Archive for barrels

A little more than a year ago, Al Melchior had the brilliant and beautifully straightforward idea of investigating how strongly pretty much ever Statcast metric correlated with various traditional power metrics and compiling them in one post. He asked me to help out, which I was more than glad to do.

Recently, I saw folks talking about this again, and someone asked specifically about the 2019 season. I figured I could refresh the values from the original post quickly enough (certainly a lot more quickly than I did last time), and it would also help bring pertinent information to the fore for folks neck-deep in draft prep.

Spoiler alert: the results barely changed. But! I do feel more confident in this particular set of values, as I nerded out with programming instead of pulling dozens of different queries from the Baseball Savant search function and constantly getting frazzled.

OK, here’s the goods. For 2019 hitters:

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New year, new deserved barrels metric. In October, I took a crack at devising a “deserved barrels” metric in which I took the basic components of a barrel — a hitter’s exit velocity (EV) and launch angle (LA) — and determined the capacity in which the components relate to Statcast’s barrel rate metric (barrels per batted ball event, or “Brls/BBE %” on Baseball Savant). I included squared terms (EV², LA²) assuming the relationship is not linear. (A launch angle that’s too steep is detrimental, for example.)

Further offseason research led me to additional insights:

• Launch angle consistency (“tightness”) is important, correlating with higher BABIPs and more repeatable EVs.
• Launch angle grade in general is important, especially for batted ball quality, not just batted ball frequency, as indicated by batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

There exist many measures of contact quality; barrel rate captures how often a hitter produces high-quality contact. (Hard-hit rate functions similarly but ignores launch angle, to my knowledge, making barrel rate arguably superior.) It only made sense, then, that the latter finding above — that launch angle tightness matters to batted ball quality — should be incorporated into my deserved barrels work somehow.

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A couple of weeks ago, I devised a deserved barrel rate (where barrel rate is calculated as a percentage of batted ball events, or Barrel/BBE) based exclusively on a hitter’s average exit velocity (EV) and average launch angle (LA). To employ such a simple model, I made a broad but accurate assumption: the average hitter’s average EV (or LA) has a distribution of EVs (or LAs) centered around it, and this distribution does not differ dramatically from other hitters’ distributions.

In layman’s terms, the typical hitter’s average launch angle is his — he owns it, and it reflects his swing plane and mechanics — but he is no better than any other typical hitter in repeating his average launch angle. He, like everyone else, will likely vary from the mean by a certain margin of error. I make the same assumption of exit velocity as well. The two variables bear almost zero correlation to each other. In light of this assumption, the best thing a hitter can do is maximize his exit velocity and hopes it coincides with an optimal launch angle.

(Some folks have suggested I include the percentage of balls hit 95+ mph to refine deserved barrels. The notion intrigues me. However, to illustrate a point: if you have two hitters with identical average EVs, would you expect their distribution of EVs to be dramatically different? Probably not. The inclusion of hard-hit rate accepts as fact that one hitter might be better at hitting 95+ mph more frequently — which would also suggest he hits more softly more frequently as well, and with certainty. This doesn’t stand out to me as a repeatable, let alone necessarily desirable, trait.)

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