BABIP on Oppo Ground Balls (Plus Crowdsourced Sleepers)

A few weeks ago, I dug through some PITCHf/x data, courtesy of Baseball Savant, and calculated the BABIP (batting average on balls in play) on ground balls to the pull side by velocity for hitters by handedness in 2015. There are a lot of prepositional phrases in that last sentence, but instead of trying to further clarify it, I’ll summarize the findings: right-handed batters hit for a higher batting average on pulled ground balls at every batted ball velocity than did left-handed batters in 2015.

It’s a long time coming, and I’m here to present the same analysis but for ground balls to the opposite field.

But, first, some quick housekeeping. Following my recent ADP (average draft position) research, I asked readers to predict which players’ end-of-season (EOS) rankings would outshine their ADPs for 2016, given some certain conditions. Twenty-seven readers responded and the results are in, ranked by frequency of votes:

Crowdsourced Sleepers

EOS: 1-100, ADP: 200-299:
3: Kevin Gausman, Jonathan Schoop, Marcus Semien, Justin Turner
2: Matt Holliday, Wil Myers, Marcell Ozuna, Stephen Piscotty
1: Dellin Betances, Justin Bour, Wei-Yin Chen, Scott Kazmir, Kenta Maeda, Gerardo Parra, Joe Ross, Victor Martinez

EOS: 1-150, ADP: 300+:
4: Carter Capps
3: Domingo Santana
2: John Lamb, Jon Niese
1: Pedro Alvarez, Jackie Bradley Jr., Mark Canha, R.A. Dickey, Jarrod Dyson, Brandon Finnegan, Joey Gallo, J.J. Hoover, Lance Lynn, Kris Medlen, Hector Olivera, James Paxton, Jose Peraza, Rubby de la Rosa, Aaron Sanchez, Vincent Velasquez, Tony Watson

Back to our regularly scheduled programming

So, as aforementioned, righties in 2015 consistently held an advantage over lefties in BABIP when hitting the ball to the pull side. Explanations abound for the results — most prominently, (1) the employment of defensive shifts versus lefties, and (2) the relative ease with which batted balls to the right side of the infield can be converted into outs compared to those to the left side.

The results to the flip-side of that narrative — ground balls to the opposite field, by handedness, at every batted ball velocity — are as follows.

I calculated discrete BABIPs at each batted ball velocity, as I did in the preceding post in this mini-series. To keep with tradition and/or default Microsoft Excel themes, the grey line depicts the number of balls in play at each batted ball velocity; lefty BABIP, the blue line; righty BABIP, orange.

Except the sample sizes are much smaller, thus making the calculations quite a bit noisier and harder to interpret. What I can tell you with certainty: batted balls at the lowest velocities — likely bunts and dinkers — succeed at much greater rates for lefties than they do for righties. If we strip them out, we can perhaps tease out the overall difference in BABIP by handedness. At my discretion, I set the cutoff at 65 miles per hour (mph).

After controlling for bunts and dinkers, lefties hit, on average, about 50 points better than righties across all batted ball velocities (with a maximum spread of 107 points). Here, the grey line depicts balls in play summed cumulatively from the lowest velocity to the highest. Weirdly, there’s a drop-off above 110 mph for lefties that levels the playing field. I don’t have an explanation for it, but it can very likely be attributed to small sample sizes at the tail end(s) of the distribution of velocities.

Courtesy of FanGraphs’ leaderboards, I can tell you that lefties are almost twice as successful than righties at laying down bunts, no matter the direction of the bunt. Looking specifically at bunts from the data with batted ball velocities*, 31 of 41 non-sacrifice bunts (.756) to the opposite field laid down by lefties went for hits compared to 14 of 42 non-sacrifice bunts (.333) by righties. Those are small sample sizes, but I can almost guarantee — almost, because I didn’t crunch the numbers — that that’s a statistically significant difference.

*To reiterate a disclaimer from my post concerning pulled ground balls, not all ball-in-play data from Baseball Savant contains batted ball velocities.

Bunting begs its own set of questions as to why lefties are more successful. I think a lot of what sets lefties a notch above righties is (1) the combination of their shorter distance to first base and (2) the third baseman’s (or pitcher’s) longer distance to, and much more difficult play at, first base.

Consequently, I think the same conclusions can be generally applied to opposite-field ground balls. Like right-handed hitters’ advantage on pulled ground balls, lefties experience that same advantage on oppo ground balls because of not only the increased distance and, thus, difficulty of throws to the first base from the left side of the field but also the inherent advantage of starting a step or two closer to first base.

This all makes sense, but it also seems to recommend strategies that would make the game especially boring. Always hit to the left side, no matter what. It maximizes the probability of success for the hitter, but my, how boring that would be. I guess we would see more shifts to the left side, and hitters would have to adjust accordingly by hitting to the right side more.

Fortunately, hitters are naturally predisposed to pulling the ball, so this won’t ever be an issue — except for lefties who not only fall victim to the relative ease with which first and second basemen convert batted balls into outs but also, for power hitters, the occasional defensive shift and further diminishes the probability of a hit.

Still, in terms of thinking about how to anticipate expected BABIP, or xBABIP, I think we can’t treat hitters of each handedness equally, and not just because of shifts. A lefty’s ability to hit to the opposite field should be valued similarly to a righty’s ability to pull the ball.

By the way, there are a lot of speedy lefties — Billy Burns, Dee Gordon, Anthony Gose, Adam Eaton, Odubel Herrera — who rank among the top 10% of lefties who hit to the opposite field versus righties. It’s a particular subset, but I’m too lazy to do the math, and lefties face left-handed pitchers only about one-fifth of the time, so it’s a perfectly adequate estimation. Anyway, yeah — if you had any question about these hitters’ BABIPs in particular, knowing they hit well to the opposite field should help curb your skepticism.