Does Lifting the Ball Have a Ceiling?
Elevating is en vogue; everyone wants to do it and it seems like every hitter who does it can become a power hitter, especially with rumors about a new ball. There have been many examples of successful hitters of that mold: Daniel Murphy, Justin Turner and Jose Altuve, among others. Is there a limit to this? Could we see hitters with a 25% GB rate in the future? 20% 15%?
One thing that seems to cap this is BABIP. There is a pretty positive correlation of BABIP and GB rate, i.e. GB hitters tend to have a higher BABIP. That seems logical since FBs tend to have a lower average, and even if they are hits they often don’t count for BABIP as they are often home runs.
This table shows the relation of BABIP and GB rate between 2008 and 2017. You can see that BABIP does go down with lower GB rates, but wRC+ is actually better with lower GB rates. Still, you could see a point being reached where the lower BABIP eats up the advantages.
| GB rate | >0.35 | 0.35-0.4 | 0.4-0.45 | 0.45-0.5 | 0.5-0-55 | >0.55 |
| BABIP | 0.287 | 0.290 | 0.299 | 0.304 | 0.314 | 0.320 |
| wRC+ | 106 | 102 | 101 | 95 | 90 | 93 |
Average launch angle shows a similar picture:
| av. LA | <8 | 8 to 10 | 10 to 12 | 12 to 14 | 14 to 16 | 16 to 18 | >18 |
| BABIP | 0.318 | 0.314 | 0.305 | 0.298 | 0.300 | 0.289 | 0.274 |
It seems that once you get past a certain launch angle or GB rate, a drop in BABIP is inevitable. However, an exception might be possible. I looked up guys with a lower than 35% GB rate and a FB rate of lower than 45%, and their BABIP was 0.304. Those guys were pretty rare between 2008 and 2017, but it is possible. You just need to get the ball off the ground and avoid both pop-ups and high outfield fly balls above 25 degrees. Not an easy thing to do, though, as the bat is a round object, and batted balls will always be distributed rather normally around the average LA, meaning that a higher average LA usually will mean more high outfield fly balls.
However, it is possible to imagine a super-hitter who has such good bat control that his band is very narrow. The best example of this might be Daniel Murphy, who managed to have a 34% GB rate with just a 40% FB rate (meaning a very high LD rate), and subsequently a very high (.345) BABIP over the last three years.
So we could indeed imagine a kind of “super Murphy” who hits 25% grounders with lower than 45% FBs. However, to date, we have not seen a guy sustaining such high LD rates; that guy would probably have to have superhuman bat control (which probably eliminates almost all >25% K rate guys). But with modern training methods, who knows what might happen.
Sorry typo there, wrote avoid high of flyballs above 25 degrees but meant 35 degrees. 25 is obviously very good.
And thanks Carson for making my article title suck less, your bad article titulation image is probably unfounded:).
Being able to sustain a high line drive rate is of course a good thing for major league baseball players. Problem is, few guys seem to be able to do it. Murph, Lemahieu, Votto, Miggy, Freeman–these guys have been doing it for a while so it feels sustainable.
Looking at LD% leaderboards for the past few years, Domingo Santana’s name pops out. His career 26.8 LD% would rank top 10 all time! Not a huge sample, but very interesting. Is he going to be a guy we talk about as having a sustainably high LD%? Or will his career #s so far prove to have been fluky?
His FB% on the other hand is much lower than Murph’s (~30% vs ~40%). Murph always had the good LD%, but after he started putting up more FBs, his production numbers across the board skyrocketed. Maybe Domingo should consider following suit.
Nick Castellanos has a similar LD%/FB% profile as Murph. But something is still missing from NC. Maybe his more than double SwStrk% compared to Murph is to blame?
Finally, Jed Lowrie had quite a resurgence last year. He had nearly the same LD%, a higher FB%, and similar SwStrk% as Murph. The only big difference? Lowrie had half as large of a HR/FB% (13% vs 7%) and 30 pts lower on BABIP. Could Lowrie sustain these skills and become a solid middle of the order bat with high 20s/ low 30s HRs and a 300 AVG? He’s only 33 (Murph is 32). Lowrie had a lower IFFB% and similar hard% and pull% numbers to Murph. Statcast has them with similar #s for exit velo and launch angle. Lowrie hit a lot of doubles last year, I think this year he could turn some of those into more HRs.
Good post, also not all liners and fly balls are created equally. Many GB hitters have high LD rates but much are probably low liners (say like 8-15 degrees). Murphy is probably hitting a lot of high liners and low fly balls between 15 and 30 degrees but no so many in the 35 plus degree range. His IFFB rate is also good albeit not super low.
I think LD rate doesn’t quite reflect that as it is the high liners and low FBs around 15-25 which are really productive without a high babip cost.
The super high FB guys usually also hit a lot in the 30-50 degree range and often (but not always also a high pop up rate).
Pop up rate is a big factor for the low babip guys but not the only one. For example ryan schimpf had a 150 babip with super high pop ups but even when looking at balls hit below 45 degrees his babip still was below 230.
So those outfield FBs between 35 and 50 degrees also play a big role.
It depends a little on the hitter though. Schimpf had a zero babip and 125 woba on balls between 35-50 degrees.
Gallo on the other hand also had a 0.06 babip on those balls but a 474 woba.
So if you are a 55 power guy like murphy or altuve those high FBs are bad but with 70+ raw power you can go a little higher since you can also hit them out at 40 degrees.
So for gallo it might indeed make sense to hit 50+ percent fly balls while for most the sweet spot in fb rate is like 35-45 (below 35 percent is not good either because it limits power output)
It’s almost time for my annual Nick Castellanos article! I love him so much. He’s stuck being the Brandon Belt of the AL in that park though.
I’ve found looking at 3 year line drive rates is the best – it eliminates the noise and allows you to find the real LD studs. You names a bunch of them but also in that group is Mauer, Posey, Belt ….
Belt actually has a quite high fb rate. With him it really might be mostly the park.
Mauer definitely hits the ball too low but also think he doesn’t pull it enough.
Too high pull rates also kill babip but with a 30% pull rate it is hard to get to power unless you have 80 power.
So to make elevate work you need to be able to pull at least like 40% or so. That is an additional problem that hosmer or mauer have. Elevating to pull is harder than elevating the other way and those guys can’t do the former at all. When they go the other way it is nice liners but pulled it is always on the ground.
I would agree that just looking at ld rate is not enough.you probably would need some sub categories or ideally LA buckets. Pull rate and what you do with pulled balls is also important.
50% pull, 50 fb guys often have a 250 babip but 25 pull, 25 fb while having good babips are usually not as effective as theya could be.