The Reality of the Anti-Ground-Ball Revolution

by
September 4, 2017

Is your name Christian Yelich? If not, please stop hitting ground balls. Right now. Please. Thank you.

Christian Yelich is the only MLB player to log 2400 PAs over the course of 2014-2017, hit 55% or more ground balls and log a wOBA of .340 or higher in a single-season. And he’s done it in all four seasons.

How does he do it? He combines a league-average line-drive rate (22%) with a .270 batting average on ground balls and a 10%+ walk rate.

Sure, Jean Segura (3yr+ GB 55.9%) did it last year, but he dropped his GB rate to 53% and had a HR/FB excursion up in the 13%+ range that year.

You might point out that during the same year, Jonathan Villar managed a .356 wOBA, but he needed an even-better-than-Yelich .316 average on ground balls with a 20% HR/FB ratio and an 11%+ walk rate. We’re talking about the definition of outlier seasons.

After a quick back-and-forth with another FanGraphs reader/commenter, John Autin, in the recently published Justin Turner piece by Travis Sawchik I started wondering what sort of wOBA does each type of player carry based on the percentage of ground balls that player hits on average. But for starters, I had to understand how many players carried ground-ball rates in what ranges.

wOBA

More than half of the qualified player seasons in the last four years have come from players who averaged 40-50% GB. Of those, 65 (16%) resulted in players contributing less than a .290 wOBA. FanGraphs’ own wOBA rule of thumb page considers these seasons “awful.” This includes seasons you might remember such as “Albert Pujols’ season in progress (2017),” “Every Billy Hamilton season ever,” and “most seasons from Alcides Escobar.”

To provide a little more context, let’s view these player seasons on a 100% graph. Players who have averaged greater than 40% ground-ball rates have a 4-in-10 or better chance of producing a below-average season by wOBA standards (.310-.319 bin and lower).

wOBA2

The “Great” (.370+) seasons lodged in the 50% bin are from Eric Hosmer (2017), DJ LeMahieu (2016) and Ryan Braun (2016). Braun needed an outlier HR/FB (~29%) season, LeMahieu is one of the ten deadliest line-drive hitters in all of baseball, and Eric Hosmer, well, he’s straddling the line 5/6th of the way through the season. There just aren’t that many great hitters carrying a GB rate between 50-55%. You’re going to either need to hit a TON of line drives to make up for all those ground balls, or pound three out of ten FBs for a HR. Otherwise you’re looking at a very average offensive season a quarter of the time, and well below average another 50% of the time.

What I’ve learned is that 30-40% GBs is the sweet spot, and only a quarter of MLB player seasons from 2014 have been recorded by players in this bin. Freddie Freeman, the king of line drives, has lived in the 30-35% GB range over this time period. He’s joined by players like Lucas Duda (putting up three above-average seasons), Kris Bryant, Matt Carpenter and Brandon Belt.

Interestingly enough, Ian Kinsler might want to rethink his approach. Along with a high infield fly rate, he’s just not doing enough damage with the HR to put up high wOBAs. The exception being his 2016 and 2011 seasons. Being that he’s an above-average line-drive hitter, he could benefit from shifting his focus a little more that way as he ages through his last few seasons. Or I suppose he could benefit from a more hitter-friendly home park as he enters free agency this year.

Now that we have the table set, I’d like to share a short list of players that are putting up terrific wOBAs, but could benefit from putting even more balls in the air. Of course there’s Christian Yelich, but let’s let him do what he’s doing. And while we’re at it, we won’t recommend any changes for Joey Votto.

One thing I’ve noticed, and this isn’t a new revelation to me, is that Cuban players like Puig, Grandal, and Abreu all hit a very high number of ground balls, even while enjoying quite a bit of success. But if they ever decide to make the anti-ground-ball leap, they may find an MVP trophy or two. Ditto for George Springer. Let’s get him ripping air balls and see how high he can fly.

And maybe there are a couple of careers to save as well, a la Yonder Alonso or Justin Turner? Here are the low-flying 2017 players who could use the #turneradjustment

Looking team by team, at the approaches employed by their players who gathered at least 400 PAs minimum in any given year, and also have accumulated 1000 PAs over the last four years, we can pick out some trends as well. I was a little surprised to see the Mets at the top of the list, but the A’s, Tigers, Reds and Blue Jays didn’t surprise me as “put it in the air” types of teams. You’ve got some of the poster children for the air-ball revolution on those teams such as: Donaldson, J.D. Martinez, Jose Bautista, and Yonder Alonso. Those teams also feature some of the game’s deadliest line-drive hitters in: Nicholas Castellanos, Joey Votto, Miguel Cabrera, and Daniel Murphy (from his Mets years).

