Hitter Analytics (2/22/15)
Last Friday, I wrote about some ways I plan on investigating a deeper into hitters. Here is the first weekly column on the information. I will pulish the data on Sunday night to help with setting weekly leagues. The format and information are not close to being 100%, so expect some changes for a few weeks as I iron out a few wrinkles.
Pitchers’ Approach Attacking Hitters
Robert Arthur at Baseball Prospectus has shown pitchers will change their approach depending on the hitter’s talent level. Here is a complete list of the number of fastballs (including sinkers) thrown to each hitter of the past two years divided into half seasons. Also the number of pitches in the strike by half season is included along with the fastball percentage in the strike zone. I will begin adding 2015 information as it becomes available.
Batted Ball Profiles
Inside Edge tracts nine distinct batted ball types. The data includes the normal three distinctions of Groundball, Line Drive and Flyball. Additionally, the designations of Weak, Medium and Well-Hit are used. Here are the league average values for each of the nine batted balls.
Batted Ball Type: xBABIP, wOBAcon, % of batted balls
Groundball – Weak: .151, .112, 31.4%
Groundball – Medium: .461, .416, 9.5%
Groundball – Well-Hit: .647, .610, 3.8%
Line Drive – Weak: .622, .579, 2.3%
Line Drive – Medium: .650, .638, 7.3%
Line Drive – Well-Hit: .719, .815, 11.1%
Flyball – Weak: .078, .074, 18.5%
Flyball – Medium: .069, .081, 8.2%
Flyball – Well-Hit: .641, 1.168, 7.8%
With these values, I have created three values to determine a hitter’s talent level.
- BABIPwHR (including home runs, but excluding bunts) – Number of batted balls which went for hits.
- wOBAcon (how hard is the contact) – Each hit is weighted to an average run value. I used 0.9 for single, 1.25 for doubles, 1.6 for Triples and 2.1 for home runs.
- Orig_xBABIP – I created this formula a while back which uses hard hit batted balls and Speed Score to estimate a player’s BABIP
Additionally, I have put some stats on a Plus system to help put the values in context. A value at 100 is league average, 90 is 10% below league average and 110 is 10% above league average.
One addition I may have in the future is each player’s values in each of the nine categories, but I need to find out if the data can be released in that form according to FanGraphs agreement with Inside Edge. Here is the information I know I can make available.
Additionally, I can take the batted mix and find players with similar mixes. Here are a trio of 2014 rookies and comparable players place in order of similarity.
- David Wright
- Daniel Nava
- Dioner Navarro
- Scooter Gennett
- Evan Longoria
- Ike Davis
- Kurt Suzuki
- Jimmy Rollins
- Grady Sizemore
- Austin Jackson
- Carlos Santana
- Omar Infante
- J.J. Hardy
- Alberto Callaspo
- John Mayberry
- Desmond Jennings
- Andrelton Simmons
- Rajai Davis
- Albert Pujols
- Cliff Pennington
- Ryan Zimmerman
- Pedro Alvarez
- Paul Goldschmidt
- Adam Lind
- Torii Hunter
- Buster Posey
- Joe Mauer
- Justin Ruggiano
- Chase Headley
- Jason Castro
Plate Discipline
More to to come
Times to First
I am collecting times from home to first base when a hitter is giving it their all to beat out a throw for a hit. With this information, changes in talent from age or injuries could be detected. Readers can submit times to first information by commenting in any of my articles or just Tweet the info to #time2first. All I would need is the player, handedness if a switch hitter, game and inning. If you can time the run even better. If you don’t have the chance to time the run, just let me know the other information and I can watch the game. I will check each when I have time and I will add them to a spreadsheet.
Sample form for data entry – very beta:
Additions
Shin-Soo Choo
Final Thoughts
Let me know what you like, don’t like or what needs tweaked. Hopefully by next Sunday night the page will complete and I will know more on how much information I can share.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
Just awesome.
Love the ambition behind this entire post! So many great things to come…
One suggestion: I think a more user-friendly method to submit Time-To-First data would facilitate this aspect of the project. A submission form on the website somewhere, or a publicly available spreadsheet to enter game dates, innings, etc. would be helpful.
