This article is not intended to take anything away from Chris Taylor. He made a great adjustment by improving his launch angle to turn into a productive hitter. To become an above-average hitter at age 27 after being basically a AAAA/bench type of player is quite amazing and not many can do that.

However, I read a lot of articles treating him like a star, and objectively, he is this season, since a 126 wRC+ and 4.7 WAR from a middle infielder is amazing.

Yet there are some concerns with him. He has some pop and now hits the ball at a solid angle, but his K/BB is not great. his K percentage was 25% this year. That is not super high and he might even be able to shave off another percent or two, but don’t expect a big jump here at his age. His BB percentage was 8.8%, which is OK, but not great for a relatively high-K guy. Overall, his K-BB% is definitely below average (16.2% for him vs 13.1% league average).

So to become an average or better hitter, he needs above-average power. He did improve his game power by improving his launch angle; however, 20 HR is basically just above average in these days, and his exit velo also is just about average (87.0 for him vs 87.3 league average). So there is raw power but it is somewhat limited. Now with the modern ball, you don’t need great raw power to hit it out, as Murphy or Altuve show, but since his LA is already about optimized at around 12 degrees (maybe 1-2 degrees can be added but then it would eat into BABIP), there isn’t much room for growth. I think around 25 should be his ceiling. Now 25 is great for a middle infielder, and Murphy and Altuve became elite hitters by raising their HRs to the mid 20s, but those two guys have a much better K-BB than Taylor — both are around 4%, vs the mentioned 16% for Taylor. Taylor simply needs his 25 HR to even become an average hitter while Murphy and Altuve are basically average hitters with “no” power (say 8 HR or so) and anything above that is positive.

Using my K-BB-ISO stat, Taylor’s -0.05 was about average. What made him elite was mostly his .361 BABIP. Now BABIP is not all luck and he does have a relatively low pop-up rate, and he also pulled just 38% of the time, meaning he is not super susceptible to the shift, but still his 87 MPH exit velo and 32% hard-hit rate are not marks of super great batted-ball quality (about average). He did have a 22% LD rate which is above average, but not amazing either.

Now, he is not slow, so I would maybe give him a .310 BABIP, but even then he will drop off quite a bit.

The xwOBA stat supports that, as his was .331 (around league average) vs. his actual wOBA of .368.

My projection for him next year would be around a 105 wRC+ and maybe a .265 average. Again, that is amazing for a middle infielder who basically was a bench player a year ago, and he should be worth at least like 3 WAR or so, but I would not overpay for him in fantasy. He did improve a lot, but he is no Turner/Murphy/Altuve because he doesn’t have their contact ability.

I researched a potential cost of elevating before. I found a small but not significant correlation of launch angle and strikeout rate, and also a hint that hitters who elevate more might suffer in BABIP, especially if the guys pull a lot. That makes sense, since the BABIP on balls above 25 degrees is just 0.093. Some of that is pop-ups as sometimes FB hitters tend to hit more pop-ups, but even just looking at non-popped-up higher FBs (25 to 40 degrees), the BABIP is just 0.167. Even subsetting that for balls hit at 100+ MPH, the BABIP still is only .233, so that doesn’t help much.

However, that is not the whole story, as HRs are hits too. The BABIP might suffer, but if you hit a lot of homers, that can offset some of that. You can calculate that pretty easily. If the BABIP of higher FBs above 25 is 0.093, that means you need a HR/FB of around 20% to hit for a true average in play of .300. If you look at guys who hit no pop-ups, that requirement lowers to about 18% (.114 BABIP on balls between 25 and 60 degrees as non IFFBs). That doesn’t even really change for harder hitters, as the BABIP between 25 and 60 with 95+ MPH still is only .130, so HR/FB remains the limiting factor. High-pop-up hitters might require higher minimum HR/FB threshold to keep the OBP up.

