6 ms·

Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles

127 points by jaydub 9y ago

huangc10 9y ago
The scrolling infographic was a very nice touch, especially with the DBZ style animation. It's only natural that in little league coaches tell players to hit ground balls because kids have trouble fielding (it requires extreme precision, speed, and dexterity). It's also quite obvious that you have to hit the ball high and hard to get a triple or home-run. Good to know data backs this up.
mtalantikite 9y ago
Reminds me of an old episode of Seinfeld, where George teaches the Yankees how to hit based on simple physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTwE7xDZkPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTwE7xDZkPk
- dogruck 9y ago
  Brilliant. "In 6 games."
  - RoutinePlayer 9y ago
    I absolutely love that line... Yes, you just won a WS, but it took you 6 games!... LOL
kodablah 9y ago
Regardless of analytics, baseball is a game of reactions. Pitchers who traditionally made pitches to induce popups will inevitably change to induce grounders (by pitch choice, location, and/or speed). The beauty of the sport is that the sample sizes can get large enough to make legitimate inferences from the data unlike many other sports. For those specifically curious about baseball and statistics, both http://www.fangraphs.com/ http://www.fangraphs.com/ and http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/ http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/ are great sites.
- phamilton 9y ago
  For those not too familiar with professional baseball, there are 162 games in a season. A player starting every game would likely see 600+ at bats. A starting pitcher pitches every 5-6 days and will face 600+ batters per season. League wide there are about 125k outs recorded per season on 700k pitches. That's a ton of data. It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a strike on a 3-0 count in the 8th inning?" and get statistically significant results.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    For those wanting to play w/ the data, there are a lot of resources [0]. I personally have combined older retrosheet data [1] with modern MLB data to some neat uses, not the least of which to try out tech like Druid (big data, live slicing, etc). E.g. If you wanted data from Sunday's Houston vs Texas game, GDX has tons of XML for parsing at [2]. There are plenty of guides that tell you what is what of course. It has been on my mind to develop a tensorflow graph trained w/ existing data to help me win some FanDuel/DraftKings money, but I haven't as of yet (and I should note the MLB data has restrictions against bulk or commercial use). 0 - https://github.com/baseballhackday/data-and-resources/wiki/Resources-and-ideas https://github.com/baseballhackday/data-and-resources/wiki/R... 1 - http://retrosheet.org/ http://retrosheet.org/ 2 - http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2017/month_06/day_04/gid_2017_06_04_houmlb_texmlb_1/ http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2017/month_06/da...
    - jarrettch 9y ago
      Thank you so much for these links. Recently I've thought about building something data viz and stats related using baseball stats. I know MLBAM has a bunch of data they keep to themselves, but I should definitely be able to find something to play with here. Many thanks for sharing!
    - T_D_K 9y ago
      Wow, thanks for the resources!
  - 9y ago
howeyc 9y ago
Interesting how the article mentions it would seem intuitive to someone new to the game as well. Just hit where there's less defense and more area to cover, the outfield.
- pgodzin 9y ago
  Sure, more area to cover but also a lot more time to get there. It's less trying to hit to the outfield, but rather hit homeruns. The problem is that it's easier said than done, and the old philosophy (look at Ichiro for example), was higher average and putting the ball in play was preferable to loading up and trying to hit a homerun. Now strikeouts and homeruns are way up, but batting averages are down.
- thatwebdude 9y ago
  That's getting harder and harder to do with "the shift". Now players are specifically working to beat the shift.
Lukeas14 9y ago
>"The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago" This should be more prominent and is likely the root cause of guys swinging for homeruns more often. Every hitter will eventually fall into a pattern where they're hitting certain pitches to only a certain part of the field. With the increase in data it's much easier for teams to recognize these patterns and position their fielders to compensate. So if you made your living hitting line drive basehits to shallow left field, halfway through the season every team will pick up on that and place an extra infielder right in your sweet spot. The same hits that got you through college and into the major leagues are now outs. This has been such a huge change that MLB thought about outlawing defensive shifts (I personally enjoy seeing the constant back and forth of strategy between offensive and defense which has always been a part of the major leagues). The obvious solution like the article mentions comes down to "the one ball that can’t be caught is the one that lands in