The Wright Brothers HATE Them: How A Local Baseball Team Abandoned the Fly Ball
This is the first time this meme format has appeared on this blog. It won’t be the last.
Note: All stats are as of Thursday 4/15
To be a Baseball Fan is to be a Philosopher
Come for the baseball, stay for… Philosophy?
Premises
Hits are normally required to score runs in baseball
Runs are good in baseball
Pitchers are good at preventing hits (in 2019, 75% at bats failed to produce hits)
Conclusion
It is hard to score runs
Premises
There is one kind of hit that automatically produces at least one run every time
Runs have not stopped being good
Conclusion
That aforementioned hit must be the best hit
Well, my friends, that greatest of all hits is the home run. The dinger. The tater. The bomb. The jack. The round-tripper.
But How Do You Hit Home Runs?
One thing that we all recognize about the home run, is that 99.81% of the time, it does not occur on a ball in play (13 inside the park HR out of 6776 total HR in 2019). One guaranteed way to make sure that you hit a ball in play as opposed to a home run is to hit the ball on the ground. I’m serious, check out this video of every inside the park home run from 2019. Precisely 0 of them occurred on ground balls.
Of course, the way to hit home runs is to hit fly balls. A certain percentage of a team’s fly ball events will result in home runs. You want this number to be as high as possible. For reference, the 2019 Yankees posted a home run/fly ball rate of 19.8% and led the league.
We’re making some good progress here. We know home runs are good. We know they can only be achieved through fly balls, and we know that a team hopes to convert as many fly balls as possible into home runs.
And How Do You Not Hit Home Runs?
You be the New York Yankees, who cannot stop hitting the ball on the ground. The Yankees’ 13 home runs through 11 games put them 19th in the league, after ranking 1st, 1st, 2nd, and 5th in homers from 2017 to 2020. I expect their production to increase as the season continues, but current underlying stats suggest it’s tough to project them as league leaders again.
This year, the Yankees are 4th in the league in ground ball rate, and not in a good way. Here are some good ways.
Batters hit ground balls against the Yankees’ pitchers
Yankees batters hit ground balls with the fourth-lowest frequency in the league
Neither of those good ways is what I mean.
As of Thursday, the Yankees were hitting ground balls more often than 26 of the 30 MLB teams (4th in ground ball rate). In 2019, the Yankees were 19th in ground ball rate, in 2018 they were 20th, and in 2017 they were 24th. Clearly, we can observe an inverse relationship between ground ball rate and home runs. As we discussed earlier, this is not surprising. In 2021, the Yankees have posted a home run rate of 2.9%, better than only 12 teams. In 2019, they led the league at 4.9%, in 2018 they led the league at 4.3%, and in 2017 they were tied for third in the league at 3.8%. That’s right, the Yankees are hitting home runs 24% less often than they did in their leanest home run hitting full season of the Judge & Co. era.
How Did This Happen?
Well in order for the Yankees to see their ground ball rate skyrocket, their batters have to be hitting ground balls at a much higher rate than they previously did, and in order for their home runs to be down so precipitously, guys who previously mashed taters would likely be the guys who started hitting a bunch of ground balls.
That can’t be true can it?
Oh my friends, it sure can be true and also is true.
Take a look!
In Giancarlo Stanton’s only full season with the Yankees (2018), 45% of his batted ball outcomes were ground balls. That’s basically identical to his MVP-winning season in 2017, and it showed. His 38 home runs led the Yankees, and the Yankees led the league in homers. This year, his ground ball rate is 65.5%, and he has 1 home run in 40 at-bats. Even though Stanton is hitting the ball hard more frequently than he ever has before (58.6% of the time), his average launch angle is 4.3 degrees, 7.7 degrees lower than any full season of his career in the Statcast era (since 2015). As a result, those hard hit balls have only netted him one homer. When your most potent power hitter stops hitting the ball in the air, it does not matter how hard he hits the ball. Major League infielders are good, and it’s going to be ground out city until Stanton starts to lift the ball again.