On the flip side, we see the Marlins, led by aforementioned ground-ball expert Christian Yelich, pound-it-into-the-ground Dee Gordon, and Ichiro Suzuki, as well as a team-wide approach by Ozuna, Realmuto, Hechavarria, and Martin Prado to hit ground balls and line drives. Prado is the only one other than Yelich to do it well.

The White Sox were led by Adam Eaton (54% GB), Avisail Garcia (52%), Alexei Ramirez (49%), Yolmer Sanchez (48%), Melky Cabrera (47%), and Jose Abreu (46%). Tim Anderson is the latest, though he doesn’t factor into the analysis yet, to pound out 52% ground balls like it’s his job and turn in awful wOBA seasons (.315 and .274 in progress).

2014-2017 Player Seasons By Team
Team Air Ballers Neutrals Ground Ballers Air to Ground Ratio
Mets 12 4 2 6.0
Athletics 9 6 3 3.0
Tigers 13 10 5 2.6
Reds 8 10 4 2.0
Blue Jays 9 8 5 1.8
Padres 3 9 2 1.5
Rays 7 8 5 1.33
Twins 8 6 6 1.29
Rockies 9 2 7 1.29
Orioles 5 13 4 1.25
Cubs 8 7 7 1.14
Multi-Team 15 15 14 1.07
Nationals 9 5 9 1.00
Phillies 8 3 10 0.80
Pirates 10 3 13 0.77
Indians 5 9 7 0.71
Cardinals 7 7 10 0.70
Yankees 3 14 5 0.60
Royals 9 4 16 0.56
Angels 5 8 9 0.56
Astros 6 6 11 0.55
Mariners 5 4 13 0.38
Dodgers 3 11 9 0.33
Brewers 3 8 9 0.33
Red Sox 5 4 16 0.31
Giants 3 12 10 0.30
Braves 3 12 10 0.27
White Sox 2 1 17 0.12
Diamondbacks 1 7 12 0.08
Rangers 1 9 13 0.08
Marlins 1 3 21 0.05
Minimum 1000 PA from Player 2014-2017
Minimum 400 PA single season to be included





 

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Dominikk85member
6 years ago

I think that staying off the ground is good but I think the effect is mostly at high grounder rates above 45%. once you get under 40 the gains are diminishing fast and might even come at a cost of BABIP.

for example the 35 and under group has a 115 wRC+ with a .284 BABIP, the 35 to 40 group has a 116 wRC+ and a .300 BABIP and the 40 to 45 group has a 111 wRC+ and also .300 BABIP. at 45 to 50 the wRC+ is 108 (and the babip is 320) among qualified hitters in 2017 (the qualified thing of course skews the average since the worse bench players are taken out of the equation, the average among qualified hitters to date this year actually is 109 so the 45 to 50 group is below average.)

but overall there doesn’t seem to be that much difference between 35 and up to like 43% or so. it gets really bad if you get to more extreme grounder profiles above 45%.

If I would work with a young hitting prospect I would work with him towards grounder rates of 40% or under. more extreme than that doesn’t seem to bring an extra benefit.

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Jim Melichar
6 years ago
Reply to  Dominikk85

Agreed on these points. There’s also only players with certain power/exit velocities that could even attempt to switch profiles – Kole Calhoun seems like an obvious choice (to me).

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John Autin
6 years ago

Interesting topic worth a lot more discussion.

Just one little note on the Cubans: I wonder if that’s a significant “nationalist” difference, per se, or something more broadly cultural. For instance, I found these trajectory splits for 4 countries of origin, using B-R data for players with 1,000 career PAs who have played this year (unweighted averages, as % of non-bunt batted balls):

Cuba: 48.6% GB, 27.5% FB, 23.9% LD (11 players)
Venezuela: 46.6% GB, 29.1% FB, 24.3% LD (36 players)
Dominican: 46.2% GB, 30.3% FB, 23.6% LD (30 players)
USA: 43.7% GB, 32.2% FB, 24.1% LD (194 players)

All 4 groups have very similar LD%. The USA-born have a significantly lower GB% than the other 3 countries. And as the Cuban group is just 11 players, it’s quite possible their excess GB% over Venezuela & D.R. is just noise.

