GET THAT BALL UP
These days in baseball, every batter is trying to find an angle
One day several years ago, as Chase Headley was still trying to establish himself as the San Diego Padres’ everyday third baseman, Padres management passed around a sheet of paper full of facts and figures on how its spacious ballpark, Petco Park, played for hitters. Fly balls were mostly swallowed up in the vast expanses of outfield, while ground balls and line drives played better than in the average stadium. The conclusion, as Headley recalls it, was clear: Padres hitters should keep the ball out of the air.
“I had more loft in my swing when I came up,” Headley said recently, “so I was trying to undo some of that, and I was trying to hit the ball down. It was a conscious thing: They wanted us to hit the ball hard, but down.”
A few thousand big league at-bats later, Headley, now 33 and the starting third baseman for the New York Yankees, chuckles at how antiquated that sounds now — as the gospel of fly balls and high launch angles spreads across the game — and can’t help but kick himself for not resisting the Padres’ efforts to turn him into a ground ball machine.
“I look back, and I’m like, ‘What was I thinking?’ ” he said. “I’ve had to try to get it back the other way now.”
In that period between the Padres’ hit-it-low memo and the first part of the 2017 season has been a shift in philosophy so dramatic it can safely be called a revolution, with more hitters, armed with better and more extensive data than ever, reaching the conclusion that not only are fly balls, on average, better than grounders but that the latter are to be avoided at all costs.
“No grounders,” Toronto Blue Jays third baseman Josh Donaldson, the 2015 American League MVP and one of the movement’s most vocal proponents, said earlier this year. “Ground balls are outs. If you see me hit a ground ball, even if it’s a hit, I can tell you: It was an accident.”
Another proponent, Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner, put it another way: “You can’t slug by hitting balls on the ground. You have to get the ball in the air if you want to slug, and guys who slug stick around, and guys who don’t, don’t.”
There is a simple and airtight logic behind the claim: Slugging, for the most part, happens in the air. In 2016, for example, big league hitters batted .239 with a .258 slugging percentage on ground balls vs. .241 and .715, respectively, on fly balls — with much of the difference, obviously, attributable to home runs: Grounders produced zero, while fly balls produced 5,422.
“If you look at a baseball field and look on the infield, there’s a lot of players there,” Donaldson said, providing an even more elemental logic. “There’s not as much grass. But you look in the outfield, there’s fewer players and more grass. So if you hit it in the air, even if it’s not that hard, you have a chance. There are some outfielders who make it more difficult. But someone who has never seen baseball before would be like, ‘Oh, yeah. You’d probably want to hit it out there.’ “
The introduction in 2015 of Statcast — MLB’s camera-based analytics system, which can measure player movements and ball flights in intricate detail — has confirmed, and perhaps accelerated, the fly ball trend in baseball by introducing “launch angle,” a measurement of a ball’s vertical trajectory, into the mainstream. While a launch angle of zero is essentially a line drive at the pitcher’s knees, a negative figure is a grounder and 90 degrees is a pop-up straight above home plate.
Analysts have been able to pinpoint the range of 25-35 degrees as the sweet spot for home runs, when paired with an exit velocity — a measure of the speed of the ball off the bat — of 95 m.p.h. or greater. The exit velocity is crucial: At lower velocities, those fly balls are simply outs.
“People see launch angle and think guys are just trying to hit it higher,” Orioles slugger Mark Trumbo said. “That is a part of it. But you also have to hit it hard.”
And while data is available for just the past three seasons, there is already evidence that players are catching on. In 2015 the average launch angle in MLB was 10.5 degrees, but in 2016 the leaguewide average rose to 11.5, an increase of about 10 per cent. This year, through May 21, the league average is up to 12.8 degrees, another year-to-year increase of almost 12 per cent. Clearly, the notion is gaining traction.
The increasing prevalence and success of fly ball-focused hitters is a massively important development in the modern game because it can help explain — or at least illuminate — many of the major trends and issues confronting the sport.
