2014 Average Absolute Angle Leaders & Laggards
So we learned that a hitter’s average absolute angle isn’t very stable from year to year, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting to dissect. What is this strange sounding metric you ask? Think of the field broken into equal segments, with center field at 0 and each side of the field a value increasing or decreasing from there. According to the definition at Baseball Heat Maps, -45 is the left field line and 45 is the right field line. Since I don’t care which line the ball is hit toward, I asked for the absolute value of the angle, and then the average of all those batted ball angles. So the higher the number, the more toward the lines the hitter’s batted balls were hit. And obviously since fence distances are closest down the lines, a higher absolute angle should yield more homers. Therefore, it follows that this variable has the highest coefficient in my xHR/FB rate regression equation.
For reference, the unweighted average of the data set was an average absolute angle of 19.7.
So without further ado, here are your average absolute angle leaders:
| Name | Avg Abs Angle |
|---|---|
| DJ LeMahieu | 25.96 |
| Jean Segura | 25.48 |
| Carlos Santana | 25.33 |
| Donovan Solano | 25.22 |
| Bryce Harper | 24.96 |
| Tyler Flowers | 24.80 |
| Joe Mauer | 24.76 |
| Robbie Grossman | 24.72 |
| Allen Craig | 24.49 |
| Tommy Medica | 24.45 |
| Ryan Braun | 24.18 |
| Jedd Gyorko | 23.67 |
| Nick Hundley | 23.56 |
| Chris Heisey | 23.47 |
| Ender Inciarte | 23.45 |
| Sean Rodriguez | 23.25 |
| Michael Morse | 23.13 |
| Justin Upton | 22.90 |
| Howie Kendrick | 22.86 |
| J.D. Martinez | 22.67 |
| Carl Crawford | 22.63 |
| David DeJesus | 22.61 |
| Brian Dozier | 22.59 |
| Wil Myers | 22.52 |
| Josh Harrison | 22.51 |
DJ LeMahieu is probably a surprise at the top of the list and he was only at 19.3 in 2013, so this was quite the jump. Check out his spray chart:
Source: FanGraphs
All five of his homers were pulled to left field, but oddly most of his fly balls went the opposite way. So you can see how this batted ball mix yielded a league leading average absolute angle.
Because of Ryan Braun’s big angle mark, his xHR/FB rate was right in line with historical figures. His distance did drop a bit, but nothing worth panicking over. Don’t be concerned about his career low 13.8% HR/FB rate. If healthy, I think he’s in for a nice rebound.
J.D. Martinez’s power outburst was boosted by his penchant for balls hit closer to the lines. A distance spiked helped as well, so the pair together led to his breakout. Because of a nearly 300 distance mark supported by a change in hitting mechanics, I think his power surge is mostly sustainable.
And now for the laggards:
| Name | Avg Abs Angle |
|---|---|
| Alfonso Soriano | 13.93 |
| Jackie Bradley Jr. | 14.34 |
| A.J. Pollock | 14.85 |
| Juan Lagares | 15.07 |
| Andrelton Simmons | 15.10 |
| Alex Rios | 15.26 |
| Lorenzo Cain | 15.43 |
| Ike Davis | 15.53 |
| David Peralta | 15.64 |
| Michael Choice | 15.90 |
| Ruben Tejada | 15.93 |
| Eugenio Suarez | 15.94 |
| Alex Avila | 16.07 |
| Brandon Phillips | 16.09 |
| Mark Trumbo | 16.09 |
| Adam Lind | 16.18 |
| Starlin Castro | 16.25 |
| Nick Swisher | 16.37 |
| Scott Van Slyke | 16.42 |
| Junior Lake | 16.44 |
| Kelly Johnson | 16.52 |
| David Ortiz | 16.79 |
| Matt Joyce | 16.81 |
| Austin Jackson | 16.84 |
If a sudden inability to pull the ball is a sign of being done as a hitter, then Alfonso Soriano picked the right time to retire.