the seats". This is also highly dependent on the type of hitter. If you're Yankee's 6'7" right fielder Aaron Judge then swinging for the fences with a higher launch angle makes perfect sense. However, if you're Dee Gordon, one of the fastest players in the league who weighs about 175lbs, keeping the ball low is probably still going to result in higher batting and slugging percentages. Guys like Bryce Harper who can hit for power and average do seem to be leaning more towards power, which used to only happen later in their career (ex. Barry Bonds). In my observation, it seems like players such as Dee Gordon are slowly becoming obsolete as teams are prefering the long ball to playing "small ball". You certainly don't see as many teams with a true, stereotypical "leadoff guy" these days and many teams seem stacked with guys who would have been labelled "cleanup hitters" 10 years ago.
- bryanbuckley 9y ago
  Does it suggest that leadoff guys will be cheaper in the future? The next moneyball trend will be fast guys who can accurately place hits?
  - Lukeas14 9y ago
    Possibly. My guess is that only the exceptionally good leadoff guys will make it to a team, making them more expensive. Other teams might rather have a slugger hitting first than an average fast guy. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
bryanbuckley 9y ago
Was there an answer to the question in the title? Just better analytics on the offensive side of things? They mention Oakland A's value approach in getting players. Clearly wouldn't have been a good choice for Ichiro..
ckirksey 9y ago
NY Times is so freakin beautiful
- pgodzin 9y ago
  It's the Washington Post
  - craigvn 9y ago
    Yeah, but his point still stands. :-)
brianzelip 9y ago
The data visualization animation with descriptive text scroll on mobile is awesome, nice work WaPo webdevs.
melling 9y ago
This a recycled WSJ article from May 18. Here's the story, if you can get access: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ryan-zimmerman-became-a-slugger-again-on-the-fly-1494873943 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ryan-zimmerman-became-a-slu...
habosa 9y ago
As many have said this is a tactical reaction to changes in pitching and defense. It always amazes me how balanced the game of baseball is compared to other sports. It's been around for more than a century and people have become so much stronger and faster on both sides of the ball. Still, offense and defense remain so perfectly matched. The bases remain 90 feet apart and the pitcher still throws from 60 feet away. A home run is still 400 feet. Consider basketball which has had to dramatically rebalance the rules over time. Restrictions on time in the paint, the 3 point line, perimeter defense, etc. Or how hockey changed all the rules after the lockout. Or how football has totally re worked pass defense and special teams. Baseball is just baseball.
- ufo 9y ago
  What kind of changes happened to the hockey rules?
  - kodablah 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005%E2%80%9306_NHL_season#Rule_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005%E2%80%9306_NHL_season#Rul...
- barking 9y ago
  Wasn't there something about the infield fly rule? :) But the same goes for soccer which has altered very little since the rules were laid down in the 19th century.
  - radicalbyte 9y ago
    The game changed completely after the (first) war when the offside rule was introduced. But that was almost 100 years ago. Since then the rule changes have essentially been tweaks.
    - barking 9y ago
      The offside rule's been there since long before WW1. They did alter the number of defending players needed to put a player on-side down from 3 to 2 in the mid 1920's. I'd argue that was altering an existing rule rather than a fundamental rule change though.
mannykannot 9y ago
I wonder if it is just chance that the 2016 average launch angle appears as though it may have favorable outcomes over the broadest range of exit velocities, and just below the angle where the distribution begins to go bimodal? It would be interesting to see how the featured players' hitting is distributed over speed and elevation (and if I am really interested, I am sure I can find the data...)
idibidiartists 9y ago
Taking the fun out of sport, for profit. :)
nickysielicki 9y ago
In the past week, a new record was set for the amount of grand-slams occurring on a single day. 7 grand slams! Fun time to be a baseball fan. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/234270104/7-players-hit-grand-slams-in-one-day/?topicId=27118122 http://m.mlb.com/news/article/234270104/7-players-hit-grand-...
oso2k 9y ago
I may be that the moneyball strategy becomes an architectural one; make the walls taller or less conventional like they used to be in the 1920s and 1930s.
aidenn0 9y ago
Five Thirty Eight did an article claiming that the results of this strategy have been mixed: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fly-ball-revolution-is-hurting-as-many-batters-as-its-helped/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fly-ball-revolution...
bitwize 9y ago
Doubtless for the same reason I'm concerned with them while playing as Junkrat: the relation between launch angle and flight distance.

