identify talent. It鈥檚 very medieval. Just because you鈥檙e throwing hard doesn鈥檛 mean you鈥檙e going to be successful.鈥

Greiner partnered with Dr. Jason Wilson, associate professor of mathematics, to develop the Quality of Pitch system, which was met with much excitement when introduced at the conference.

The presentation earned press clippings in the Los Angeles Times, BaseballAmerica.com and Yahoo! Sports.

The system took more than five years to develop and analyzes more than 5 million pitches thrown in Major League Baseball since 2008. The system uses data gathered from the big league鈥檚 PITCHf/x system and attempts to assign a single number value of effectiveness to each pitch.

The Quality of Pitch system combines data on pitch velocity, location, total break, breaking point and rise to determine the overall rating of each pitch. It was launched as a way to analyze just curveballs, but has since expanded.

After debuting the new analysis system at the conference, Greiner hopes to use insight from some of the minds at the conference to help improve the model and potentially get involved with a major league team that has scouts who can provide more measurable data.

More information on Greiner鈥檚 product can be found at http://www.qopbaseball.com/home.html.