Part of Alex Rios‘ power drought could be blamed on his inability to hit it closer to the lines. He never posted big angle marks, but this marked a career low. Moving to Kansas City won’t help his power reappear, but he should certainly rebound at least somewhat.
I don’t know what happened to Ike Davis, but would have liked to see him in a hitter’s park. Improved contact is great, but his power disappeared, and this is some of the reason why.
Blame Mark Trumbo’s HR/FB rate decline on a career low angle. His batted ball distance was just a smidge below his career best mark set in 2013, so he should rebound nicely this year.
Maybe this is the sign we’ve been waiting for that hints at David Ortiz’s impending decline? It has to happen at some point, right?! Pretty amazing that his angle was at a career low since we have data for back to 2008, and yet his HR/FB remained stable.
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
Since you seem to be interested in how much the hitters are pulling the ball, why not adjust the raw angles? Make the “pull” field (LF for RHB, RF for LHB) 0 degrees and the “opposite” field 90 degrees. Then compute average pull angle (or whatever you want to call it) for everyone, where a value of 0 means every ball gets pulled down the line. As it is, you’re lumping oppo hits with pulled hits, and maybe that’s making the result less predictive.
No, I said exactly the opposite. I don’t care if the ball is pulled or hit the opposite way, as long as it’s down one of the lines. We know batters typically could hit the ball further when pulling hit, but since we already know the average distance, it doesn’t matter whether it’s pulled or pushed the opposite way.
I’m not sure I understand the point of this, then. At least, if you’re going to use it as an input for xHR/FB. You have players like LeMahieu, Segura, and Grossman who rank high on this list but clearly don’t (and aren’t likely to ever) carry a high HR/FB rate because it’s mostly the result of opposite field flyballs.
There’s probably a small subgroup of powerful hitters for whom opposite field flyballs close to the line correlate well with HR/FB rate, but for the majority of players that angle should be weighted at a fraction of the pull side.
But maybe you already adjust for that when you incorporate batted ball distance. Your equation is behind a pay wall so I don’t know how the details of the xHR/FB calculation.
Yeah the guys you mention just don’t have the distance so angle is rather moot
You mention the “unweighted average” in this article. Does that mean you account for unequal distribution of batted ball distance in the equation itself?
I’d think you’d need to weight one (or both) sides of the field by the difference in batted ball difference (somewhere around 10%, I’m guessing). So a ball hit directly down the pull side foul line would count as .45, whereas a ball down the opposite field foul line would be ~.41.
No I meant I just averaged every hitter’s angle, ignoring how many balls each batter hit. The true average would account for a batter hitting more flies, weighing their angle more highly in the group average than others. But I just averaged the percentages.
Just based on my anecdotal observations, I was expecting D. Mesoraco to place highly on this list – seems like he pulls everything when I watch so I was surprised to not see him listed.
He was actually just about average.
I am curious what data you used to gather the fly ball angles for these players. My assumption was the information here, but, based on your findings, it doesn’t appear that way – http://www.baseballheatmaps.com/graph/distanceleader.php.
Piggy-backing off of what d_isays said, I’ve cobbled my own similar table together and have found Mesoraco to be the #3 most-pull happy hitter. Combining his pull-happiness with his average fly ball distance compared to the mean and considering StDev, he actually ranks as the #1 player in all of baseball.
You are correct, it’s not the same as the angle presented in the leaderboard. It was a custom stat Jeff Zimmerman provided for me.
Mesoraco ranks #1 in all of baseball at what?
Ah – that makes sense then. I used the data available at BasebaseHeatMaps.
The short answer to your question is: Mesoraco was the ‘best in baseball’ last year at hitting *flyballs* far and to the pull side.
Long answer: Based on the information currently displayed on that page, Mesoroco ranks #1 when adding his standard deviations from the mean of the qualified group in Average Flyball Distance (297.5) and Angle (-8.03). For the purposes of exercise, instead of using the average angle of the group, I just used 0, as that is ‘dead center’, when calculating his standard deviations.
So, contrary to your calculation that took the absolute value of each player’s flyball angle, I harnessed it, as *most* players have more power to their pull side.
