There is always a lot of talk about the AL being better and the interleague record usually supports that, but this year it seems to be especially severe. The AL is once again dominating IL play and there might be some scheduling and market-size reasons for this, but also when looking at other factors the AL seems to be much better.

The number of very bad teams:

KC and Oakland have been quite bad, but still the three worst records belong to NL teams.  If you look at below .450 teams you have only the two mentioned teams in the AL, but six teams in the NL.  And that is with the Brewers as one total rebuild team actually over-performing. If you look at the teams that even try to compete you have the Braves, Padres, Phillies, Reds and Brewers as full rebuilders while in the in the AL only the White Sox are fully committed to rebuilding. Now you could say that the A’s and Royals should do a full rebuild but the same could be said for the Marlins. However you slice it, there are way more non-competitive teams in the NL than in the AL.

The WC Contenders:

There is a weak division too in the AL with the West, but there are still at least five somewhat credible WC contenders including all AL East teams and probably one of the Twins or Tigers.

In the NL that field has been thinned out to the Cards and the two overperforming West teams (although the Cards, like the Tigers and Twins, are basically projected as .500 teams now).

Now the Dodgers and Nats are really good but even the third supposedly great team, the Cubs, has been mediocre, albeit they should win the division rather easily considering the abysmal state of their division.

Overall the AL seems to be in a much better state as both the East and the Central division of the NL are in a really bad state.

There is hope of course as the Braves,  Brewers, Phillies and even Padres have some good young players and minor league prospects and the Reds have some big league success with position players that were somewhat unlikely prospects, but all of those teams still have ways to go.

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Since lowering the hands was often a topic the last few months, I wanted to look at what the best hitters actually do. For that purpose I’m looking at the so-called “launch position” around front toe touch, and not the stance, since many batters will start to lower and then load up during the stride (David Ortiz or Josh Donaldson), while a few start higher and then load down (Kris Bryant).

As a reference, I used the top of the shoulders and the highest finger on the handle. As a marker for the gap, I use barrel diameter, which is about 2 1/2 inch with wood bats.

Standard height I consider top of the shoulder plus/minus one barrel diameter, and low or high is more than one barrel diameter away from that (it is arbitrary but I have to chose some cutoff). I used shoulder high because that is a common teaching by many hitting coaches.

The hitters are the 2016 wRC+ leaders.

Mike Trout

His hands are borderline between standard and high. I have measured a tick more than one barrel diameter so I will group him in the high category. He is like Bryant also, one of the quite passive and early hand load guys and not a big “rubber band guy” like Donaldson who loads the hands very late to create a lot of stretch. That might be biomechanically slightly less efficient due to the stretch shortening cycle, but it is simple and not much can go wrong, plus he is explosive enough to leave a little on the table

David Ortiz

Very different load from Trout, as he lowers his hands and then loads them late as the lower body already opens. His hands even continue to go up as the elbow starts to lower, creating a ton of stretch. That is the modern Donaldson style of load that might be the biomechanically most efficient due to the best use of stretch shortening cycle. In the modern internet hitting coach circles, this is the most popular load right now, made popular by Bobby Tewksbary, who worked with Donaldson and many other pros. Almost all pros who have lowered their hands have some kind of connection to Bobby (Lamb, Pollock…). Overall his hands end up in a standard height at toe touch.

Joey Votto

More conservative load than Ortiz, although there is a little bit of lift during the load from below shoulder height. Overall his toe touch height is standard.

Daniel Murphy

Very quiet and conservative load that ends at a standard height.

JD

Same load style as Ortiz, ends at standard height.

Miggy

Donaldson loading style light. Hands end up on the low side.

Freddie Freeman

Tried to find his “new swing.” Hard to find a good one but he seems to be on the low side.

Altuve

Definitely on the high side

Kris Bryant

Load is a little like Trout; starts high and then drops to about standard.

Cruz

Not much of a load at all, if anything a very slight drop. Still ends up slightly high but not by much.

Rizzo

Starts low but ends up standard.

