Baseball Info Solutions
Baseball Info Solutions (BIS) is the Pennsylvania-based company which produces the annual Bill James Handbook and provides major and minor league data and analysis for a variety of clients.
Founded by former STATS, Inc President John Dewan and Director of Operations Good Fielding Plays. Starting in 2009, the video scouts are also recording objective hit timer data, which is expected to drastically improve the accuracy and objectivity of hitting, pitching, and fielding analysis. The proprietary data is utilized in advanced analyses, including Dewan's Plus/Minus System to evaluate fielders.
Rather than attending each game live, BIS video scouts record information from satellite video feeds of each game, allowing them to rewind and review each play as often as necessary to record accurate information.
BIS also authors the Bill James Handbook, published by ACTA Publications and released annually on November 1.
Baseball Info Solutions clients include about half of MLB teams, fantasy services, computer game developers, and popular websites such as The Hardball Times (though THT has announced that it will no longer publish statistics starting in 2010).
Discrepancies Between BIS, STATS, and MLBAM Data[edit]
In some cases, analysis that incorporates detailed PBP data, such as that provided by BIS, STATS, and MLBAM, can produce different results depending solely on which database is used. One notable example is UZR, where players such as Andruw Jones and Derek Jeter have significantly different UZRs using BIS data compared to STATS data. Some analysts, such as Colin Wyers, have suggested that some potential biases may exist in the subjective data recorded by stringers, and that analysis that does not use the subjective parameters may be more accurate at large enough sample sizes. BIS may be less prone to these biases than MLBAM because of their different recording practices. BIS rotates its video scouts so that each scores every team throughout the season in order to prevent the bias of an individual stringer from affecting one team's players disproportionately. MLBAM employs stringers to record data from the pressbox at each individual park, so the stringer at one park can consistently record data differently than a stringer at another park. One of the potential biases noted by Wyers is the effect of the height of a stadium's press box on the classification of hit trajectories, which BIS also avoids (as long as the camera angles at each park are the same) by recording data remotely from video feeds.
The Hardball Times in 2007 that examined the differences between BIS RZR/OOZ and STATS ZR with a focus on the number of plays credited, although the number of plays credited in the STATS data was not explicitly given by his data source.