Great idea, will add once I get out a MASH report
So, to summarize, you’re revolutionizing hitter analysis, and then publishing the results weekly? Love it
Jeff,
I was reading your previous article showing an overview of what you are going to do. While reading the comments section of aforementioned article, an individual posted: can we get ball speed and angle off the bat from pitch f/x?
I know from experience, that this information is available at baseball academies in the states (It may have been unique to the academy I was at and may not be exactly what they are referring to). Anyhow, they would connect you to a device that would track your movement (hands, hips, contact, bat speed, feet, etc.) and compare you to MLB players in their database. An example that I still remember to this day was Albert’s swing; Bat speed was 85MPH, Ball came off at 109-112MPH, and had shown location/pitch/angle off of the bat/swing in addition to all the previously listed. It was incredibly valuable in showing your faults in mechanics and what right looks like.
It may sound as if I am rambling, but maybe try the local academies to see if they will share this type of information with you. Hope I didn’t waste your time.
Great work!
It would be great to have if people would share, I just don’t have the data right now.
This is great! The Batted Ball Profile excel isn’t loading and I’d love to download the data.
I saw that, I re-embedded the code.
Also, you can download the data from one of the other two views. All the data is in the spreadsheet.
i have to get a new thesaurus to come up with new adjectives to describe how impressive and valuable your research is – i’ll use “awesome” for now and i going to put it to work today in a draft i am in….
because i am a bit dense, i just want to make sure i am reading this correctly. the first 4 data columns are the absolute number of fastballs since by a batter per half season; the next 4 columns are those absolute numbers expressed as a % of all pitches seen; the 3rd set of columns is FB in the zone expressed as a % of all pitches, so to get the % of fastballs that are in the zone i just have to do some division (so for AJ Ellis who had 58.7% FB and 32.9% FB that were in the zone, the % of FBs he saw in the zone was 32.9/58.7 = 56%), and the final set of columns is the total % of pitches in the zone.
i am reading that right?
the batted ball profile is not loading as noted above – but the pitch data is going to keep me quite busy.
thanks again Jeff.
The first four are the total pitches seen so you can know the size of the sample.
The next four are the % of fastballs seen.
The next four are the % of fastballs seen in the strike zone.
The next four are the % of all pitches seen in the strike zone.
got it (i think) but just for clarity (and i hate to belabor this):
For AJ Ellis and using the definitions above, of the 965 pitches he saw in the second half 67.1% (or 648)were fastballs; of those 648 fastballs, 38.7%, or 251 were in the strike zone. Overall, however, AJ Ellis saw 53% or 511 strikes. that would mean of the (965 total pitches less 648 fastballs) 317 non-fastballs AJ Ellis saw (511 total strikes less 251 fastball strikes) 260 were strikes – or 82% were strikes. that just seems like an awfully high % of non-fastball strikes to me but i could be 100% wrong. But that is why i thought the “% of fastballs seen in the strike zone” might actually be “the % of total pitches that are fastballs in the strike zone” and to get the % of fastballs that were strike you need to just do a bit of basic math.
also, Jeff, i was going to match up Fastballs with O-swing rates or some other accessible Fangraphs measure of plate discipline this week. i will be more than happy to merge that data with this incredible data base and send it to you if you would find that helpful.
It is: “the % of total pitches that are fastballs in the strike zone”
Hey Jeff, this is the start of something truly special, indeed.
So, I was thinking about the batted ball profiles, and wanted to download the spreadsheet to play with my idea, but it’s in a format Macs can’t handle. I don’t have OpenOffice, but, apparently, the ODS format is deprecated? I dunno, Google told me a bunch of stuff. Anyways, can you put the data online in a more common file format next time? CSV works for everybody…
It is not going to be a .csv since it would be 3 seperate uploads. Does .xls format work?
Oh yes, definitely. I figured you were uploading OpenOffice as you didn’t have access to Excel, so I thought csv would be the meeting place there… Thanks!
Was looking at the Attacking Hitters tab and it would be great to have the age of the hitter. One of my thoughts is that I would like to use this to track the progress of younger players and it would be nice to filter out the over age 30 players.