Same story for Aaron Judge. His ground ball rate in his MVP* season in 2017 was 34.9%. This year it’s 54.8%. Now, because Aaron Judge is a monster he has managed a 50% HR/FB rate which has buoyed his team-leading total of 4 homers, but the underlying stat that is more likely to persist is GB%. Among 334 qualified batters from 2015 to 2019, Aaron Judge leads baseball with a 32.5% HR/FB rate. You tell me if you think he’s suddenly going to sustain a 50% increase there.
This ground ball epidemic is being passed around the Yankees clubhouse like a stomach bug through a first grade classroom. DJ LeMahieu’s GB% is up 14.1% over 2019, Aaron Hicks’s is up 9.9% over 2018 (his last full season), Clint Frazier’s is up 14.2% over 2019, even Gio Urshela’s is up 17.6% over 2019.
The only people the bug has truly spared are a resurgent Gary Sanchez, who is currently posting the lowest ground ball to fly ball ratio of his career and coupling it with his second-highest average exit velocity in a season, and Gleyber Torres, who is hitting the ball in the air but not making much hard contact.
*: Looking at you, Jose Altuve.
What Else Does This Explain?
This explains the double plays.
The Yankees have grounded into 15 double plays this year, the most in the American League. Their rate of 1.25 GIDPs per game leads the Majors, just ahead of the San Diego Padres (1.21 GIDP/G). No other AL team has more than 12 GIDPs this year.
It is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, incredibly hard to ground into a double play without hitting a ground ball.
This also explains the weak run production. The Yankees are only scoring more runs per game than 7 teams, and are producing the same number of runs per game as the PITTSBURGH PIRATES. Embarrassing. Their 4.00 runs/game number through Thursday puts them 1.82 runs/game behind the 2019 team, 1.25 behind the 2018 team, and 1.3 behind the 2017 team, all of which ranked in the top-2 in the league in run production. This is gross.
Irresponsible Speculation
The myth of teams relying too much on the home run has persisted for years, and remains alive and well on Twitter (here are some examples).
I hate to beak it to these people, but this is the offense they asked for. This is the result of a team prioritizing the ball in play over all other things.
Here’s the irresponsible speculation. A team-wide increase in ground ball rate that is this significant may indicate a change in approach by the hitters. Maybe there are people with sway within the organization who agree with the tweeters included above. Maybe the Yankees wanted to experiment with an approach that prioritizes the ball in play. I’m sure the Yankees know the numbers (which tell teams to prioritize the home run) and understand the logic (one hit that automatically scores runs is better than trying to get multiple hits that may not), but why on earth would Giancarlo Stanton be producing ground balls in 2/3 of his batted ball events? Why are almost everyone’s batted ball stats so different from their career norms? This approach doesn’t work, and it needs to change.
Hope Springs Eternal
While it does seem likely to me that there has been a change in philosophy and approach that has instructed the Yankees’ hitters to prioritize putting the ball in play, we have a few reasons to believe it cannot last.
It’s doesn’t work. Even if it is the result of a formal directive, they’ve tried it, and there’s no proof of concept here.
The team is not constructed for it. This is not a team full of David Fletchers and Nick Madrigals who put the bat on the ball at all costs. This is a team full of guys with insane power who need to be freed up to strike out, pop up, or fly out because they’re selling out for home runs.
Some of the guys who are experiencing a spike in ground ball rate are experiencing one that must be outside of the realm of normal statistical variation, and the team is constructed so similarly to the teams of past years that their outcome stats will have to return to more normal levels. They will hit more home runs, Stanton’s GB% won’t remain 50% higher than his career mark, and their run production will increase. Some element of this must be an aberration.
You may have noticed I did not use any 2020 stats in this article. We know small sample sizes can distort statistics, and I hope that’s a significant part of this GB% spike. I’m willing to believe that it takes most of a full season to see the true level of production of a team or player, so we have reason to expect these stats to normalize back to (something closer to) their historical levels, unless I was spot on with my irresponsible speculation.
Time to mash some dingers, boys. Let’s go Yankees.
All stats come from Baseball Reference, FanGraphs, and MLB Statcast
