How Sticky is Sweet Spot Rate?
How Sticky is Sweet Spot Rate?
A look at the sweet spot rates. What is it? How sticky is it? Which hitters are set for regression in 2025?
What Is Sweet Spot Rate?
It’s very simple. A “sweet spot” ball in play is one hit between 8 and 32 degrees.
It’s good to hit balls in this range.
AVG & SLG by Sweet Spot Yes/No
YES: .570 AVG, 1.017 SLG
NO: .186 AVG, .252 SLG
What’s It Look Like?
The distribution from 2024:
Minimum: 23.1% (Johan Rojas)
25th Percentile: 32.3%
50th Percentile: 35.0%
75th Percentile: 37.8%
Maximum: 47.8% (Connor Norby)
Here’s what the histogram looks like for the league leader, Connor Norby:
And here’s the histogram for the league’s worst hitter in this regard, Johan Rojas:
Is It Sticky?
The question of stickiness is: how well can we predict what will happen next year in a stat if we know what happened this year in the same stat.
So I looked at the numbers going back to 2021. I found every hitter with at least 100 balls in play every season. I found every hitter who had 100+ balls in play in two consecutive seasons, and then put those numbers in a list next to each other.
The Excel file looked like this:
After I had a bunch of numbers (925 in each list), it’s easy to do the correlation and some plotting. The correlation coefficient was 0.397.
The average change was -.4%, less than half of a point. Looking at the average absolute value change, we see a 3.4-point average change (ignoring which direction it went). The biggest change was 14.6 points.
That 0.397 coefficient shows a pretty weak relationship. That means there will be a regression to the mean. 104 times in this sample, a hitter went above a 40% Sweet Spot. Only 11 of those (10.6%) went up the next year. And the reverse is true.
Takeaways
Paywall time! A bunch of names I expect regression from (positive or negative) are below the paywall. Subscribe today to get the full MLB offseason content schedule!