Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 678: Early Statcast Leaders, Laggards, and Lessons

Episode Date: May 15, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to Rob Arthur about which batters have had hard luck or good fortune so far, according to Statcast.

Work it harder, better, faster, stronger. Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger. More than ever, hour after hour, work is never over. Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger. Good morning and welcome to episode 678 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, by sam miller of baseball prospectus hello hello shall i introduce our guest i guess real quick somebody had a uh i don't know if you'd call it a conspiracy theory but suggested the alternate explanation of cory kluber being pulled with 18ks was to protect bob feller's cleveland legacy slash record do you uh

should we just agree that that was it? I don't think I'm buying that one. No, obviously I'm not either, but it is compelling. It's, it's compelling in a way. Like it's obviously not.

I mean, I think it's compelling in a way that I wouldn't consider it for a moment, except just to consider it as a, as a thing. Like, like, I don't think it's true, but it's fun to think about it being true.

Yeah. It would be interesting if they didn't let the 21 strikeout game dictate their decision but they did let that dictate their decision yeah yeah because you do get the feeling that if bob feller were so alive he would not i don't know this if he were alive i i would have probably done that because he was kind of scary right exactly he is he would have really been unhappy like i think he would have been very unhappy that the that this was like i i don't get the feeling that he would be like slap you on your back and say good job better you know better that you have it than i do like i think that he would be he would be fuming and and god bless him i think

that's why he was bob fowler yeah all So our guest, we just may listen to that silently, is Rob Arthur, now of FiveThirtyEight. Hey, Rob. Hey. How are non-subscription-based comment sections treating you? Wonderful. Yeah. So we did a show just about a month ago, a little over a month ago, when the first StatCast information started seeping out, and we talked about what we would want to use it for, what it might be useful

for, and now we've built up a little bit of a sample, and we can start using it for those things. So you wrote an article for FiveThirtyEight. It is up today on Friday. And you talked a little bit about this batted ball data and some of the people who it has revealed something about that we wouldn't otherwise know. So I guess the first relevant thing that you always have to talk about at this time of year is how quickly these things mean something and this seems to be more quickly than most other things how quickly yeah so um yeah this is all driven by the fact that ops and obp and the other statistics stabilize much much more slowly in hundreds of uh plate appearances so batted ball velocity i found out stabilizes in its view as 15 batted balls so

really really quickly and we're already well past 15 for most players so we have plenty of data to say something about batted ball velocity for many people and so what does batted ball velocity correlate with or what does it tell us now that we've had some little sample of performance and we can look at who's hitting it hard and who's having success when hitting it, what is the relationship between those two things? Yeah, so pretty much the harder the ball goes off the bat, the better the hitter is in every conceivable way. So the ball is more likely to fall for hits. They're more likely to fall for extra base hits. The player is even more likely to walk in other

plate appearances, obviously, just presumably as a function of the fact that they have increased power. And so it's overall what I chose to correlate it with was OPS. And basically every additional mile per hour of average batted ball velocity equates to an 18 point increase in OPS, which reflects that sort of every batted ball velocity is good for everything. And what's the spread, roughly? What is a hard hit ball or a hard hit average? And what is the opposite of that? So the averages right now tend to be between about 80 and 100. And they've kind of compressed, as you might imagine, as we got more data. But yeah, right now, the worst hitters tend to be between 80 and 85

and the best between 95 and 100. By the way, if you had made that joke about the unpaywalled comments at Grantland, Ben would have edited it out. That's the power of this. He gets to make you look slightly unhappy with your publication. There are no comments at Grantland. I'm not unhappy. I didn't say I was unhappy. I think they're great. So when you say that, I mean, obviously it makes sense. It would not make any sense at all if batted ball velocity did not correlate to increased

offense in the aggregate. But I haven't dug into this stuff yet, to be honest. I've read what you and Ben have been writing and other people, but I'm fairly uninitiated into it. So it is true that a line drive that is hit 95 miles an hour is going to obviously, obviously, indisputably be more likely to be hit than a line drive that goes 94 miles an hour or 84 miles an hour. However, a line drive that goes 84 miles an hour might be more likely to be a hit than, for instance, a fly ball that goes 94 miles an hour and is caught six feet in front of the warning track, or a ground ball that goes 94 miles an hour, and I don't know what the BABF is