For a Right Handed Batter (like Mesoraco), I took their StDev’s from the average Flyball Distance of the group and subtracted from it their StDev’s from ‘0’ as it relates to flyball angles, as a ‘negative’ angle is to the pull side.
For a Left Handed Batter, I took their StDev’s from both the average Flyball Distance of the group and their StDev’s from ‘0’ for the angle and added them together, as a positive angle is to the pull side.
Guys on this list include: Mesoraco, CSantana, Zunino, Reynolds, Beltran, VMart, Napoli, Gattis, Springer, Francisco, E5. Some interesting names here, but remember that this *does not* account for the # of flyballs hit by each player.
When adding each player’s total flyball total StDev’s from the mean to the previous calculation, we find names like this: Mesoraco (ha! – still #1), Santana, VMart, Miggy, Papi, JoeyBats, E5, Dozier, Granderson, Duda, Cruz, McCann, Pearce, Trout.
I wouldn’t die for the logic I used when calculating this, as it a little elementary, but I think the findings are legitimate in that the reality is that you cannot ignore which side of the field a player is hitting these balls to as it relates to pull/oppo.
The anecdotal case that I think describes this best is Puig. He ranks 172 and 95, respectively, on these lists (out of 295). He is just way too oppo-happy to ever become a true power hitter, especially in LA.
But I think going oppo too often would show up in the distance. If players generally hit the ball further to the pull side, then those going the opposite way more often would have a lower distance, right?
More often than not, but there are seemingly exceptions to that rule, which includes Puig, Cutch, Kemp, and even Ryan Howard to an extent – these guys power alleys are to the opposite field.
I think the following comparison really portrays my case, which is that most players hit for more power (re: HRs) to the pull side:
2014 –
Brian Dozier (R) – 135 Fly Balls; 277.52 Average Distance; -4.85 Angle (Pull Side)
Nick Castellanos (R) – 133 Fly Balls; 284.11 Average Distance; 11.89 (*Strong* Oppo)
Based on the idea of absolute angles, one would easily believe that Castellanos would have hit more HRs this year. That, however, as I’m sure you’re aware, is not the case. Dozier hit 23 while Castellanos hit a paltry 11.
Taking a look at these guy’s spray charts on the site here, we see that *all* of Dozier’s HRs were hit to the left of left center field, with a fairly even distribution of his non-HR flyballs across the entire field (http://www.fangraphs.com/spraycharts.aspx?playerid=9810&position=2B&type=battedball).
Looking at NC’s chart is pretty eye opening in this case. (http://www.fangraphs.com/spraycharts.aspx?playerid=11737&position=3B&type=battedball) Even though he has a very strong oppo tendency, 8 of his 11 HRs were left of center field (pull side). The remaining 3 squirted out all the way down the right field line. What is most interesting is that, although most of his HRs were to the pull side, left field looks like a barren wasteland for fly balls, while right field is incredibly clustered with flyballs without enough mustard on them.
I don’t know of the best way to aggregate the information, but if you could look at a pool of players’ pull/oppo fly ball distribution, I think that we would find that a lot of the time players will hit an equal or greater number of flyballs to the opposite field as to the pull side, but a notably shorter distance on average compared to their pull side (which is sorta personified by Dozier’s profile). To overcome oppo tendencies like the onle Castellanos has, you have to really beat the heck out of the ball and exceed ~295-300 feet on average to hit a notable amount of HRs.
I know it’s tough to pick and choose singular data points in a large set to demonstrate a point, but, I think it’s reasonable and fair in this case.
We’re only concerned with HR/FB rate, not total homers, because other factors like strikeout and fly ball rate are involved in total homers. And just looking at HR/FB rate, your examples don’t really prove your point as much as just looking at homers would make you believe. Dozier was at 11.3% and Castellanos 7.5%. That’s not a huge difference. You’re also missing the SDD, which Castellanos was terrible at. Dozier wasn’t great himself, but better.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, your angles differ from mine. I actually show Dozier as slightly higher than Castellanos! If the numbers you’re looking at are those on Baseball Heat Maps, that’s not what I’m using.