127 points by jaydub 9y ago

The scrolling infographic was a very nice touch, especially with the DBZ style animation. It's only natural that in little league coaches tell players to hit ground balls because kids have trouble fielding (it requires extreme precision, speed, and dexterity). It's also quite obvious that you have to hit the ball high and hard to get a triple or home-run. Good to know data backs this up.

mtalantikite 9y ago

Reminds me of an old episode of Seinfeld, where George teaches the Yankees how to hit based on simple physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTwE7xDZkPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTwE7xDZkPk

dogruck 9y ago
Brilliant. "In 6 games."
- RoutinePlayer 9y ago
  I absolutely love that line... Yes, you just won a WS, but it took you 6 games!... LOL

kodablah 9y ago

Regardless of analytics, baseball is a game of reactions. Pitchers who traditionally made pitches to induce popups will inevitably change to induce grounders (by pitch choice, location, and/or speed). The beauty of the sport is that the sample sizes can get large enough to make legitimate inferences from the data unlike many other sports. For those specifically curious about baseball and statistics, both http://www.fangraphs.com/ http://www.fangraphs.com/ and http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/ http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/ are great sites.

phamilton 9y ago
For those not too familiar with professional baseball, there are 162 games in a season. A player starting every game would likely see 600+ at bats. A starting pitcher pitches every 5-6 days and will face 600+ batters per season. League wide there are about 125k outs recorded per season on 700k pitches. That's a ton of data. It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a strike on a 3-0 count in the 8th inning?" and get statistically significant results.
- kodablah 9y ago
  For those wanting to play w/ the data, there are a lot of resources [0]. I personally have combined older retrosheet data [1] with modern MLB data to some neat uses, not the least of which to try out tech like Druid (big data, live slicing, etc). E.g. If you wanted data from Sunday's Houston vs Texas game, GDX has tons of XML for parsing at [2]. There are plenty of guides that tell you what is what of course. It has been on my mind to develop a tensorflow graph trained w/ existing data to help me win some FanDuel/DraftKings money, but I haven't as of yet (and I should note the MLB data has restrictions against bulk or commercial use). 0 - https://github.com/baseballhackday/data-and-resources/wiki/Resources-and-ideas https://github.com/baseballhackday/data-and-resources/wiki/R... 1 - http://retrosheet.org/ http://retrosheet.org/ 2 - http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2017/month_06/day_04/gid_2017_06_04_houmlb_texmlb_1/ http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2017/month_06/da...
  - jarrettch 9y ago
    Thank you so much for these links. Recently I've thought about building something data viz and stats related using baseball stats. I know MLBAM has a bunch of data they keep to themselves, but I should definitely be able to find something to play with here. Many thanks for sharing!
  - T_D_K 9y ago
    Wow, thanks for the resources!
- 9y ago

howeyc 9y ago

Interesting how the article mentions it would seem intuitive to someone new to the game as well. Just hit where there's less defense and more area to cover, the outfield.

pgodzin 9y ago
Sure, more area to cover but also a lot more time to get there. It's less trying to hit to the outfield, but rather hit homeruns. The problem is that it's easier said than done, and the old philosophy (look at Ichiro for example), was higher average and putting the ball in play was preferable to loading up and trying to hit a homerun. Now strikeouts and homeruns are way up, but batting averages are down.
thatwebdude 9y ago
That's getting harder and harder to do with "the shift". Now players are specifically working to beat the shift.

Lukeas14 9y ago

>"The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago" This should be more prominent and is likely the root cause of guys swinging for homeruns more often. Every hitter will eventually fall into a pattern where they're hitting certain pitches to only a certain part of the field. With the increase in data it's much easier for teams to recognize these patterns and position their fielders to compensate. So if you made your living hitting line drive basehits to shallow left field, halfway through the season every team will pick up on that and place an extra infielder right in your sweet spot. The same hits that got you through college and into the major leagues are now outs. This has been such a huge change that MLB thought about outlawing defensive shifts (I personally enjoy seeing the constant back and forth of strategy between offensive and defense which has always been a part of the major leagues). The obvious solution like the article mentions comes down to "the one ball that can’t be caught is the one that lands in the seats". This is also highly dependent on the type of hitter. If you're Yankee's 6'7" right fielder Aaron Judge then swinging for the fences with a higher launch angle makes perfect sense. However, if you're Dee Gordon, one of the fastest players in the league who weighs about 175lbs, keeping the ball low is probably still going to result in higher batting and slugging percentages. Guys like Bryce Harper who can hit for power and average do seem to be leaning more towards power, which used to only happen later in their career (ex. Barry Bonds). In my observation, it seems like players such as Dee Gordon are slowly becoming obsolete as teams are prefering the long ball to playing "small ball". You certainly don't see as many teams with a true, stereotypical "leadoff guy" these days and many teams seem stacked with guys who would have been labelled "cleanup hitters" 10 years ago.