on a hard hit ground ball, but presumably less than 650 or whatever a typical line drive is. And then similarly, direction is significant if you're a left-handed pole hitter who they load up the infield with. Well, almost every ball you pull is going to be hit harder than almost every ball you take the other way. And yet, if you can take it the other way, it's probably a lot more likely to be a hit just because of the direction. So, are we controlling for that stuff yet? So, the short answer is no. The long answer is you raise a couple different good points. The long answer is you raise a couple

different good points. So one is that for a given batted ball, more velocity isn't necessarily good. There's like a kind of a troughs and valley kind of shape to the graph if you plot it where it's good to hit it hard, but if you hit it too hard, then it'll go to an outfielder. And then if you hit it harder still, it'll be a home run, right? So it goes up and down essentially. There's also the other variables that you brought up like the direction and the angle. And those data are actually in the StatCast feed that's coming off of LLBAM. But I didn't include them in the analysis that I did for the article, because it seems like the data is not quite trustworthy yet. So for example, about 95% of the angle measurements, so the horizontal angle, whether

it's going down or up in the air, it's like fly ball right now, about, I think it's 90% of them are zero, which doesn't really make sense. So I think that they're still working out some of the kinks in the data. And in terms of the angle and direction in particular, it seemed like it wasn't quite trustworthy. So I chose just to exclude it. There's been, I mean, like at the beginning of the year, it was like appearing in the feed and then it was disappearing from the feed. And then at Baseball Savant, at least where you can look this stuff up,

it's, I think at this point, it's just being like scraped from the MLB game day pages where it'll tell you how hard a ball was hit. And sometimes it'll tell you how hard a ball was hit and sometimes it'll tell you how far it was hit and sometimes maybe it'll tell you the angle but often it won't tell you the angle like it's very inconsistent right now it's not giving us everything for every batted ball right yeah so we definitely have to take this with a grain of salt because um yeah there's a lot of batted balls that it seems like it's not tracking.

And there's also, it seems like, some technical issues where Jeff Sullivan wrote a really good article where he looked at some of the odder, more outlier numbers coming from the StatCast data. And for instance, there was a bunt from Anthony Rizzo that was recorded at greater than 100 miles per hour off the bat. And that seemed kind of unbelievable. So there's things like that. But it seems to wash out, at least in the aggregate, and I wouldn't necessarily expect there would be biases for a given player who's played at many different ballparks and so on. Right. Yeah, so there are nitpicks and everything, and if you are predisposed to not like new information,

you can come up with all kinds of reasons why this is not perfect but on the whole you found that there is a relationship between how hard you hit it and how well you do so can i real quick interrupt one last thing do you uh do most line drives go harder than most ground balls go harder than most fly balls? Like, is there something about the angle that you hit it that affects the typical velocity? Like, is a hard struck grounder generally less hard struck than a hard struck fly ball or vice versa? Do you know that? I haven't actually looked into that. I think that the line drives would be the hardest on average.

So, like, in other words, so like a hitter who's a you know a power hitter a guy who's you know like got an uppercut in his swing and is going to hit home runs he might actually have like a lower exit velocity than like a howie kendrick type line drive hitter conceivably even though he's doing more productive offense yeah i think that's very possible i mean if you think about it from a physics perspective right right, that like the squarest way to hit the ball is like at the straight angle. So the more like the more it goes up or down, the less energy is going to be put into the ball. So you can see the batted ball velocity potentially falling off because of that. I can look up the average batted ball velocity by batted ball type as we are talking here and get you an answer on

that at least as we discuss things so the peg of this post is guys who are possibly underrated or guys who are possibly overrated or underperforming or overperforming based on their just raw stats that we're used to seeing and their batted ball velocities. So give us some guys, give us some good fantasy regression slash rebound candidates based on this, because that's all anyone cares about. Right. Well, okay, so on the list of overachievers, one of the ones that was really interesting that popped out was Dee Gordon, who has like a pretty poor batted ball velocity of 83 miles per hour on average.