The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago (2,974 total at-bats against shifts in 2011 vs. 33,343 in 2016). Many hitters cite this as a primary reason they have chosen to take to the air. “Teams have more information about where to play their infielders,” Headley said. “But the one ball that can’t be caught is the one that lands in the seats.” Some baseball executives say the next logical step to combat the fly ball revolution will be occasional fourman outfields.
The overall increase in home runs. Hitters bashed 5,610 home runs in 2016, an increase of more than 14 per cent from the year before and the most since 2000. That year turned out to be during the height of widespread performance-enhancing drug use in baseball. Maybe this new era of home-run hitting can be explained, at least partly, by more hitters simply concentrating on elevating the ball with power.
Even the issue of pace of game is tied into the fly ball revolution. It’s no secret games are longer and more bloated by inaction — one of commissioner Rob Manfred’s pet causes — in part because hitters swinging for the fences are willing to trade strikeouts for home runs and thus are willing to go deeper into counts. Meanwhile, pitchers are taking longer between pitches, which some in the game attribute to the fact mistake pitches are being turned into home runs at a higher clip than ever.
“You can see pitchers taking more time to gather themselves before every pitch,” Nationals catcher Matt Wieters said. “There used to be a couple of hitters in each lineup where you needed to do that. Now it’s everybody.”
It’s not as if anybody has suddenly cracked a secret code about the optimum swing plane. Hall of Famer Ted Williams — in his seminal book, The Science of Hitting, published in 1971 when he was managing the Washington Senators — advocated swinging with a slight uppercut, a notion that went against the prevailing wisdom of the day.
“The ‘level swing’ has always been advocated,” Williams wrote. “I used to believe it, and I used to say the same thing. But the ideal swing is not level, and it’s not down.” Grounders, Williams acknowledged, put a “greater burden on the fielders.” But he added, “If you get the ball into the air with power, you have the gift to produce the most important hit in baseball — the home run.”
What is most important, Williams concluded, is that you hit consistently with authority. But Williams’ measured theory is a long way from the more radical approach of today, with some hitters swearing off grounders altogether.
Where did the modern gospel of the fly ball originate?
The Oakland A’s of the early 2010s are credited with identifying and exploiting a market inefficiency of undervalued fly ball hitters, hoarding relatively cheap players with extreme fly ball rates — such as Jonny Gomes, Josh Reddick and Jed Lowrie — and leading the majors in both 2012 and 2013 in fly ball-ground ball ratio, while winning the American League West both years.
But in terms of hitters purposely revamping their swings to become extreme fly ball hitters, this modern trend is often traced to Marlon Byrd, the outfielder serving a 162game suspension after a second positive test for performanceenhancing drugs. In 2012, Byrd averaged two grounders for every fly ball, a rate that was in line with his career numbers to that point. But in 2013, after working with an obscure, independent swing instructor named Doug Latta who runs a baseball training facility in Chatsworth, Calif., Byrd cut that rate in half and produced the best season of his career.
Eight of the 10 playoff teams in 2016 ranked in the top half of the majors in fly ball percentage.
Even the most ardent fly ball evangelists acknowledge the approach has its limitations and caveats. It isn’t for every hitter. There may also be another reaction coming, in the form of hard-throwing sinkerball pitchers, who can better counteract hitters trying to drive the ball in the air.
For now, at least, teams are finding it easier to acquire fly ball hitters than to convert them during the season; most players only make major swing changes in the off-season.
If Williams was the oracle for older generations of hitters, perhaps Donaldson will be the same for this and future ones — a role he would relish. During an illuminating segment on his swing theory on MLB Network last year, Donaldson stopped at a crucial juncture and looked straight into the camera to address any kids who might have been watching.
“If you’re 10 years old and your coach says to get on top of the ball,” Donaldson said, “tell them no. Because in the big leagues these things that they call ground balls are outs.
“They don’t pay you for ground balls. They pay you for doubles. They pay you for homers.”
If you’re 10 years old and your coach says to get on top of the ball, tell them no . . . they don’t pay you for ground balls.