bryanbuckley 9y ago
Does it suggest that leadoff guys will be cheaper in the future? The next moneyball trend will be fast guys who can accurately place hits?
- Lukeas14 9y ago
  Possibly. My guess is that only the exceptionally good leadoff guys will make it to a team, making them more expensive. Other teams might rather have a slugger hitting first than an average fast guy. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

bryanbuckley 9y ago

Was there an answer to the question in the title? Just better analytics on the offensive side of things? They mention Oakland A's value approach in getting players. Clearly wouldn't have been a good choice for Ichiro..

ckirksey 9y ago

NY Times is so freakin beautiful

pgodzin 9y ago
It's the Washington Post
- craigvn 9y ago
  Yeah, but his point still stands. :-)

brianzelip 9y ago

The data visualization animation with descriptive text scroll on mobile is awesome, nice work WaPo webdevs.

melling 9y ago

This a recycled WSJ article from May 18. Here's the story, if you can get access: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ryan-zimmerman-became-a-slugger-again-on-the-fly-1494873943 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ryan-zimmerman-became-a-slu...

habosa 9y ago

As many have said this is a tactical reaction to changes in pitching and defense. It always amazes me how balanced the game of baseball is compared to other sports. It's been around for more than a century and people have become so much stronger and faster on both sides of the ball. Still, offense and defense remain so perfectly matched. The bases remain 90 feet apart and the pitcher still throws from 60 feet away. A home run is still 400 feet. Consider basketball which has had to dramatically rebalance the rules over time. Restrictions on time in the paint, the 3 point line, perimeter defense, etc. Or how hockey changed all the rules after the lockout. Or how football has totally re worked pass defense and special teams. Baseball is just baseball.

ufo 9y ago
What kind of changes happened to the hockey rules?
- kodablah 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005%E2%80%9306_NHL_season#Rule_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005%E2%80%9306_NHL_season#Rul...
barking 9y ago
Wasn't there something about the infield fly rule? :) But the same goes for soccer which has altered very little since the rules were laid down in the 19th century.
- radicalbyte 9y ago
  The game changed completely after the (first) war when the offside rule was introduced. But that was almost 100 years ago. Since then the rule changes have essentially been tweaks.
  - barking 9y ago
    The offside rule's been there since long before WW1. They did alter the number of defending players needed to put a player on-side down from 3 to 2 in the mid 1920's. I'd argue that was altering an existing rule rather than a fundamental rule change though.

mannykannot 9y ago

I wonder if it is just chance that the 2016 average launch angle appears as though it may have favorable outcomes over the broadest range of exit velocities, and just below the angle where the distribution begins to go bimodal? It would be interesting to see how the featured players' hitting is distributed over speed and elevation (and if I am really interested, I am sure I can find the data...)

idibidiartists 9y ago

Taking the fun out of sport, for profit. :)

nickysielicki 9y ago

In the past week, a new record was set for the amount of grand-slams occurring on a single day. 7 grand slams! Fun time to be a baseball fan. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/234270104/7-players-hit-grand-slams-in-one-day/?topicId=27118122 http://m.mlb.com/news/article/234270104/7-players-hit-grand-...

oso2k 9y ago

I may be that the moneyball strategy becomes an architectural one; make the walls taller or less conventional like they used to be in the 1920s and 1930s.

aidenn0 9y ago

Five Thirty Eight did an article claiming that the results of this strategy have been mixed: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fly-ball-revolution-is-hurting-as-many-batters-as-its-helped/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fly-ball-revolution...

bitwize 9y ago

Doubtless for the same reason I'm concerned with them while playing as Junkrat: the relation between launch angle and flight distance.