And he's right now doing extremely well offensively, right? I think he's still in the lead in the fan graphs war, and he's got an OPS of, I think, in the 900s. And his batted ball velocity would suggest that it's going to be a lot lower than that. And his batted ball velocity would suggest that it's going to be a lot lower than that. Now, D. Gordon's a little bit tricky because if you just regress batted ball velocity on OPS, you're not taking into account the other skills that a hitter can have. And one of the skills that D. Gordon is really great at is he's really fast. So it makes sense that he might overachieve his batted ball velocity predicted OPS,

but it seems like not to quite the extent that he has, which is basically a 350 point difference in his predicted OPS based on batted ball velocity versus what he's actually done. Yeah, so right. So eventually when you build up your model where you want to estimate how good a guy's OPS will be based on his batted ball characteristics, you would also want to factor in his speed somehow because if he's a really fast guy he can hit some weak ground balls and still get on base more often than someone else can so it would have to be a little more complex okay it's somewhat interesting because gordon was last year gordon had a pretty season. He was basically a league average hitter, and I think a lot of people considered that something that he wouldn't be able to replicate,

that there was nothing in his history that suggested he was even capable of that. And so you're saying that he's, you know, speed not accounted for. He's 350 points above where his batted ball velocity should be. And in fact, he's like 275. So maybe if his speed is worth 75 points of expected OPS, it might actually be that this is confirmed that last year is exactly what he is, I wonder. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm not sure how much to credit his speed, honestly, because it would kind of interact with his batted ball velocity. So maybe he's really good.

He doesn't need a high batted ball velocity. In fact, maybe he thrives on sort of weakly hitting the ball and then just beating out the grounders to third or something. It would be interesting to see whether his own at-bat to at-bat offensive production correlates to batted ball velocity or if the troughs and valleys are different for him. Yeah. They certainly would have been. I don't know if they certainly would have been,

but it would make sense that if, like, in Ichiro's prime, that you might have seen, like, all of his worst batted ball velocities, you know, producing, you know, a third of his hits because he was just doing that little thing. Right, and yeah, I could definitely see that. And it could also be something with one of the variables that I didn't capture, like, the angle or the direction. Like, maybe he's just really good at slapping the ball to places where the defenders aren't somehow.

And who else is on the potentially overperforming list? So it's a few guys that have high OPSs that I expect to still have high OPSs, but perhaps not quite as high as they were. So like Adrian Gonzalez is another one, just because essentially his OPS was like 1.16 in the data that I have. So he's really good, it seems to be this year, and his batted ball velocity is sort of in the top half, but it's not quite 1.16 OPS good. It's more like 0.9. So he's going to regress a lot, but he's regressing back to really good instead of just being like super humanly good. And then there's guys like Steven Vogt, Anthony Rizzo, and Michael Stakis. And to varying degrees, I'm, you know, those guys,

I'm a little bit less certain about because again, we're dealing with gaps in the data. And one of the gaps is like I mentioned the angle And those guys all tend to be fly ball hitters, and I wonder if they're getting something out of that that isn't being captured. And on the other end of the spectrum? Yeah, so on the other end, the guy that really pops out is Chase Utley. And a lot has been said about Chase Utley so far this season. He's doing really terribly. His OPS when I wrote the article was 389, which is awful, and he had

a 115 BABF, right? So a lot of other factors suggested that he's really doing terribly, but his batted ball velocity is sort of middle of the pack, a little bit below average but not so bad. So he's predicted to have something like a 700 OPS, which is much, much, much better than how he had been doing. He's a really interesting contrast with some of the other batted ball data that we have, like based on BIS. So some of that data had suggested that he was hitting fewer line drives of potentially making weaker contact, but that's not what the stack has data says. So it's kind of like a contrast with those older sources. How would you expect that to happen very often? I mean, we have some things.

I mean, we've had batted ball type. We've had BABIP. We've had at least some people have access to like well-hit average from inside edge, that sort of thing. Or I guess BIS has that now also. So would you expect those to be, I mean, if you factor in all of that stuff together, a pretty good proxy for this new stuff we have? You know, I'm not really sure.

We haven't been able to compare it until just now. And so I really have no idea how it works out. I could see that it might be over perhaps. So I think the more data that you had, the more likely they would be to converge, right? So over a full season, maybe they're more likely to converge, but perhaps over only a few hundred at bats or like a hundred for Utley, they might be much more likely to be different. And I'm not sure which one to trust yet.