A good example is prime Pujols. He was no Bautista/Dozier HR-or-out type of elevator, but his BABIP was only around league average while his average was higher than his BABIP, due to low K and high HR/FB rates. Thus, he could hit for the same average as Miggy, who routinely had .330+ BABIPs but slightly worse K and HR/FB rates.

Here is a table showing wOBA for different LA/EV combinations. I used 87 as a cutoff because that was the 2017 league average. Minus 10 to plus 5 was taken as more “line-drive grounders” while <-10 was used for chopped grounders and anything above 60 as a pop-up, so I did not divide that more. Keep in mind those are all hits and not hitters/average EV.

You can see that higher EV guys have a higher effective LA range. The very soft group actually was a little less sensitive for EV in FB angles, probably because there are a lot of bloopers in that range. Thus that might not apply that much for guys who routinely hit that soft, and thus are played shallower.

The slightly below average group was effective between 5 and 25 and then had a sharp drop-off. With the slightly above average group, the grounders get a little more effective, the peak at the line-drive angles gets a little higher, but there still is a big drop-off around 25 degrees, actually even starting above 20 degrees.

Now it really changes in the hard-hit range (95+) and especially the really hard-hit balls (100+, 110+). The really hard hitters stay effective until almost 45 degrees, meaning they do much better in the non-popped-up but high outfield fly balls (pop-ups are not sensitive to EV and always produce nothing). Those real power hitters (not the Murphy/Altuve type elevators, but guys like Gallo, Sano, Stanton, Judge who can really hit it) thus should hit a lot of fly balls to the OF.

The slightly above average power guys can still benefit from elevating, but then a few things must be true:

1)at least low-ish K rate. This is seen with Altuve and Murphy who don’t hit super hard but for great production

2) The elevated balls shifted towards the LD range and away from the high OF FB range, i.e. a very narrow LA range. Murphy here ideally is again a prime example because he hits very few grounders without a really high FB rate

3) Ideally a low pop-up rate

So it really depends on the type of hitter how they should approach. The hard hitters are always quite effective, even with grounders, but still they need to elevate since the grounders are only around average, but they usually have low defensive value and high Ks and thus need to compensate something. The really hard hitter is rarely truly terrible even as a grounder machine (see Christian Yelich), but if there are higher Ks and no defensive value they might still be bad players. Also despite grounders being less bad, the gap between grounders and FBs is still getting larger, so they have more to gain by elevating. Thus it makes sense for them to go into the OF FB range.

For the really low power hitters it doesn’t really matter unless they slap it straight into the ground, which still is a bad idea for them.

And the average power hitters should shoot for the low-line-drive range unless they are able to have a very narrow range and avoid the high OF FBs; then they can elevate up to the 15-20 range without a penalty (Daniel Murphy type).

In some FanGraphs articles, Z-O swing percentage is thrown around as a measure of plate discipline. That makes sense because generally when a hitter swings at strikes, good things happen, and if he swings at balls, bad things happen.

To test if that stat is really better, I looked at the 2017 leaderboard. I looked at the wRC+ of the top 30 and bottom 30 hitters with Z-swing%, O-swing%, and Z-O swing%. Here is what I found:

There is a slightly positive effect of Z-swing, but a much stronger effect of both Z-O swing% and O swing%. At the top, the low-chaser and high-differential guys do about the same, while the bottom chasers do even worse than the bottom differential guys.

If you widen the search for top half and bottom half you get that picture:

Z-swing has no effect at all, and the differential is slightly better than the chase rate, but not by much.

Overall, the Pearson value for differential was a positive .42, for the chase rate it was .32 (used 100 – O-swing% to get positive value), and for Z-swing there was almost no effect (.07). So the differential is a bit better, but the effect isn’t huge; it is probably like with OPS+ and wRC+ where one is mathematically more elegant and correct but the actual values won’t differ much.

I also dissected the hitting into the components OPB, ISO and BABIP.

