This has been the year “launch angle” entered the mainstream baseball lexicon, with media members, fans and players alike poring over Statcast data and discovering its many wonders. What has followed has been described as a flyball revolution, with a growing number of players, driven by the new data, eschewing ground balls altogether and focusing on lifting the ball - with authority - every trip to the plate. As a result, the leaguewide average launch angle - a data point that has only been available since 2015 - has risen in each of the past two seasons, a period which also happens to coincide with a historic rise in home run rates.
There is perhaps no bigger evangelist for this movement than Toronto Blue Jays third baseman Josh Donaldson, who has tweeted, “Just say NO . . . to groundballs,” and who has stated flatly that any ball he hits on the ground, even one that goes for a base hit, was an accident. Among the other hitters whose recent successes can be traced, either admittedly or anecdotally, to keeping the ball off the ground are Justin Turner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Daniel Murphy of the Washington Nationals.
But there is also a dark side to launch angle, which has revealed itself in less-obvious ways. As some observers pointed out in our story last week, the flyball revolution is not for everyone. But it’s even worse than that: in the wrong hands, a higher launch angle not only won’t help a hitter, but it could actually damage him.
That observation may have been made first by Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto, who told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “Everyone tells the good stories [of players who have increased production by focusing on lifting the ball], but there’s a lot of [crappy] stories of guys who are wasting their time trying things.”
And according to a study by FiveThirtyEight.com writer Rob Arthur, published last month, it is “almost exactly a toss-up” as to whether hitters who increased their launch angle year over year would get better or worse. “Overall,” the story said, “the correlation between a batter’s changing flyball rate and his subsequent change in production is nonexistent.” Anecdotally, at least, it seems some players who have altered their swings to lift the ball more frequently can end up killing their own production.
As Exhibit A in this argument, Arthur held up Jason Heyward of the Chicago Cubs - a flyball happy squad that championed the phrase, “There’s no slug on the ground.” Heyward’s precipitous (and much-discussed) drop in production in 2016 (from a .797 OPS in 2015 to a .631 in 2016) was accompanied by a corresponding rise in his average launch angle, from 4.7 degrees in 2015 to 10.5 in 2016.
For Heyward, in other words, there was no slug in the air. (His production in 2017, for what it’s worth, has been roughly halfway between 2015’s high and 2016’s low, in terms of OPS, while his average launch angle has continued to creep upward, to 12.3 percent this year.)
It can be informative to play with the numbers and see if other former offensive stars whose production fell off might be unwitting victims of the flyball revolution. Pirates outfielder Andrew McCutchen? Yeah, maybe. Back in 2015, when he was an all-star with an .889 OPS, his average launch angle was 13.9 degrees. But in 2016, when his launch angle shot up to 16.0 degrees, he lost 121 points of OPS. Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez? Yep. While his OPS (a career-low .699) is down 115 points over 2016, his average launch angle is up, from 9.3 degrees to 13.5.
It isn’t difficult to understand where the problem lies. While it is possible to identify a “sweet spot” for home runs at between 25 and 35 degrees of launch angle, that also requires an exit velocity off the bat of around 95 mph or greater. A flyball struck at a lesser exit velocity is simply a pop up.
“You can get caught up in it,” Orioles hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh said. “You never want to impose a higher launch angle on someone who’s not a power guy . . . You could be asking a guy to be doing something that works against them.”
Earlier this season, Zimmerman took a stab at explaining to The Post’s Chelsea Janes the problem with going to the plate trying to alter your swing to drive the ball in the air:
“Good luck trying to hit the bottom of the ball when everyone throws 95 to 100 miles per hour,” Zimmerman said. “You’re either going to foul everything straight back if you’re lucky, or pop up, or you’re going to miss. At least I would. I think it’s more of a mind-set. I think there’s obviously proof to the data, but it’s really easy to sit there and say, ‘Every ball that goes out at a 35-degree launch angle and squared up at 95 miles per hour.’ For me, if I start trying to control all those things, I start trying to do too much and think too much. It’s always been tough enough to just hit the ball hard. If you can do that, good things happen.”
Zimmerman clearly doesn’t want to be a poster boy for the flyball revolution - nor should he be. While his 2017 turnaround is remarkable - with a 1.121 OPS that represents a nearly 500-point jump from his career-low .642 in 2016 - his average launch angle has crept up only slightly, from 9.0 last year to 10.1 this.
It’s great that Donaldson and his band of no-grounders hard-liners have been spreading the gospel of the flyball revolution to all who will listen. But like any weapon, in the wrong hands it is as dangerous as it is effective.