My gut instinct is that the data that's collected objectively from the cameras is more likely to be right. But I think Utley's sort of an interesting test case. We'll see whether his performance will come back up or maybe it won't. Going by the BIS data, he's really hitting the ball less hard, according to them. So if they're right, then he's really falling off. All right, and who else is potentially underperforming? Chris Carter's one of them. Mike Napoli's one of them.

I think Rene Rivera and Matt Joyce. And I think all these guys, you know, in a certain sense, it was all for naught because all these guys really have low BABIP. That's one thing that united them. So you probably could have told that they were underperforming just based on their BABIP. But this maybe gives you a little bit more confidence that they are going to come back and they're not just, they're not truly having weak contact. I mean, we've occasionally heard some sort of vague comments from teams that allude to this information and there's been some more slightly more open

comments from brian cashman recently talking about how his stat guys kept telling him to sign chris young sign chris young because chris young was evidently hitting the ball hard and was not having results and Chris Young has hit incredibly well for the Yankees so far do you think there are a lot of guys like that I mean I'm asking you to speculate I know but are there like what what quantity of diamonds in the rough are there here do you think that that we would totally miss them because if this i mean so the batted ball stuff stabilizes very quickly so how quickly should we expect the results to mirror the batted ball stuff like how how weird would it be for a guy to go for a full season and have his batted ball stats and his results disagree by a lot? Yeah, that's a really good question. One I don't have the answer to. I mean, I think it's

something that we're going to find out, right? But I mean, one of the possibilities I bring up in the article is that maybe these guys will see their batted ball velocities go to meet their OPSs instead of vice versa. It seems like, just based on logic, that because the batted ball velocity is sort of the cause of good hitting as opposed to vice versa, that their OPSs would rise or fall to meet their batted ball velocities. But it's not necessarily the case. And of course, you can see some guys, maybe if they're struggling in slumps like Chase Utley, maybe they change their approach and that causes their OPS to fall. So, you know, I'm not really sure. And as to the first part of your question,

whether there are a lot of guys sort of diamonds in the rough, I would suspect there's not that many because all of the front offices have this data and have had this data. And I would think that they would be sort of on top of it if there's a bunch of people like Chris Young that are floating around that are actually really good hitters and their OPSs just haven't matched it. But, you know, maybe some front offices don't take it into account or don't put much credence in it, then that would be possible. It does seem like, so I don't know if you guys saw this, the New York Times wrote about this, and there was this amazing quote by Ruben Amaro Jr. Did you guys see this?

No. Okay. All right. I'll just tell you. All right, so they talked to a bunch of front office types about batted ball velocity. And mostly it was GMs going like, yeah, it's really good. And yeah, I like it. And yeah, let's do that. And then it's Ruben Amaro Jr. has a more traditional approach. He said he liked to watch batting practice up close next to the cage.

That way he could hear the sound of the ball off the bat, see the trajectory, and determine if a player is swinging well. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that, he said. So it does seem like this is kind of the first... I mean, if you think about it, batted ball velocity creates this whole new stat. It creates a whole new world of stats. You could judge a player without looking at the results at all. And there really hasn't been since, you know, 2000 or so when, you know, we kind of got somewhat sophisticated in what we looked at at a player's offense.

There really hasn't been a real divide between what teams are looking at with players. There's like a little bit here and there, and sometimes you see it with framing or whatever, or a team will decide what to prioritize. But basically, they've all been working with the same stats, the same back of the baseball cards, more or less. And now you've got this world where one team is going to look at this and have a completely different profile of players than Ruben Amaro is going to have. And I don't know if Amaro is the one outlier here,

or if there are 10 GMs who are kind of resistant to this, but they're basically getting completely different views of players based on this. And I'm sort of surprised that in the last couple years, as some teams have, I mean they've had this data already, some teams have maybe leaned on it and some teams have ignored it. I'm sort of surprised we haven't seen like a lot more trades

