Exceptionally Well Hit Fly Balls And Home Run Surges

A few weeks ago I delved into the ideal launch angle and exit velocities for home runs, and I discovered balls hit between 21 and 36 degrees vertically and equal to or greater than 96 mph have wound up as home runs nearly half of the time (46.9% to be exact). This was initially somewhat surprising, this seems like a pretty large range of values, but after reflection it seems to check out. When you hit the ball 96 mph in a general upwards sort of trajectory, you’re giving it a ride.

I have spent the past few days playing around with this data to see if it can highlight any more players who may be trending upward or downward with these sort of ideally hit balls, and I have created a few very simple metrics along the way, all of which will be in an attached spreadsheet. You’ll see average exit velocities and batted ball distances for all balls in play along with pushed/pulled splits. I did this again for all batted balls that fit into this ideal launch window, 21-36 degrees and 96+ mph. I have counted how many home runs a player has hit, and how many of those home runs were hit ideally. Finally, I have found the ratio of ideally hit home runs to home runs.

I’m running on the assumption that these ideally hit balls are much less reliant on park and game factors, and instead more representative of a player’s ability to make extraordinary contact on what are, more than likely, pitcher mistakes. Whether this is a true repeatable skill, I don’t know, that is an area to look into. For now, I’m rolling with this assumption, because it might get us somewhere interesting.

With this data, I’ve sorted by the year to year delta for some of these stats. Namely, the ideally hit home run to home run ratio, the exit velocity on ideally balls, and the distance of ideally hit balls. I also eliminated anyone with fewer than 15 home runs, since they probably aren’t particularly interesting for this sort of analysis. In the following table you’ll see a list of the players who have drops in all three of these metrics while also sporting an increased home run total. Before you read this chart, keep in mind the stats that begin with “id” represent the ideally hit balls, ie 96+ mph, 21-36 degree vertical launch angle. So, for example, idFB represents the number of ideally hit fly balls. idEV, is the average exit velocity for ideally hit balls, etc. The delta columns, which I have labeled in orange, represent the change from 2015. Negative delta means the stats decreased in 2016.

Guys in this chart are those who saw increases in home run production while decreases in overall ideally hit ball quality. Notice, none of these ideally hit balls are pop ups or ground balls. These are very hard hit line drives and fly balls which a 46.9% chance of being a home run. This is nothing to sneeze at. Drops in performance on these balls should suggest, I think, anyway, a drop in real overall performance at the top end of the quality of contact.

Jung ho Kang pops out of this list as a guy I’m personally worried about. He had a strong funk in the middle of 2016, which included temporarily losing his everyday starting role. There were on and off the field problems leading up to that point, but here we see a significant drop in this ideally hit ball performance. He lost 1.5 mph exit velocity, which is enormous, which translated to around 5 fewer feet on those batted balls. Generally speaking, 1.5 mph would equate to much more than only five feet, so there are other factors at play, such as slight variations in launch angle to make up the lower velocity. However, the real eye opener here is the shift in ideally hit home runs to non-ideally hit home runs. I’m not sure to what extent ideally hit home runs matter in the grand scheme of things, but his xHR rate for 2016 was only 15.6, and drops to 14.8 when adjusted with park factors, compared to the 21 he registered in game so you see again a similar potential issue with his power.

Wil Myers saw a huge surge in home runs in 2016, jumping from 8 in 253 PA in 2015 to 28 in 676 PA in 2016. He also saw a 19 foot drop in average fly ball distance on ideally hit fly balls. This might be a bit misleading, since he also had an up tick in ideally hit balls in general, in addition to his much larger sum of plate appearances. His 2015 totals may have been unduly influenced by statistical noise, so maybe we can ignore some of this. However, his xHR for 2016 was only 24.5, 3.5 fewer than his registered total of 28. If I apply park factors to his xHR, that drops to 23.8 homers, an even larger difference. It seems likely that a large degree of his home run increase is sustainable, while a significant portion may not be. Perhaps it would be more realistic to expect 25 from him next season than the 30 you may be tempted to assume.

Enough of the negativity, though, let’s take a peek at players who maybe perhaps have more sustainable power surges in 2016.

If you’ve followed me, or perhaps ever looked at this player’s fangraphs page, you’ll probably have a small twinkle in your eye for Cameron Rupp landing on this list. No, I didn’t rig it. I promised to stop writing about him, because it started to feel weird. But man, I can’t help it. He had a great season, and he was underrated. If you picked him up in May, good for you! He fell off towards the end of the season, but for a solid 2-3 months stretch he was a very valuable catcher, and just barely missed out landing in the top 100 position players of 2016 in fantasy baseball. Raise your hand if you predicted that last March! (my hand isn’t raised, but I do have a big smile). Getting to the stats though, he had 2.5 mph increase on his ideally hit balls, and as I’ve written previously, I do feel it is sustainable. With this exit velocity increase he saw a roughly 14 foot increase on his average ideal fly ball distance, and 14 of his 16 homers were ideally hit. Swoon.

Justin Upton had a rough season at the plate, no doubt about it, but his ideally hit stats make you wonder if that was more about bat luck more than anything else. Not only these ideally hit stuff, but all of his statcast data in general. You see here that he had a 2.6 mph increase in ideally hit balls, along with nearly 27 extra feet on ideally hit fly balls. Not pictured, he went from 5% ideal hits in 2015 to 5.5% in 2016. So, he had more ideal hits, those ideal hits were hit harder and farther and to top it off he hit more home runs with them to boot. When I tell you that, it seems particularly odd that he would also, simultaneously, have such a weak season, at least by his standards. It should bode well for Tigers fans, though. He doesn’t appear to have lost much, if anything he appears to be getting better. I can point to how his xOBA in 2016 came out to .343, above the .336 xOBA he had in 2015 almost identical to his .340 wOBA in 2015. Watch out for him in 2017, he should slide right back into the same production you saw prior to 2016 as if nothing happened.

Semien, Walker, Lamb, Blackmon.  All these guys had significant increases in exit velocity on ideally hit balls.  Looking up and down this list you see 10+ foot increases on these batted balls left and right.  These guys all increased their rates of exceptionally well struck balls in 2016.  Again, I don’t know how sustainable some of this stuff may be, I’m only trying to offer a slightly different lens for looking at some of these players.  Take everything with a grain of salt!

Some special mentions from this list: You see Encarnacion sitting happily on the improved players list.  You may be sad to hear Jose Bautista is sitting on the opposite end of the spectrum.  Not quite bad enough to make the cut for the naughty list, but significant drop in performance nonetheless.  A lot of the people on the naughty list don’t seem perhaps as bad off as the list may imply.  A few are jumping from rookie or otherwise limited seasons to full season play, so the change in sample size may be a big factor.  Others, like Joey Votto, seem to have refocused their approach at the plate.  Votto especially, he appears more fixated on contact than selling out for hard contact.  Which is a good thing overall.  Perhaps not the best thing for fantasy, though, and seeing this sort of change in his stats may be a sign that his approach is working.  That feels weird to say.  I mean, he had no drop in actual home runs, so it is probably a lot to do about nothing.

It may be that drops in hard hit contact are subtle and nuanced, whereas increases are more bold and aggressive.  For example, seeing the changes in Rupp were very easy as early as mid to late April.  His exit velocity was through the charts, his launch angles were dramatically improved, on and on down the list.  With statcast, and xStats, finding those guys might be a tad easier, but identifying guys who are getting weaker over time may need a bit more tweaking.