Archive for oppo

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:

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FanGraphs’ leaderboards are like iron ore mines. They abound with potentially valuable commodities, but sometimes it takes effort to unlock the potential and extract the value.

There’s only so much you can write about a certain subsection of players (National League outfielders) without beating a dead horse. Alas, I’ve tried to find peculiar reasons to write about particularly interesting hitters. And, ah, FanGraphs’ leaderboards, they’re helpful in this regard, especially when broken down by splits.

Baseball Info Solutions’ (BIS) opposite-field batted ball data are no exception, as exemplified by this table of opposite-field hard-hit rate (Hard%) leaders among NL outfielders:

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You may have noticed that FanGraphs now feeds batted ball data, courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions, into its leaderboards. The day the data appeared, my mind buzzed with ways they could be useful in improving our understanding of a hitter’s batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

Mike Podhorzer already augmented previous attempts at devising an equation for expected batting average on balls in play (xBABIP) for hitters by incorporating elements of a hitter’s power, speed, plate discipline and batted ball tendencies. So, with fresh numbers in hand, I embarked on a journey to further improve the ever-evolving xBABIP. However, I sought to do so by using only batted ball data. Basically, I intended to develop a convenient xBABIP equation, one that can be computed using almost entirely variables found on the same page.

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