with, like you would think that at this point there would be a lot of teams that would just be going to Ruben Amaro and being like, man, crack of the bat, sure sounds lousy on Utley, huh? And like seeing if they could get him for a bag of sunflower seeds. And so I don't know, I'm kind of surprised that there hasn't been a little bit more of teams taking advantage of other teams

or at least thinking they're taking advantage of other teams on this stuff. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that this might be a case where the different ways of figuring out the value of a player kind of converge on one another. So, like, for example, with Chase Utley, I'm reading this article with a quote from Ruben Amaro Jr. He says, he's hitting the ball hard. He's just literally the unluckiest person on the planet about Utley. And I think that, like, you know, it doesn't take a lot of ball velocity to figure out that Chase Utley's been getting unlucky. You just need some bad-bip.

Maybe Amaro's way of getting at it is to stand at the batting cage and hear the crack of the bat, but it's going to give him essentially the same information. I think that probably the cases where the batted ball velocity really departs from the conventional information and the line drive rates and all the other things are going to be small in number and so that's maybe one reason why you haven't seen these these departures i wonder if he has every feed from the televised batting practice shows piped into his office and he just sits there silently, closes his eyes, just listens to the quality of contact. I mean, Rob Arthur is the leading academic

when it comes to batted ball cracks, and I'm surprised that the Phillies haven't hired you to run their crack of the bat department. Yeah. I think my numbers are just getting away. I think they can hear it, so they don't need any you have now you've made your own bat crack analysis irrelevant now you have you have moved on to an even better way of doing the same thing so yeah unless the phillies are more interested in your version of it but i have the average batted ball velocities by batted ball type.

So pop-ups, obviously the lowest, 74.9 miles per hour for pop-ups. Ground balls, 85.9. Fly balls, 90.2. And line drives, 93.0. Nice. Yeah. That's about what I would have expected, I think. Yeah.

Maybe I'm a little surprised that there's not more separation between line drives and fly balls. But then again, there are lots of fly balls that are crushed, so I probably shouldn't be. So you didn't really look at team level stuff for this post, but theoretically the same principles should apply. this post but theoretically the same principles should apply like i'm looking at the batted ball velocity averages by team so you have you know the dodgers are by far the best offense in baseball this year and they have the second best batted ball velocity and speaking of the phillies they are the worst offense this year they have the second worst batted ball velocity. But there are also some weird ones. Like the third lowest batted ball velocity this year is the Kansas City Royals,

who have the second best offense in baseball. So what does that say to you? Does that say that they are hitting over their heads? Or is there something with team level batted ball stats that differs from player level? I don't think there should be anything especially different with team level unless one thing I could think of, perhaps is that there are big park adjustments to the batted ball velocity that we haven't been able to work out yet because of the lack of data but if for example the kansas city royals stadium uh is consistently slow in terms of tracking the batted ball velocity then it might be underestimating them and since

they're going to play a majority of their games there or half their games there you know that could be an issue but other than that i mean i would think that it would be a fairly good guide unless there's like i said additional things that that the royals are doing that to outperform their batted ball velocity like they they tend to be faster than the other teams or they tend to be really good at hitting the ball with an angle such that it will you know fall for bloop singles more often i don't. I feel like this should just be added to the stable of stats that you see when a hitter comes to the plate. Like I would want to see this just next to the triple slash line or whatever is there right now. Just put his batted ball velocity on there because we see the pitcher's speed on every pitch just about. And this seems, oh, well, on every pitch just about and this seems oh well that that's another thing that i wanted to ask you about pitchers so your article dealt with hitters how useful is the same thing for pitchers not that

useful it turns out so it's it's kind of interesting that um i did some some modeling some mixed effects modeling kind of the same approach that jonathan judge Harry Pavlidis and others have used at BP before. And I ended up finding that hitters are about six times more responsible for the batted ball velocity for any given batted ball than the pitcher is. So it seems like the hitters kind of do affect the batted ball velocity a lot more than the pitchers. And as a result, with such a small sample that we have, the pitcher batted ball velocity doesn't really correlate very well with like their ERAs or their FIPS or anything like that. It doesn't seem to have much to do with how good they are as pitchers. So it seems like the utility of it is asymmetric. It's much more useful for batters than it is for pitchers. And how useful do you think this would be for fielders for evaluating how good fielders are?

