Baseball’s upward trend is leaving some players grounded
The new conventional wisdom in baseball is that hitters are more effective when they adjust their swings to increase the launch angle of the ball when it leaves the bat. Doing so produces more fly balls that can turn into doubles, triples and home runs. Many players, including Josh Donaldson and Yonder Alonso, attribute their success to this new trend.
Nevertheless, this tactic does not work for every player.
Fly balls alone will not turn Jose Reyes of the New York Mets into a hitter like Aaron Judge of the crosstown Yankees. Judge simply hits the ball a lot harder than Reyes. In fact, Judge hits it harder than anyone. His fly balls end up over the wall about 40 percent of the time; Reyes’ only 7 percent. So players like Reyes need to find the right launch angle to match how hard they hit the ball.
Reyes, by many measures, is having an awful year. Of the 164 players who qualify for the batting title, only two have a lower batting average on balls hit in play than Reyes does. And the Chicago Cubs briefly demoted one of those two players, Kyle Schwarber, to the minor leagues to work on his hitting.
So why has Reyes been so bad when he makes contact? Examining the angle at which the ball leaves his bat identifies weaknesses in his approach.
Reyes hits a relatively high percentage of his batted balls between 20 and 80 degrees, resulting in fly balls and pop ups. However, almost all of his base hits come on balls that he hits between 0 and 20 degrees.
The distribution of Reyes’ batted-ball launch angles resembles that of Detroit slugger J.D. Martinez. Martinez hits a similar percentage of his balls in play above and below 20 degrees. But many more of his batted balls in those ranges fall for hits. And a larger percentage of those hits are extra-base hits, because Martinez hits the ball much harder than Reyes does.
Reyes’ average exit velocity puts him in the company of players like Denard Span and Alcides Escobar, where Martinez hits the ball as hard as elite sluggers like Paul Goldschmidt and Miguel Cabrera.
Oakland’s Alonso is a major success story in the popular narrative that players can benefit from raising their launch angle. Alonso is a first-time All-star this year who increased his average launch angle over the last few seasons to great effect.
Almost all of Alonso’s hits come on batted balls around the 20-degree angle. He has a much tighter distribution of batted balls than Reyes as well, with the vast majority of his batted balls coming between 0 and 35 degrees.
If the fly ball revolution is not going to help players like Reyes, how can he be successful? A better model for light-hitting players might be Dee Gordon of the Miami Marlins.
Compared to Reyes, Gordon has many fewer batted balls above 20 degrees, but more of his batted balls fall for hits. Gordon’s batting average on balls in play is .336, which is just about league average despite the lowest exit velocity of any qualified player. He makes up for his relative lack of punch by rarely hitting the ball in the air.
Some players with relatively high exit velocity actually succeed by hitting line drives instead of fly balls. For example, Colorado’s D.J. Lemahieu has about the same exit velocity as the Mets’ Michael Conforto, but hits many more line drives and ground balls than fly balls.
Lemahieu is even more aggressive about putting balls in play between 0 and 20 degrees, and has many more of them fall in for hits. Lemahieu’s batting average on those balls in play is well above league average, and much better than Reyes’.
It is true that the league as a whole might hit more home runs when players hit more fly balls, and those home runs are driving up the amount of total offense. But it is also evident that this approach won’t work for every player. For players with a relatively low exit velocity, an increased launch angle appears to be a route to more fly ball outs rather than extra base hits, depressing their batting average on balls in play and dragging down their offensive value.
The question for teams is whether they will continue to find room on their rosters for players who do not follow the new trend. If not, punch-and-judy hitters will become as rare as soft-tossing right-handed pitchers.