JD Martinez

Slight upward load to slightly high.

Belt

Small load to about standard height.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5iR2PPjv7E

Cano

Small and early load slightly on the low side.

C. Seager

Classic standard load to standard height.

Carpenter

Hard to find a good shot but might be a little on the low side.

Betts

Slightly on the high side.

EE

Simple load to very slightly high.

Cespedes

One of the few very high guys as his hands start about ear to eye height.

Goldschmidt

Very small drop load to about standard height.

This is the top 20 in wRC+ last season. Seven of the guys were on the high side, 9 were on the standard side and 4 were on the low side below shoulder height. But overall most ended up somewhere around shoulder level at toe touch. It might be an advantage to not go very high as only Cespedes made the top 20 with an ear-level high load, but lower than shoulder high is not common either.

In my opinion, the whole lower-the-hands thing is mostly a pre-stride thing. Even Jake Lamb, who is the poster boy for low hands, starts low but then loads up to around shoulder height. Now there might be a biomechanical advantage to dropping the hands and then loading up late. I know Bobby Tewksbary from many hitting forum discussions when he still posted there, and I also recommend getting his excellent ebook if you are into hitting, but I’m not sure if that whole low-hands thing isn’t a little overblown. The Donaldson style of load with the lowering and the barrel tip is now really en vogue and anyone promotes it on the internet now, but the 2016 MVPs Bryant and Trout both don’t do it. It might very well not be quite 100% perfect what Trout and Bryant do there, and they are definitely both freak athletes, but it works well enough for them. I would definitely have young hitters experiment with the JD style to see if it is for them but it isn’t as much of an absolute as many people now try to sell it.

Some hitters did lower their hands in their stance and it worked for them, but others did not and they still hit very well. In either case, both will still load up to around shoulder height. The hands definitely do not start “on plane;” the hands and bat always will start down before they level out and then go slightly up through contact.

Here is Miggy’s hand path to illustrate that:

His hands do start low, but still his hands and bat start to arc down and then level out and turn up.  Basically the swing is like the sign of a famous shoe company, first arcing down behind the body and then going up through contact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehs-H2V6N5o

A lot of talk this offseason was about how HRs became cheap and sluggers are not getting paid. Two teams that adapted to that really quickly were the A’s and Rays. Just a couple years ago, the A’s and Rays both were no-power teams that mostly tried to compete with pitching, and, in the Rays’ case, great defense.

As of today (May 30th) the Rays and A’s are first and fourth in HR in the majors despite playing in not the most hitting-friendly parks.

They are also first (OAK) and ninth (TB) in average team launch angle, so they are probably either trying to acquire or teach launch angle.

They both strike out a ton (Rays are first in K% and A’s are fourth) but overall, offensively, it kind of works for them. The Rays are fifth in wRC+ and the A’s are eighth, which is not bad, given their financial constraints.

Where they are paying is defense. The Rays at least have a good OF compensating for their terrible IF, but they are still just 22nd in the defensive rating at the FanGraphs leaderboard. With the A’s it gets really ugly; they are dead last in defense and basically terrible in almost all of their positions.

For the Rays, it seems to work overall, as they are third in position-player WAR, and they also had some Pythagorean bad luck, but the A’s are just 22nd in position-player WAR, so they might have taken it too far.

Overall, the Rays and A’s still follow the trends and act quickly, but finding a bargain is harder and harder. Teams now have a good concept of value and if you find a bargain somewhere, you usually have to pay a price somewhere else.

Probably, it is still good that they try it. They need to gamble on upside and a balanced team is probably not the way to go. It is hard to say how much they gained, but launch angle and homers probably was a slight market inefficiency and they both went to it quickly.

What I found interesting were the Dodgers. Overall, they are a very good team, but they are not hitting homers and their launch angle is one of the worst in the majors (22nd). I thought as a sabermetrically-inclined team with a former Rays FO, they would try to close that hole, but then again they already were really good and can afford to lose some value. Also, the Dodgers team is much more expensive, so a super fast re-structuring of the team like the A’s and Rays did is not really feasible. An expensive team is not as flexible as a team full of pre-arb and early arbitration players and can’t react to a changed market as quickly.