The result is quite interesting. The differential (+27 ISO points) does clearly better in the power department than chase rate (+7); in fact, even Z-swing had a more positive effect (+17) on power than a low chase rate.

With OBP, that is reversed. Here, the chase group does better than the differential group, while a high Z-swing rate has a negative effect.

With BABIP there was a very small positive effect of differential and Z-swing, and no effect of the chase rate, but the effects are almost non-existent.

So we seem to have two opposing effects here. Being more aggressive in the zone helps the power but seems to slightly hurt the OBP (of course there probably is a bias that aggressive hitters in the zone are often also aggressive outside, but still). And for OBP, chase rate clearly is king, while it doesn’t really have an effect on power.

Still, that might have an effect for certain hitters and especially pitchers, but overall the advantage doesn’t seem to be big, even though it is a bit due to coincidence due to the opposing effects.

This is probably not going to be a long article but I was curious which players fit the Hoskins profile best in recent history. Carson already established the Hoskins profile as a guy who hits the ball in the air and makes contact.

For that, I searched first basemen that played from 2002 to 2017. I used 2002 because that is the year we started to have batted-ball data. It also means that it mostly covers a high-K era, although it got more extreme recently. As a cut-off, I used 1500 PAs played. 96 players fulfill those criteria.

First, I filtered for an ISO of .200 or greater. I also filtered for a BB% of greater than 9% (because Hoskins also walks), a K% of 20% or smaller, and finally a ground-ball rate of 40% or under.

That leaves a list of just eight names:

The list is a pretty good group. It averages 23 career WAR, a 127 wRC+ and a .273/.367/.503 line. The only downside there might be is that the fly-ball profile could supress BABIP some. The group has a .287 BABIP which is below the league average of .300 during that time span, especially if you consider how hard those guys hit the ball. That means that those guys do underperform their K/BB/ISO profile a little bit. For example, Konerko has a very good power/contact/discipline profile that by my math points to more of a 140+ wRC+, but his actual wRC+ is 120. That is the disadvantage of that extreme profile — you are losing some BABIP to fly outs, especially if you hit more balls in the high fly ball range, which tend to be either HRs or outs, and even more so if there is a slightly elevated pop-up rate coming in conjunction with the fly balls.

But overall that doesn’t matter that much if the K/BB/ISO profile is that good; those guys are all really good hitters even with a slightly lower BABIP. Just expect Hoskins’ hit tool to play under his contact rate a little bit due to that Bautista-like profile (who also had that lower-BABIP, pulled-fly-ball profile with great contact and walk rate).

That means Hoskins might be a .265 hitter despite above-average contact, which also makes his SLG play a little bit down on his power, but he should still get on base on a very good clip and produce excellent power. Just be a little careful when looking at his power, contact, and discipline if you want to bank him for a .300 average/.600 SLG for your fantasy team. He might pay some cost with his elevating that doesn’t come in the form of Ks, but BABIP. But nonetheless he should be very good, even if it is “just” a Konerko/Teixeira type of player and not the next Miggy like some Philly fans probably think right now.

Carson had an interesting article about finding contact hitters who can elevate. That makes a lot of sense, especially if the ball is really juiced, because that new environment means that more FBs are going out even though they are not totally crushed. A couple months ago I already correlated power and contact together with walks, and had pretty decent correlations with performance. Power and contact together is definitely a good thing. However, when it comes to low-minors players, often the power is not present yet, so it can make sense to look at the batted-ball profile instead when evaluating potential for growth.

Now, that is not a hard rule, and you could actually say that a strong ground-ball hitter like Daniel Murphy when he was young has actually more potential for growth than a weak FB hitter when he actually learns to elevate, and he and others have shown that it is possible to make that change even in the late 20s, but we also know that sustainable swing changes are quite hard to attain (there are the Murphys and Donaldsons but also guys like Jason Heyward who tinker with the swing every year and make it worse because muscle memory gets confused), and it is probably a safer bet that a young minor leaguer (17-19-year-olds especially) can add some muscle and make some of the FBs go over the wall.

