Four Players Who Could Stand to Join the Fly Ball Revolution and Starling Marte
There is a lot of potential in these power bats. Which ones aren’t using it at optimal level?
Most true analysis comes out of curiosity. I believe that one should not have a thesis before researching the supporting statistics because a thesis should be drawn from statistics; not the other way around. I have fallen victim to one of my own ideas many times, so desperate to prove myself right that I would cherry pick and present statistics in a manner that did more to make me look good than serve as truth.
That being said, I did have someone in mind before I began researching for this piece. I can’t help having heard that Christian Yelich, one of the most talented hitters in the game, has an Average Launch Angle (aLA) of less than one degree. For those of you unfamiliar with the metric from Statcast, you can learn about Launch Angles here. If the optimal aLA for power is somewhere in the range of ≈10° — ≈25°, then that’s where the best power hitters should be, in theory. If we are to decide what constitutes power, many people turn to the Statcast metric Average Exit Velocity (aEV), which you can read more about here.
On my end, I began to wonder if there are power hitters that don’t use their abilities at the optimal level. Christian Yelich comes to mind as the most extreme example. Here is my arbitrary pick: I took all qualified hitters in 2016 with a slugging percentage between .417 (which was the league average) and .483 (which was Yelich’s mark). If Yelich is the extreme example, cutting off players who exceeded his mark eliminate power hitters who in theory already have an optimal swing, from Mark Trumbo to J.D. Martinez. Cutting off players below the league average eliminates hitters who in theory lack in power. Here’s the list, since it’s too big to insert in picture form.
When we plug these names into Statcast and create a scatter-plot, the X-axis will be aEV and the Y-axis will be aLA. This will isolate the players we want, because the light-hitting middle infielders on this list will be in quadrants two and three, the high strikeout rate sluggers coming off a down year will be in quadrant one, and players with high aEV but low aLA will be in quadrant four. This is the result.
I’m highlighting the extreme examples here, only those with an aEV of at least 91 MPH and an aLA of less than 10°. Obviously, there’s Yelich, in the extreme bottom right. It’s almost scary to consider what kind of hitter he could turn into if he adjusted his philosophy.
Eric Hosmer was a surprise to see here, considering how much he is shunned in the sabermetric world. Interestingly, his aEV in 2015 was only 90.5 MPH, which would have made him just ineligible for our study (similar to Jonathan Villar, the dot I am sure you noticed to the left of Correa and Desmond). Additionally, Hosmer actually decreased his aLA somewhat from the 7.8° he had in 2015. Naturally, Hosmer has the 12th highest GB% out of 165 hitters with at least 2000 plate appearances since 2012.
Another surprise to find in quadrant four was Ian Desmond. Desmond’s aEV in 2015 was 91 MPH and his aLA was 5.1°. That seems nearly identical to his mark here. Of course, out of 165 hitters with at least 2000 PA since 2012, Desmond ranks 96th in hard hit rate. His only year with an ISO above .200 in his career was 2012, so we will have to wait to see what Coors Field (and maybe a swing adjustment?) can do for him.
The most interesting non-Yelich player in quadrant four is Carlos Correa. Ticketed by pundits as a contender for American League Most Valuable Player going into 2016 after winning the Rookie of the Year in 2015, Correa did not meet those (unreasonably) high expectations. He went from a .233 ISO his rookie year to .177 in 2016. If there’s any indication why, it’s that his 2015 HR/FB% was 8th in league among hitters with at least 400 PA. However, what makes that unsustainable for Correa is that he was one of only two hitters on that list to record a FB% lower than 30% among the top 20. For the sake of context, six of those hitters recorded a FB% above 40%. If Correa wants a sustainable high HR/FB%, he is simply going to have to hit more fly-balls, and if he wants to hit more fly-balls, he is going to need to elevate his aLA. After all, it makes perfect sense to do so for someone who recorded such a high aEV.
You’ll note that there is one more player here that I noted. Much ink has been spilled on Starling Marte’s 80 game suspension for performance enhancing drugs, and the general narrative seems to be, “why?” Why would such a talented player with financial security that many of his peers do not have risk his reputation by using steroids? Well, Marte is certainly in our optimal range for aLA, and is a complete player otherwise, but has the sixth-lowest aEV on this scatter-plot. With such a low mark, perhaps he was trying to generate more power. It’s a sad situation, and that’s really the only note I wanted to make about it.
Starling Marte aside, Statcast gives us the opportunity to use data that was never available to Branch Rickey or Ed Barrow. I had no idea that I would run into Ian Desmond or Eric Hosmer when I began this study, and seeing Carlos Correa gives us a better understanding to his 2016 season than “it was a sophomore slump.” There is a lot of talk about a fly-ball revolution, and from this study, it seems as though these players could stand to get on board. We will have to see if any adjustments are made on their end this season.