It will be interesting how they develop in the next years. Will they slowly try to increase LA and power while trying to keep their strengths? Or will they sacrifice some defense and contact like the Rays and A’s did?

It will also be interesting if the Rays and A’s stick with it. Power will probably get slightly more expensive again, but I don’t expect the price to explode because the success of the A’s and Rays has been moderate and now teams mostly go by overall value. What teams certainly want to try is to teach elevating to their young players so they can get power without a big trade-off. Players with power and defense will always be sought after, and not be available as a bargain, so being able to teach LA to defensively good prospects could be a market inefficiency, but that is of course not easy to do.

This is for now the final article of my launch angle series (Sorry Carson, or whoever edits all those articles).

Alan Nathan wrote an article that suggested that a steeper attack angle (upward swing angle of the bat) produces more extra-base hits but has a cost in power.

That makes sense since the average pitch only has a downward angle of like 5-10 degrees and if you swing up at 20 degrees you are on plane with the pitch for a shorter time.

Unfortunately, we don’t have attack angles for pro players in games, because there are cheap bat sensors that measure that now but they have only been used in ST and futures games (suggesting attack angles of like 8-15 in most cases I have seen), but I will assume that the average exit angle over a long sample should be pretty similar to the attack angle, or at least correlate closely.

For that, like in my last post, I looked at guys that had at least 500 ABs in 2015-2016.

I looked at LAs of <7, 7-9, 9-11, 11-13, 13-15, 15-17 and >17 degrees.

I did not really find very big differences. Below 9 degrees it was about 2 percent lower than at the higher angles, but after that there isn’t a big change. Even looking at the small sample above 19 degrees, it was only elevated to 21.6%, which is higher but not spectacular (and it was a small sample of only seven batters).

To look further I looked at exit velo. If I looked at the batters above 91 mph they averaged 23% Ks, vs 19.1% for the below-91 group.

So there may be some penalty for swinging hard, but there also might be a selection bias, since low-power swing-and-miss guys are weeded out while power hitters with bad contact skills produce more and stay in the league longer.

Overall, looking at those data, I would say that contact is mostly a skill that is separate from launch angle. In my prior articles I have shown that there is a punishment for  angles that are too high, but it seems to come more in the form of pop-ups and routine fly outs and thus lower BABIP, and not in the form of whiffs. Now we know there are some high-LA, high-whiff guys like Chris Davis for example, and those guys do trade BABIP for ISO with higher LAs to get the most out of their contact, but the more extreme uppercut likely isn’t the source of their whiffs but an attempt to compensate for them by trying to strengthen their strength while “punting” their weakness.

I looked at the Statcast leaderboard from 2015 to early 2017 and sorted for below-average (88 MPH) and above-average exit velo for batters who had at least 500 ABs in these two and something years as an arbitrary cutoff.

The Top 15 in wOBA above with an EV of above 88 MPH averaged a wOBA of .402 while the top 15 below 88 MPH averaged .351. As expected, the higher EV Group has a higher wOBA than the lower group.

The average LA for the harder-hitting group was 14.16 +- 2.5 while the LA for the softer-hitting group was 11.75+- 4.3. It seems like the softer group does better at a lower LA and there also is a greater variance for different LAs.

I also looked at the worst hitters of each group. The bottom 20 in the soft-hitting group came in at 10.15 degrees +- 4.2.

In the hard-hitting group, the worst wOBA hitters averaged 11.15 degrees +- 3.8.

So there seems to be some relationship of LA in the harder-hitting group, while it doesn’t matter much for the below-average group.

Now, if we expand it to 90+ MPH you get an average angle of 13.43 +- 2.9 for the good wOBA group and 12.26 +- 3.7 for the lower level group.

So the conclusion seems to be that harder hitters benefit more from increasing the LA while for the soft hitters it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Of course, I did not factor in Ks and BB in my calculations (I unfortunately had no access to wOBA/con in the leaderboard) and that is probably a big influence.