Instead of FBs, however, I have tried a new stat. Instead of FB% I have used a stat I called “effective off the ground percentage.” I used off the ground percentage because line drives are just as good as FBs (actually better) and everything off the ground is good unless it is a pop-up. Basically it is 100 minus GB% minus PU% (IFFB*FB/100). I think that is important because pop-ups are a terrible result and we do know that extreme FB hitters like Schimpf, Story, or Odor tend to have elevated pop-up rates. Overall, there is a small but not super significant positive correlation between FB% and IFFB% (0.3 Pearsson), but at the extreme top end of launch angle, the pop-ups do get higher.

That means, obviously, a hitter who can get the ball off the ground while avoiding pop-ups (like Trout or Votto) is a big asset. Still, the overall correlation of wRC+ and effective off the ground percentage is not huge, although it is better than just FB% (0.23, vs 0.17 Pearsson).

The effect gets stronger at the extreme ends; for example, the top-20 in effective off the ground percentage is at a 117 wRC+ and the bottom 20 just at 99. However, of course power still plays a big role, as do strikeouts. Launch angle does help, but there are limits to that; it is not a magic pill. The most important things are still the big three — power, contact, and plate discipline. But a bad batted-ball profile can make the other peripherals play down. There is an effect of diminishing returns. Getting balls in the air is good, but it is mostly an issue when it gets extreme. If you have 6-degree LA/50% grounders, that is bad, but once you get past average (10 degrees, 45% grounders) there is not that much of a gain by further increasing LA.

I don’t believe in that “steeper swings lead to more Ks” thing, but higher LA can have a cost of BABIP and sometimes pop-ups. So I’m not sure a Hoskins / Jay Bruce / Cody Bellinger FB profile is that much better than a normal 40% FB profile. In the end, there is a threshold when LA can’t be further increased.

The FB revolution is mostly helping the guys who had extreme grounder profiles; in the end, it is probably best to have a slightly above-average LA of like 12 degrees, and have an off the ground percentage of 60+%, but extreme FB profiles probably only make sense for extreme power guys.

Carson’s article had Rhys Hoskins in it, but also Willians Astudillo, who probably won’t become a star. I think it is good to look for prospects who don’t hit on the ground too much, but I’m OK if my prospect hits like 45% grounders since many prospects tend to improve that a little in the majors, and I don’t think looking for extreme off the ground profiles brings that much of an extra advantage.

However, when a guy hits a ton of grounders, it is a red flag, especially if it comes with K issues. If you can’t make contact better, make your contact count with hard-hit fly balls. Moncada has that problem somewhat, and needs to improve that.

However, what is also bad is pop-ups with no power. J.P. Crawford, for example, has good off the ground rates (almost 60%) but also insane pop-up rates. He is starting to develop some pop, but unless it gets better, he probably might be a low-BABIP guy. He probably might be better off with a more conservative batted-ball profile of like 45% grounders and a little less pop-ups, so that his BABIP gets better. His off the ground rate is 60% but his effective off the ground rate is actually slightly under 50%, which means he is not getting the benefit of staying off the ground, but is paying the costs.

Of course, his plate discipline and contact profile would still work with average power, but the batted-ball profile definitely is not ideal.

There are a few really good teams this year. The Dodgers and Astros are really destroying their divisions, although the Astros have been slowed down by injuries a little. The Nats are also really good despite their bullpen struggles, that they tried to fix with a few trades.  There are also the Red Sox and the Yankees, who started really well. I will also include last year’s World Series finalists, who had a mediocre first half but really turned it on in July and on paper have very strong teams that should compete with the other top teams.

Let’s start with hitting. I used wRC+, K, BB, ISO, my own K-BB-ISO, xWOBA and BABIP.