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Jim Melichar
6 years ago
Reply to  John Autin

John, a friend of mine said that he believes this could be due to the playing surfaces in these countries (dirt/gravel infields) so that when they are learning to play, it’s more advantageous to hit the ball on the ground. I have no first-hand knowledge of this fact, so it would all be conjecture coming from me.

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Dominikk85member
6 years ago
Reply to  John Autin

That is interesting. Not sure if it is intent or the way their swings work with the way mlb pitchers pitch (maybe their swing works better for high pitches while mlb pitchers mostly pitch down -just a theory).

But I is sticking out that many Cubans hit too many grounders. Moncada also might need to work on that.

An exception is cespedes who has a pretty extreme FB profile but the Mets generally are probably the organisation who has targeted that profile the most out of all clubs.

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YKnotDisco
6 years ago

Tommy Pham doesn’t qualify for your list (794 PA) but could definitely benefit from more lift. His career GB% is just over 50%. His HR/FB is 25.8%. If he met your 1000 PA minimum, his HR/FB rate would rank 3rd in all of baseball. Trailing only Stanton and Domingo Santana.

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Jim Melichar
6 years ago
Reply to  YKnotDisco

I’m torn on Pfam. Need to dig deeper. His HR/FB is an outlier this year.

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YKnotDisco
6 years ago
Reply to  Jim Melichar

You can get a good sense of fly ball and ground ball rate with a month or two of data. Using the career 478 BIP he has accumulated – he can’t fool us to much with his batted ball mix. With that in mind, this season his HR/FB% is only 1% higher than his career rate, so I don’t see this season as much of an outlier (from his norm). I do expect that rate to drop with more BIP but not enough to change my mind about him benefiting from hitting more FB.

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Jim Melichar
6 years ago
Reply to  YKnotDisco

Well we still only have about about one seasons worth of games for Pham. I don’t know many players who have a true talent level of 25-26% HR/FB. I mean even a guy like Arenado is at something like 18% (going off memory). IIRC Cespedes might have one around 20%. There is just a lot of year to year variation in that stat. Both these things have me hesitant to buy into Pham at his current rates.

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YKnotDisco
6 years ago
Reply to  Jim Melichar

I’m not sold on him maintaining 25% either. I don’t have to squint too hard to see ~20% though. If his batted ball profile doesn’t change, that makes it much more likely. Take Domingo Santana for example, he is 2nd behind Stanton. Do you think his true talent level is ~27%? Probably not, but its a lot easier for him to run a high percentage because of the few FB he hits.

Keep in my mind – extra base hits can come from FB too. Just because it didn’t result in a HR doesn’t mean it wasn’t a productive BIP.

His Avg FB/LD EV is 93.9. That’s tied with Mike Trout and Rhys Hoskins (among others). They benefit more from having a higher avg launch angle than Pham does.

This is all a long way to say what the original comment suggested: I believe he could benefit more from not hitting the ball on the ground ~50% of the time.

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Jim Melichar
6 years ago
Reply to  YKnotDisco

You make excellent points. Sometimes I forget if I’m having a baseball or fantasy baseball conversation, too. So if we’re just talking about the baseball player, yes, Tommy Pham has done great things. Even if I regress his HR/FB back to 20%, he’s still going to be something like a .280/.380/.460 player which is super valuable. As David Laurila reported from Pham’s mouth this week, the best thing he did was stop striking out and put a ton more balls in play. That’s the quickest (and most difficult) way to break out. If Nick Castellanos (yes, I’m in love with his bat) could do that, he’d already be on his way to becoming Nolan Arenado.

I’m actually not sure if he should stop hitting groundballs or not. Over two years, he’s hitting nearly .300 on groundballs. I’d really love someone to define the trade-off math explicitly. I think we’re dancing around it, but close to defining it.

Domingo, it’s easier to make the argument when he only hits .250 on ground balls. For Pham the trade-off is higher.

But either way, Pham and Domingo are both falling into that special class of hitters that are deadly line-drive guys. Anything above 25% line drives is elite.