Overall, when I did a correlation test of wOBA and LA, I didn’t really find anything significant for both groups.

Where it got interesting was when we got into more extreme launch angles. The top 15 wOBA below 9 degrees was .328 (-23 points compared to the best soft hitters) while for the harder hitters the average was .358 (-44 compared to the best hard hitters).

At 7 degrees, the performance of the hard hitters was .340 (- 62 and the first time it was worse than the best soft hitters) while for the best soft hitters below 7 degrees the average was .320 (-27) and only marginally worse than minus 9.

Looking at the other end, the top hitters above 15 degrees had a wOBA of .376 (-26 compared to all LA) — maybe this is due to sacrificing contact for more lift?

And finally, in the softer-hitting group, there were only 12 guys with a LA above 15 degrees, and their wOBA was .314 (-37).

Overall, it seems like LA only has an effect if you get farther away from the average (around 11-12 degrees). Harder hitters can benefit from going higher, while for soft hitters it doesn’t matter much, as long as they stay somewhere near the vicinity of average.

The guys who really benefit from a LA change are the really hard hitters with really low angles.

First, let me start with an excuse: I’m not able to pull launch-angle data from Statcast and thus I’m only using the data from MLB.com as of May 16th 2017 this year. I’m currently learning R for doing better analysis, so if anyone knows how to get a complete LA leaderboard, please let me know.

We all know the the best LA for a HR is around 28 degrees and a HR is the best result in baseball. But still, when looking at the leaderboards, the best guys are all around 13-15 degrees. I looked at the top 10 in wRC+ to date this year and the average was 15.7 +/- 3.9. Looking at BABIP, the average was 13.6 +/- 4.0 (admittedly there is a lot of noise in BABIP at this point of the year) and in ISO the average was 16.4 +/- 4.9. That gives a small hint that BABIP peaks lower than ISO.

This chart supports that.

According to those data, BA peaks between 10 – 14 degrees, while slugging peaks much higher.

But there are also other factors why so far in MLB the best LA is around 15 degrees. According to Alan Nathan, the average fastball, depending on pitch height and velo, goes downward around 5 – 10 degrees.

That means the optimum swing for making contact goes upward 5 – 10 degrees. If you want more lift, you either need to hit under the ball more, which decreases EV, or you have to swing up more, but that means you are in the hitting zone for a shorter time, probably costing you some contact. Some sluggers will go above that, but then it comes at a cost.

And then there is the factor of EV sensitivity. Around 8 – 15 degrees the BABIP is not very sensitive to EV; most balls between 80 and 100 MPH will be hits. At 20 – 25 degrees that is very different; we are seeing that donut hole where you get the bloopers at 75 to low 80s and mostly outs mid 85s to low 90s, and then again HRs in the high 90s. Not every ball will be hit hard, so at lower LAs you get more out of your softly-hit balls.

And lastly, the LAs will be distributed on a Bell curve.

It doesn’t seem like players are able to consistently hit under the ball. That means if your average LA would be 28 degrees, basically half of your batted balls would be useless fly outs above 30 degrees, while if you peak at 15, most of your well-hit balls will fall in the useful 10 – 30 range. That also explains why EV peaks around 10 degrees — that is where the attack angle and exit angle match, and thus balls are hit on the screws while HRs tend to be a couple MPH slower than the hardest-hit balls (and many of the 110+ HRs are hit around 20-25 and not 30+).

Practically, that means that every player with a swing attack angle of below 10 degrees could benefit from swinging up more without any cost for consistency. Swinging up like 10 – 12 degrees means you get some lift and good contact. In fact, at plus 10 degrees, you are longer in the zone than at a completely level swing, plus your BABIP at 10 is better than at 0 degrees.

But above that, it gets more tricky, because slugging goes up but BABIP and contact can go down. For certain hitters with low contact and high EV profiles, it might make sense to swing up at up to plus 20 degrees to maximize whatever contact they get, but it will make the profile more extreme. The swing revolution is a good thing, but above 15 degrees many hitters might reach a point of diminishing returns when they try to elevate more.

