Examining Line Drives to Spot Breakout Powers Hitters
We look at batted ball data to pick out a handful of hitters that could see expanded power production in 2024
Quick analysis piece here today. This could have been a Twitter thread but I felt it best to expand things here.
We want to find breakout power hitters. This is harder to do nowadays since everybody has knowledge and access to very useful data. Barrel rate going public and being more commonly used wised up the field quite a bit in spotting players that are likely to improve their home run production.
One way I’ve found to potentially spot these guys is to find hitters that are just missing barrels. There’s no commonly cited metric for this.
75% of barrels are fly balls. The other 25% of them are all line drives. You have to hit a line drive very hard and near the top of the angle range to get it to classify as a barrel. The average launch velo of a fly ball barrel is 103.5 miles per hour. For line drives barrels it’s 107.5.
Here is what the Baseball Savant batted ball type classification algorithm looks like:
Ground ball rates and the like for hitters are quite sticky year to year. It’s very rare to see a 50% GB% guy turn into a 40% GB% the next year.
Taking a look at the hitters that reduced their GB% the most between 2022 and 2023:
We see changes over eight points in the GB% Delta column, but the changes in FB% are lesser. It is most common to trade a ground ball for a line drive, because those two outcomes are much more similar than a ground ball and a fly ball.
I’m not making this case very well, so let me just make my point and get to the point of the post.
To get more barrels, we want to get more fly balls. The batted balls that are most likely to turn into fly balls are line drives. It’s not uncommon to see a hitter raise his average launch angle 2-5 degrees from one year to the next, and 2-5 degrees turns plenty of line drives into fly balls. It’s really uncommon to see a hitter raise the angle the 10+ degrees it takes to turn a ground ball into a fly ball.
So our breakout picks will be players with
High line drives rates
High hard-hit rates on those line drives
Simple enough, right!
The average line drive rate is 23.9%. The highest LD rates last year:
Riley Adams 34%
Jared Triolo 33%
Alex Kirilloff 31%
Donovan Solano 32%
Rougned Odor 32%
Lowest:
A.J. Pollock 13%
Josh Donaldson 13%
Joey Votto 13%
Luis Urias 14%
Rodolfo Castro 14%
One standard deviation in line drive rate is 3%. So let’s add 3% to the average (27%) and filter to those players.
The average hard hit rate of a line drive is 54%.
Hard Hit Rates
Overall: 39%
Ground Balls: 34%
Line Drives: 54%
Fly Balls: 44%
Line drives are much more often hit hard (read: above 95mph), and that’s just because of the physics of the swing. If a hitter hits a line drive, that means they hit in the center of the barrel of the bat. The line drive category itself eliminates the mis-hits where the ball is topped or popped up.
So let’s that 54% and push it up to 60%, and filter:
So now we have a list of 13 hitters with
At least 27% of their batted balls being line drives
At least 60% of those line drives being hit above 95mph
If you’ve been reading the team previews, you already know that we’ve picked out guys like Jarren Duran and Riley Greene as power breakouts in 2023, so that leads even more credence to that theory.
Maikel Garcia is a guy I wasn’t very interested in, but maybe I should upgrade that here. The 48.5% GB% is high, and that’s what kept me away from him, but what I didn’t realize was how crazy low that FB% was. 18% is insanely low, and it should come up next year. So if he take three points from GB% into LD% and then five points from LD% into FB%, he should see a big increase in homers. My model, which uses Statcast data, is the highest on his home run total, but still comes up with just 10 bangers:
Lots of these other names just don’t have starting jobs, so they can be ignored. Those would be Pratto, Freeman, Rivera, Calhoun, and probably Garrett as well (he’s currently hurt). Nobody is sleeping on Bryce Harper or Corey Seager, of course, so the other “breakouts” we haven’t mentioned yet would be Jordan Westburg and Michael Harris II. Harris isn’t cheap, but yeah Westburg falls quite a bit in drafts and is interesting as a guy that will be just 25 this year.
Let’s loosen up the criteria a bit more. We’ll keep that same 27% LD%, but back the hard-hit rate to the league average 54%.
As a Pirate fan, it hurts me to see Endy Rodriguez here knowing he’s out for the year already. Some other names I pick out based on their playing time prospects and other things (I’m not going to talk up Jarred Kelenic because of the 32% K%).
Ezequiel Duran (playing time questions but with Seager hurt he could be in there early)
Josh Jung
Anthony Rendon (maybe there’s still hope…)
Alec Burleson (if he can find a role)
Zack Gelof (30-30 upside?)
And hey, you can take the data and go whatever other ways you want with it. That’s what I’m here for.
But that wraps it up here, I’ve gotta get back to work on the team and position previews!