The Astros have clearly been the best hitting team. Their BABIP might regress some, but they also lead in xXOBA, K-BB-ISO, ISO and contact. Behind them, the Dodgers, Yankees, Nats and Indians form a group that is pretty close together by all the stats. The Cubs are clearly behind in wRC+ but they also have the lowest BABIP at .286 that might be due to some regression. The Statcast-based xWOBA suggests that it was not all bad luck but in ISO, contact and my combined stat, only the Astros clearly are superior to them. The Cubs also have a July WRC+ of 113, which is fourth of the group behind the Astros (152), Dodgers (120) and Indians (115) with a not outrageous .307 BABIP.

Boston, however, clearly is the last team out of the bunch. They are last by xwOBA, wRC+, K-BB-ISO and ISO. Contact, walks and BABIP are OK, but Boston this year simply doesn’t have power; their ISO is actually second-last in MLB.

If we want to create tiers of hitting, the Astros are alone in their own tier. Of course, currently half of their lineup is on the DL, but hopefully that changes and then they should be number one again. After them, there is a tier out of the Nats, Dodgers, Indians and also the Cubs. The Cubs have been clearly worse in results and are closer to Boston in that regard, but their lowish BABIP, their preseason projections and their last very good month, as well as their peripherals, make me grade them on par with the other non-Astros teams. All those teams are pretty close in talent and should be projected for about a 105-110 wRC+ the rest of the way.

And then there is Boston, clearly the worst out of the pack no matter how you slice it.

Then there is pitching:

Here the Dodgers clearly lead the field, being first in xwOBA against and FIP and second in K-BB. After them, we have the Indians, who are a weaker team in xwOBA but second in FIP and first in K-BB, and Houston, who is second in xwOBA, third in K-BB and fourth in FIP. Boston is second in FIP and fourth in K-BB, and the Yankees are in the same tier. Washington and the Cubs are a bit weaker in that regard, but overall there are not huge differences, plus the Yankees and Cubs both had really big upgrades.

Tiers here would be the Dodgers and Indians first, then Red Sox and Yankees and third the Nats and Cubs, but the recent trades might have moved the Cubs into the second tier and the Yankees into the first tier.

By xWOBA differential you have:

the Dodgers ahead of the Astros, Yankees, Indians and Nats and the Red Sox and Cubs last. I think, however, that with the recent trades and their hitters getting hot, the Cubs are pretty close to at least the Yankees, Indians and Nats and not that far off the big two from LA and Houston, especially because they excel in defense, which was not included in my analysis. Boston unfortunately I don’t see quite in that tier, especially if Price doesn’t come back strong.

The Cubs have struggled this year. They are two under .500 and 5.5 games back in almost mid-July.

There was a lot of talk about the Cubs’ defensive regression and worse pitching, but one of the biggest problems has been the hitting. Last year they had a 106 team wRC+ which has regressed to a below-average 94 wRC+ this year.

That is not good, but it also means there’s a lot of room for improvement. The Cubs’ struggles are mostly based on their .279 BABIP, as their .180 ISO and 10% BB rate are above league average and their K% is about average. According to those stats, they should be at least above average.

The Cubs should hit better than that, and they have, outside an abysmal May and early June.

Here is the monthly breakdown (month: wRC+, BB, K, ISO, BABIP):

April: 98 wRC+, 10,22.9,.162, .313

May: 83 wRC+, 10.1, 21.1, .177, .242

June: 96 wRC+, 9.7, 22.7, .194, .282

July: 112 wRC+,9.2, 21, .212, .293

As you can see, the peripherals are not that different; if anything the ISO was trending upwards during the season. What was different was the BABIP, and that especially in like six weeks in May and early June.

Now there is no reason to believe the Cubs’ low BABIP would be for real, and the Cubs’ season ISO if anything might be a little low. They won’t be ISOing over .200 like in July so far, but high .180s seem to be a realistic goal. But even if they stay at their current peripherals of 10, 22, .180 and their BABIP improves to around .300 in the second half they should be a good hitting team.