Thus I think we will see more elevation of the launch angle. The average LA of MLB is now just below 13 degrees, which is well higher than the last two years (I think it used to be around 11 degrees), and I could see it go up to 15, but then I think the end of the line is reached. I think we are quite close to seeing the LA optimized in MLB. There always will be players who benefit from more, but there is a limit.

I think guys like Joey Gallo might benefit from going to 20+ but Trout and Harper are basically average in their LAs; they get enough elevated balls with their LA profile to hit 30+ homers and still have a high BABIP. I think the best all-around hitters/sluggers will stay between 13 and 15; it is only the below-10 guys that will slowly adapt or die. Guys like Ryan Schimpf will never become the norm. When many players were chopping wood, almost anyone could benefit from swinging up more, but a point of diminishing returns might be reached soon.

I often read articles that say strikeouts are bad if you don’t have power. Inspired by the success of K%-BB% with pitchers I tried to do something similar with hitters to generate a stat that gets predictable with a smaller sample size than wRC+ due to the elimination of BABIP. This could be useful for prospect analysis or also early-season stats.

The rationale basically was to take something bad (Ks) and subtract good things (ISO, BB). To do this, I first scaled BB and K from percent to decimal dividing it by 100. So instead of 22% Ks I would use .22 to get it to the same scale as ISO. You could also scale ISO to percent, but it does not really matter.

Doing that, I found out that most good hitters were below zero. I looked at players that had at least 1000 PA from 2014 to April 2017.

Here is the complete document.

The worst K-BB-ISO was a positive .133 by Chris Johnson (75 wRC+) while the best was a negative .256 by David Ortiz. The average was a negative .05. The 25th percentile was negative .012 (Rajai Davis, 95 wRC+) while the 75th percentile was a negative .09 (Charlie Blackmon, 110 wRC+). Based on this, I conclude that good values are something like negative .1 or better, while values that approach zero are bad and positive values are atrocious.

Overall, the Pearson Coefficient between wRC+ and K-BB-ISO was a negative .75. A negative correlation is expected because the good values are below zero, and the correlation is significant.

The top 20 in K-BB-ISO all have a wRC+ above or equal to 120 and are ranked in the top 50 in wRC+. In the bottom 20 there are three hitters with a wRC+ slightly above 100 but most are near the bottom of the leaderboard.

Now BABIP is not random and there is a skill that is related to contact quality, but then again ISO is also related to contact quality — the guys who hit the ball hard and at decent angles usually also have good ISOs, while the put-everything-in-play-weakly guys usually have bad ISOs (and often bad BB%).

So here is what I look at in a prospect:

excellent: <-0.15 (expect 120 or better wRC+)

good: -0.08 to -0.14 (expect 105 to 120 wRC+)

OK: -0.03 to -0.07 (expect 90 to 105 wRC+)

red flag: above -0.03

Now there is a disclaimer to this: The K-BB-ISO might underrate ground-ball-heavy hard hitters who have lower ISOs but generally solid contact quality. For example, Christian Yelich is just 146th out of 246 in K-BB-ISO over that time frame but 45th in wRC+. It might also overrate fly-ball-heavy pull hitters with high pop-up rates. Examples of this are Brian Dozier (68th wRC+, 29th K-BB-ISO) or Jose Bautista (17th wRC+, 3rd K-BB-ISO).

Also you have to consider park and league factors as there are some very hitter-friendly leagues and parks in the minors (for example the PCL) and HR/FB luck also needs to be considered.

But overall, the leaderboards look quite similar and K-BB-ISO might be a good indicator for success if you want to eliminate BABIP from the equation. Basically this is pretty simple — if you don’t walk or slug a lot, you better not strike out. And if you strike out a lot, you better have something to make up for it.

My analytical background is not the best, though, and maybe somebody who has a little more skill in that field could look at the data and see if I’m onto something.