Do you think there would be a big spread in the difficulty of opportunities that fielders are getting that you could kind of suss out with the stat cast stuff? Yeah, so that's another area where I think this could be extremely useful. Because, you know, fielders get relatively few balls. And so if they are, you could see a situation where a particular fielder has just happened to have received a lot of balls that are at high batted ball velocity. And they would be expected to perhaps perform less well on those than a fielder who had seen lower speed balls in their direction. So that seems like another area where it'll be extremely useful. But again, I'm a little bit cautious to apply it there just because of the sample size considerations. Is Bryce Harper going to hit 50 home runs? It seems unlikely to me. Okay. Let's see how his batted ball velocity is doing. You have anything else to ask, Sam? Just want to reinforce that I'm interested in knowing

if Bryce Harper is going to hit the forward. I have him at 88. This is from data from about a week ago. 88? That's not good. 88. That's kind of middle of the pack, I think. Oh, but a week ago. I think it's better now, let's say so. I'm sure it's much better now.

He is now at 90.6 which is uh i don't know he's 58th of hitters who've hit at least 40 balls in play that have been tracked it's pretty good i still don't i mean it just seems to me that that you have to know whether it's a grounder line drive or a fly to determine whether it's been hit hard right you could they're not all the same hard-hittedness like if a guy is a fly ball hitter then it's not you know it's been hit hard, right? They're not all the same hard-hittedness. Like if a guy is a fly ball hitter, then it's going to be different. I don't know. I feel like if you don't know that, you don't know the answer.

You haven't gotten there yet. So I think you're right. So when I put the angle data in there, the regression explains a lot more of the variance. So that suggests that the angle is important. But the caution with using the angle right now is just that we have such incomplete data that I was worried it would mess things up more.

So I think you're absolutely right in that the angle's a big part of this. But until we get the proper angle data for everyone, I was a little bit hesitant to add it in. And I mean, the names make sense. At the top of the hard hit balls list is Jack Peterson. Jack Peterson actually is like two miles per hour above everyone else, which is kind of crazy.

But, you know, then it's John Carlos Stanton is number two. It would be weird if he were not number two. So they seem to kind of accord with who you would think it would be even without seeing the angle but theoretically like you could have a guy who just and i was wondering about this when i wrote about the astros a couple weeks ago but theoretically you could have a guy who showed up at the top of these leaderboards, but he hit everything to dead center on the fly or something, right? And he just had the highest batted ball velocity, but everything he hit was caught on the warning track in center field.

Would you expect that there will be guys like that who are just outliers every year? They'll be at the top of some list and they'll be next to all the really good players but they won't actually be good players and it'll be because of something like that yeah i do think that'll be the case i think it'll be the case especially with guys that get shifted a lot and have really predictable tendencies with where they tend to hit the ball um like you mentioned and And so in those cases, they could hit the ball really well, but as long as there's a defender standing right there

because they always hit the ball there, then it won't really do very much good. So I think in the long run where we'd like to go with this is developing an expected value of each batted ball that's independent of what actually happened, but sort of takes into account not just the velocity but also the angle and the direction and then maybe even take it a step further and is this guy shifted all the time and he hits it into that shift then it's probably not

going to be very valuable and then so then you can get like a really good sort of expected ops that was calculated for each play as opposed to just on average. I'm trying to figure out how useful this would be for positioning. I imagine somewhat useful, but like if you had your old-fashioned spray chart and you know roughly with, you know, decent precision where the balls are being hit, and maybe this is a little bit more precise, but how much extra information do you think knowing how hard the ball was hit in addition to where it was hit? How much would you shift your guys based on the speed if you already know the location? think if you already knew the location but a guy consistently hit it hard there you could tell your your guy to take a few steps back right just to give them a little bit more time to react since

they're gonna since the ball is getting there faster right i don't know how much help that would be but potentially i could see it being something that somebody would try or test out you know all right so rob's article is up at 5 38 now you can find all of his articles there which i know makes sam sad as the editor of baseball perspectives but we are happy that more people are reading him at 5 38 and you can find him on twitter at no little plans with underscores between the words thank you for coming coming on again, Rob. Thanks for having me. Okay, so that is it for us this week. We will welcome your emails for next week

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