The Cubs’ young core can hit, and they will never be much better than they are now. They have Rizzo and Bryant at their peak, and Contreras, Happ, Baez and Russell aren’t bad hitters either. And even the struggling Schwarber should bounce back. He probably was overrated by Cubs fans as his contact and defensive issues are for real, but his 14% BB rate and .212 ISO are solid and he was a big time victim of BABIP, at .199. Now his BABIP was partly due to his 14% IF fly rate and his predictable pull tendency (shift), but .199 still is way too low. Schwarber might just end up being a poor man’s Adam Dunn, but while hardcore Cubs fans see that as an insult, peak Adam Dunn was a pretty good hitter and even if he is not the second coming of Babe Ruth, Schwarber should be decent at least offensively.

So from a hitting perspective, there is no reason to wait. The Cubs can hit now and the service time clock for the core is ticking, although there are still quite a few years left and this certainly is no now-or-never situation. Also, except for Eloy Jimenez, all major prospects have been called up so there is also no reason to wait for guys in the minors. This is the Cubs’ core and it is one that gave them two big years.

So why potentially risk wasting one of the control years of the core? The Cubs are a few games back, but realistically, it is a weak division, and they still have clearly the best postseason odds in their division. And once you make the PS any team can win anyway, so grab that playoff run if you can; the chances are not going to get better.

Now the Cubs probably win the division without a move, but there is a risk the Brewers pull through. Also the Cubs do have future issues. Arrieta is going to be a free agent and might be declining a little anyway, so it will be tough decision on whether to re-sign him as he still won’t be cheap. Lackey is getting old too, and Hendricks, while not bad, clearly had a fluke-ish season last year. Lester is still good, but how much longer will he stay an ace at age 33? And all the typical buy-low Theo signings for the fifth spot so far did not work this year.

The Cubs have some interesting pitching prospects but nobody of note is remotely big-league ready.

So if you can add a cost-controlled young ace, now is a good time. Next year, arbitration will start to kick in, and the core won’t stay that cheap forever. That means a cost-controlled ace would ease the salary situation. The Cubs at some point need to make a move for pitching anyway, and why not do it now, when you are a couple games back and a hot-at-the-wrong-time Brewers club could cost you a very valuable playoff run that you counted on before the season started?

The Cubs still are in a good position, but there has been a negative swing in playoff odds that the Cubs could counter with a big move. Of course, that big move will hurt the Cubs a lot in what it will cost, but if there is a chance to get a deal done, now might be a very good time, and since the Cubs’ window, while not eternal, is not closing anytime soon in the next years, it probably makes sense to go for a long-term solution rather then a rental.

The Cubs have a chance to do two things at once: get back some of the playoff odds they lost due to their mediocre two and a half months of baseball in a season that was seen as a lock to make the PS, and fix a future need in the rotation, and IMO Theo should use that situation to make the move this deadline. There really is nothing to wait for — the future is now for the Cubs.

Batting average was rightly criticized as a measure for player performance when better stats arrived. Batting average only measures a part of hitting skill (getting hits), and not other crucial things like walks and power. Because of that, better statistics like OBP and OPS and finally wRC+ were used to evaluate players.

Over the years, Ks went up, but also contact quality increased, so batting average did not change that much, but about 20 years ago BABIP maxed out and has stayed at .300 ever since while Ks continued to climb. Still, the number of .300 hitters isn’t down that much; in 1997 it was 35 and last year it was 25. Hitting .300 always was a tough thing to do, and still is.

Hitting .300 is not productive by itself of course, but if you look at the .300 hitters last year it seems like the “empty .3o0 hitter” that was often used as an example of why BA is bad to judge hitters is basically not existing anymore. Last year only five of the 25 .300 hitters hit single-digit homers and none of the 25 had a below-average wRC+. It seems like slapping the ball in play is not enough to hit .300 anymore with today’s defenses. Basically the modern .300 hitter is a powerful hitter in most cases. The .300 hitters of last year averaged a mightily impressive 132 wRC+ and a whopping 4.7 WAR so it was truly an elite group (seven out of the top 10 in WAR hit .300).

