I don’t believe I’m alone in my fascination with pulled fly balls. These days, we’re virtually drowning in information: exit speeds, launch angles, chase rates, aggressiveness rates — the list continues. There are a lot of various methods of thinking of exit speed that you can check out a whole excellent short article about what they all imply. If you wish to equate how tough somebody strikes the ball into how they’re most likely to carry out, there’s no scarcity of useful short articles. But because deluge of information, horizontal angle has actually been overlooked, for factors both purposeful and unexpected, and the not available is constantly intriguing.
Earlier this month, I did some idle digging into what pull rate ways for production on contact. The takeaway was, to be generous, middling. It appears like pulling your aerial contact leads to much better general production on that contact, however the result isn’t big. Perhaps the more intriguing takeaway was that xwOBA on these batted balls had a predisposition: the more pull-happy the player, the lower their xwOBA was on the balls they strike in the air. That held true regardless of higher general production on those balls.
That’s a strange little artifact, though I didn’t believe too much of it since I type of understood what it would state beforehand. Every time I take a look at a dead pull fly ball player, they’re getting crowning achievement out of batted balls that xwOBA dislikes. But that doesn’t imply the figure is working improperly; it’s doing precisely what it states on the label by bucketing batted balls based upon exit speed and launch angle.
After I composed that short article, I did a little talking with xwOBA developer Tom Tango, who composed a followup piece that took a more holistic take a look at that space in between wOBA and xwOBA. He discovered that after taking all batted balls into account, pull-happy players produced approximately comparable general lines to their xwOBA, and vice versa for the guys who went oppo frequently. Here’s the chart from that short article, recreated in beautiful FanGraphs green:
Pull Rate and Overall wOBA
Quartile | Pull Rate | Best Speed | wOBA | xwOBA |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 39.1 | 99.8 | .326 | .324 |
2 | 32.5 | 99.8 | .321 | .321 |
3 | 27.7 | 99.7 | .319 | .320 |
4 | 21.0 | 99.6 | .315 | .318 |
A minor methodological concern: To create those 4 quartiles, I utilized my initial information, which was very first bucketed out into 4 quartiles by exit speed, then divided in 4 once again by air pull rate. The pull-happiest group in the above chart is really the leading quarter of each exit speed group. That’s extremely partially various from organizing it solely by air pull rate, so I’ve done that also simply to reveal that absolutely nothing too unusual is going on:
Pull Rate and Overall wOBA, Take Two
Quartile | Pull Rate | Best Speed | wOBA | xwOBA |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 39.1 | 99.8 | .326 | .323 |
2 | 32.5 | 99.9 | .320 | .321 |
3 | 27.7 | 100.0 | .323 | .325 |
4 | 20.9 | 99.3 | .311 | .314 |
On the entire, these are incredibly comparable numbers, and they inform the very same story: You can’t take a look at air pull rate (the pull rate in concern in this research study) and utilize that to suggest either outperformance or underperformance relative to Statcast’s anticipated stats. I presume that the factor for this is that a method that focuses on lifting and pulling likewise causes a great deal of rolled-over grounders; our lift/pull heroes are harmlessly tapping the ball to 3rd (or initially if they’re lefty) more frequently than the typical player.