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YKnotDisco
6 years ago
Reply to  Jim Melichar

From the FG glossary:

A line drive produces 1.26 runs per out, while fly balls produce 0.13 runs per out and ground balls produce 0.05 runs per out. In other words, batters want to hit lots of line drives and fly balls, while pitchers generally want to cause batters to hit ground balls.

Pham is definitely giving the pitchers what they want, as far as hitting it on the ground. That nearly .300 you mention, those GB have produced an wRC+ of 60 vs an wRC+ of 279 from FB. But what if he went from 50% GB to 45% GB? It’d lower his BABIP (.359), but it would potentially produce much more damage caused by extra base hits.

LD rates usually take much more time to establish than FB/GB tendencies, but Santana has the better LD% of the two. His career rate is 26.2. Thats nearly the same as his FB%. Pham checks in at 22.6%

I think we can both agree that LD are the most effective. But look at FB vs GB again. FB have almost three times the value of GB.

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Jim Melichar
6 years ago
Reply to  YKnotDisco

Yes, we’re in agreement on all of these things. If Santana’s true talent level was 26.2% he’d rank second behind only Freddie Freeman (28.6% LD) over the 2014-2017 time frame. And just ahead of guys like Headley, Mauer, Belt, Castellanos, Adrian Gonzalez, Pagan, LeMahieu, Votto, Miguel Cabrera and the aforementioned Daniel Murphy.

If Santana could adjust in the way that Murphy did, from ~43% GB to ~35% GB and hold onto all his line drives, that would be an amazing outcome. However the biggest gain in the short term might just be reducing his K% like Pham did.

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Dominikk85member
6 years ago

I think it is also important how narrow your batted ball distribution is. The batted balls are always distributed somewhat on a bell curve around the average launch angle but a player with very good bat control could have a narrower band.

A player that elevates more will shift a larger share of his distribution to angles above 30 degrees which are very bad especially with fringy power. That means elevating the LA could lead to more infield fly balls and also high outfield flyballs which are very bad for the babip.

But if you take daniel murphy for example he elevates everything but doesn’t have a really high fb rate and his pop up rate is low too (at least absolute pop ups on fly balls it isn’t that low). Generally line drive rate is not super stable year to year but murphy seems to have so good bat control that he can maintain a high 20s line drive rate. That means he avoids grounders but still stays in the line drive and low fly ball (20-30 degrees) range which is very productive.

But this skill is pretty rare, most have a wider distribution (swing angle has an effect on elevation but with the round bat it is also where you make contact on the ball which is dependent on intent but also bat control). These hitters might benefit from a more average launch angle (let’s say 12 degree LA or 43% grounders) since that means they avoid getting too much of their curve into the very bad extreme ends (bigger than 40 degrees or smaller than minus 5 or so – that lower end is also important, those minus 5 degree grounders have a babip of like 400 but at minus 10 or lower it is like 200 or so).

What makes murphy so special is that he has a very high average LA of around 17 degrees but without getting the punishment of pop ups and high warning track fly outs (35 to 45 degrees) that other guys with that LA have.murphy basically hits high line drives all day long without much variation of that. Murphy doesn’t even have a super low pop up rate on fly balls but he doesn’t hit that many fly balls to begin with (his fb rate is only slightly above average despite a super low grounder rate, he hits so many liners).

An exception might be the huge power guys. For example Gallo has that extreme fly ball profile. He is paying in pop ups but the high outfield flies are not as bad for him as they would be let’s say for altuve or murphy. For the latter guys those are easy outs but Gallo is so strong that those high 30 degrees balls and sometimes even 40 degree fly balls go out too. There is still some loss in babip but the homers make up for that.

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Jim Melichar
6 years ago
Reply to  Dominikk85

You touched on a number of very important topics that I’m aware of but didn’t cover (for simplicity).

The first was the total distribution of launch angles. Your comments on Murphy highlight this.

The second is the stability in line drive rates. Ageeed, which is why I was using a 3+ season sample size to look for their true talent levels on line drive, ground ball and fly ball rates (again, rather than break this down st the LA level I simplified). Murphy, Freeman, Votto, Castellanos … these guys are line drive freaks.

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Giolito's changeup
6 years ago

Jim,

Thank you for sharing all of your research. For us who are further behind on the learning curve, this article was thought provoking.

Look forward to reading more of your research.

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