You can illustrate the value of hitting .300 pretty well when you look at the dated stat of OPS. Its components are OBP and SLG. OBP is hits+walks+HP/PA and last year 71% of all on-base events were hits. And even slugging is heavily influenced by BA as it is BA+ISO. The importance of ISO has grown over the years but still SLG is about 60% driven by BA and only 40% by ISO. That means that BA still has a huge influence on batting production.

What we do see is that the .300 hitters are good contact hitters. On average they have a 15% K%, which is way better than the league average (around 22%). No .300 hitter had a K% of above 25% and only two were even above 20%. Still, K% does not have a big correlation with batting performance since there are still the weak slap hitters and productive TTO, but the below-15% K hitters as a group have a respectable 109 wRC+.

Again it looks like the weak slap hitters are a dying breed. We all have noted that the league is getting closer together in power and this could actually mean a comeback for contact and batting average. it doesn’t mean that slap hitters will come back, but since power seems to be about maxed out (still increasing but more because the bottom guys now also hit bombs), now players can get more productive by adding contact without sacrificing power; with the new ball or whatever, you don’t need to hit the ball that hard, just at the right angle, and that can be done without striking out more.

Now we all read the stories about players who got more productive by swinging harder and striking out more, increasing their power (Alonso, Freeman), and we all notice the huge power hitters with a ton of Ks being quite productive (Sano, Judge, Gallo, Stanton, Bellinger), and that is true, but those guys are all huge power guys (and still won’t be .300 hitters at least when you think that last year’s correlation of Ks and hitting 300 is still true).

The more desirable thing for the average player is probably to be like Murphy or Altuve, who don’t strike out and still hit 25 bombs. Those guys don’t hit the ball super hard (around average EV) but they make a ton of solid contact at good launch angles.

It is a bold statement, but I think the batter of the future would be a guy who hits the ball reasonably hard but makes good contact and hits the ball in the air. Hitting the ball in the air like Billy Hamilton won’t get it done, but once you are past a certain threshold, there are no extra points for more EV. A 120 MPH homer doesn’t plate more runs than a 100 MPH homer.

Now, of course, the extra power still has a value. Last year everyone hit 30 HR and still the leaders were only mid 40s, but this year we actually might get 50-bomb guys again. But still, I think that we won’t see a proliferation of Judge or Sano types. I think the new conditions actually hurt those guys a little because a team now can find a 25-HR guy who makes contact and defense more easily, making it harder for the big slugger to separate himself from the pack.

The Astros actually already incorporated that successfully. They improved their contact without really giving up power and they now really do well.

Low Ks don’t have an intrinsic value, but if power is already maxed out and the league is striking out so much, it is pretty easy to separate yourself from the pack. The low-K thing already was en vogue after the Royals won, but they still did it at a cost of low power. The Astros are basically the Royals 2.0 because they also have power.

Home runs are up across the league and everyone is searching for reasons. One assumption that would make sense is that with the feedback system of Statcast, the league gets closer together in launch angle since we know that the best hitters have an average LA of around 12-15 degrees and players that are way off that would be incentivized to correct that or else be replaced by other hitters who can do it.

First, let me say that I used at-bat cutoffs since that is what Statcast allows for. I used 250 for 2015 and 2016 and 100 for 2017 to date. That probably changes the values a little. Specifically my average LAs look higher than the usually-cited league averages, probably because bench players who hit weakly are excluded.

Looking at the average LA, the chosen group of hitters went up from 11.7% in 2015 to 15.9% in 2016 (+4.2) to 16.6% (plus another 0.7).