As you’ve most likely collected, I have a bit more to include on the topic. (Otherwise, this would be a quite brief post that just restates things from in other places online.) I wasn’t completely pleased with that response; it still appears like the José Ramírezes and Isaac Paredeses of the world are getting a little additional out of their batted balls. So I returned and organized by contact quality once again, in the type of Tango’s “best speed.” This time, I was searching for general wOBA differentials, instead of simply what occurs on balls struck in the air. Here are the hardest players in the video game:
Pull Rate and Overall wOBA, first Quartile Best Speed
Quartile | Pull Rate | Best Speed | wOBA | xwOBA |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 39.2 | 102.8 | .346 | .352 |
2 | 32.1 | 102.9 | .351 | .356 |
3 | 27.8 | 102.8 | .345 | .349 |
4 | 21.7 | 102.5 | .338 | .346 |
As in the past, the players with the most power published the very best general numbers, however pull propensity didn’t offer any extra info. Across the board, everybody somewhat underperformed their xwOBA. Figuring out precisely why that’s the case is outside the scope of my analysis today, however it’s definitely of interest. Anyway, time for the next tier, and it’s barely definitive:
Pull Rate and Overall wOBA, second Quartile Best Speed
Quartile | Pull Rate | Best Speed | wOBA | xwOBA |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 39.4 | 100.4 | .331 | .329 |
2 | 32.8 | 100.4 | .322 | .324 |
3 | 28.2 | 100.3 | .325 | .329 |
4 | 22.2 | 100.3 | .321 | .323 |
There’s very little to see here. The pull-heavy players do the very best, and xwOBA believes they need to do the very best. The magnitude of the misses out on in either instructions merely isn’t huge. But have a look at the last 2 groups:
Pull Rate and Overall wOBA, 3rd Quartile Best Speed
Quartile | Pull Rate | Best Speed | wOBA | xwOBA |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 39.3 | 98.8 | .322 | .316 |
2 | 33.1 | 98.7 | .305 | .305 |
3 | 27.7 | 98.7 | .307 | .306 |
4 | 20.8 | 98.8 | .303 | .306 |
Pull Rate and Overall wOBA, fourth Quartile Best Speed
Quartile | Pull Rate | Best Speed | wOBA | xwOBA |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 38.5 | 97.0 | .305 | .295 |
2 | 32.1 | 96.2 | .295 | .287 |
3 | 27.2 | 96.4 | .290 | .287 |
4 | 19.4 | 96.0 | .293 | .292 |
Now we’re getting someplace. Here, the spaces look more significant to me. Pull players in my 3rd group – below-average however not the real bottom of finest speed – outperform oppo players by 19 points of wOBA in general, versus just 10 of xwOBA. In the lowest-speed tier, the space in between the pull-iest and oppo-iest groups is 12 points of wOBA, versus just 3 of xwOBA. These information sets are significant, too; 3 years of information throughout all of baseball produces a robust sample.
To be clear, this still isn’t a big result. I’m not stating that players who look horrible may be sneakily excellent if they simply pull fly balls 5% more frequently. But for players with little or middling raw power, going to the pull side more often is connected with much better outcomes, both general and relative to a design based upon exit speed and launch angle.
I believe this is an instinctive conclusion. The more fly balls you cluster to the pull side, the more balls that have a possibility of slipping simply over the wall where the fence is closest to home base. That matters substantially more for players who are often striking the ball in between 95 and 100 miles per hour. Take a take a look at this chart, which I’m recreating from an earlier short article:
wOBA By Speed and Direction
Speed | Pull | Straightaway | Opposite |
---|---|---|---|
<90 | .091 | .107 | .084 |
90-95 | .214 | .015 | .050 |
95-100 | .812 | .079 | .289 |
100-105 | 1.043 | .598 | 1.082 |
105+ | 1.853 | 1.505 | 1.728 |
Fly balls just, 2023
There are certainly tradeoffs in the groundball department. There may be tradeoffs in the strikeout and walk department, too; if you’re changing your regular method to focus on getting in front of the ball, it stands to factor that you may be dedicating to each swing previously than you’d like. But on the whole, the numbers recommend that if you can’t mash the ball over the fence the routine method, with frustrating force, you need to most likely attempt to tuck it into the pull side corner. After all, crowning achievement are the currency these days’s video game — striking more of them appears like an excellent strategy.
There’s still more to examine on this front, however that’s for another day. It’s still February, and this one has actually gone on enough time as it is. My next line of query in locating this little edge readily available to players is to take a look at 2 things: how groundball/fly ball propensities impact this phenomenon and how pull rates differ from year to year. The batted ball propensity part appears essential in determining who may benefit most from the all-pull life. The year-to-year connection part appears essential since this result is just intriguing if it’s repeatable. But that’s for the future. For now, I’m gonna sleep. All this information acquisition is tiring.
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