Statcast has afforded us many new ways of examining well struck batted balls. We’ve been given quantifiable evidence that Giancarlo Stanton hits the ball harder than anyone else in the game, for instance. That is a neat trivium to exhale after witnessing one of his line drives, but it isn’t particularly helpful for analysis. Factoring in the vertical launch angle certainly gets us much closer to valuable information. We have statistics such as ‘Barrels’, which display the league average values for batted balls based upon those with similar exit velocity and vertical launch angle. However, this two dimensional approach fails to fully explain the three dimensionality of the game we love.

Balls hit to center field are significantly different, on a qualitative level, than those hit down the line. For starters, the fences are deeper in center field and more shallow down the lines. Additionally, balls hit down the line will have a different spin profile than those hit to center field. They may spin at a different rate, and in a different direction, causing the ball to slice or hook, or draw or fade if the effect isn’t as severe. Furthermore, once a ball has sufficiently sliced or hooked, it will begin to lose the benefit of the lift bestowed by its backspin, and as a result it will fall ever more quickly out of the air as it travels, limiting the maximum attainable distance.

I’ve sought to find exactly how much home run rates change with horizontal angle when assuming ideal exit velocities and vertical launch angles, which players hit the most balls on these ideal angles, and what their individual success rates look like when compared to league averages. Read the rest of this entry »