So what did definitely happen was an increase of the launch angles across the board. However, when looking at the standard deviations, the league did not get closer together. SD was 3.6 in 2015, 3.8 in 2016 and 4.2 in 2017. It seems like not everyone is adjusting at the same pace.

So let’s look at different subsets here.

The average of the top 20 went way up from 17.8 in 2015 to 25.1 in 2017 (+7.3). The average of the bottom 20 also went up, from 4.2 to 8.0 (+3.8) degrees. The Q25 went up from 9.4 to 13.9 (+4.5) and the Q75 from 14.3 to 19.2 (+4.9) degrees.

So LA definitely went up across the board in all groups, but if anything it accelerated more at the top than on average or at the bottom. The league is increasing LA but so far it is not getting closer together.

…the New York — not the mashing Yankees, but the Mets. Unfortunately I had a hardware crash so I currently can’t pull reports from Statcast and thus I now take ground-ball rate as a measure for elevation instead of launch angle. I prefer grounder rate over fly-ball rate because that tells you the “off the ground rate” (100 – gb%). Since liners are also very good I think they should be included.

The Mets have faced a lot of heat from sabermetric fans and sometimes for good reason, like their lowish OBP, neglecting defense and handling injuries.

But there is one thing they have done for a couple years now and that is elevate the ball.

In 2015 they had the third-lowest grounder rate in the majors at 41.9%, only trailing the Astros and Yankees. That means 58.1% of their balls were off the ground.

In 2016, after losing the poster boy of the fly-ball revolution, Daniel Murphy, they improved their grounder rate to a clearly league-leading 39.5% (almost 2 points on the second-place Rays). That improved their off-the-ground rate to over 60%.

In 2017, despite a lot of injuries, the Mets have even improved their GB rate to 38.2%, but they’ve been exceeded by the A’s.

Overall, the Mets clearly lead the Statcast era with a 40.3 GB%, almost 2 points ahead of the second-place Tigers.

The elevation also leads to power output, as they are 7th in ISO (only NL team ahead of them is the Rockies) and 6th in HR (top NL team, even ahead of the Rockies). Granted, they are only 21st in OBP, and negative in defense, so they are not without flaw, but there is no doubt they were built to elevate and mash, and that is by design.

Now did the Mets teach that or acquire elevation?

Looking at some long-time Mets:

Curtis Granderson

2013(Yankees): 33.8%, 2014: 34.2%, 2015: 30.8% , 2016: 36.4%, 2017: 31.3%

Granderson was a FB hitter when the Mets got him.

Daniel Murphy

We all know about him. 50% grounders in 2012 and improved that to 42% in 2013 and then more.

Lucas Duda

Always was a FB hitter with sub-40% grounder rates since the minors.

Yoenis Cespedes

Was a FB hitter when they got him (upper 30s grounder rate) but became a more extreme FB hitter in NY. This year he is running an insane sub-30% grounder rate.

Travis d’Arnaud

He started out in the mid-40s and then had some ups and downs with a very bad 50% rate last year, but this year he is down to 39%. We will have to wait to see whether that is sustainable.

Michael Conforto 

Sightly improved his grounder rate over his career from low-40s to now high-30s.

And then there is Jay Bruce who was acquired as a fly-ball hitter and became an extreme fly-ball hitter.

It seems like elevation was mostly acquired, but there are or were players who learned to lift more with the Mets. I assume it is at least encouraged by the Mets that hitters hit everything in the air.

The Mets have earned their share of criticism with some things they have done, but when it comes to the fly-ball revolution, it is they who deserve credit as the leaders of the fly-ball revolution, and probably moreso than the saber-darling teams like the Cubs or A’s, who are usually cited when talking about the fly-ball revolution. I’m not saying those teams did not target air balls, as the A’s have the 5th-lowest and the Cubs have the 7th-lowest grounder rates during the 2015 to 2017 to date time frame, but the leaders have clearly been the Mets.