We’ve quietly added a few new stats to our batted ball section.
First we have percentage of balls a batter pulls, hits to center field, and hits to the opposite field. This will make it much easier to figure out the general direction a player hits the ball without going to the splits pages and pulling out a calculator.
Pull% – Percentage of balls in play that were pulled by the batter
Cent% – Percentage of balls in play that were hit to center field by the batter
Oppo% – Percentage of balls in play that were hit to opposite field by the batter
Then we have how hard each ball is hit as provided by Baseball Info Solutions. It’s important to know that these are all relative to the batted ball type. For instance, a fly ball might be classified as hard, but if that ball were a line drive, it could potentially be classified as medium. If you are interested in seeing how line drives/fly balls/groundballs are classified into soft/medium/hard, we have that information available on the splits pages.
It’s also important to know that prior to 2010, these were all graded visually. From 2010 onward, the batted ball type, hangtime, and distance hit are all used to calculate the soft/medium/hard classifications.
Soft% – Percentage of balls in play that were classified as hit with soft speed.
Med% – Percentage of balls in play that were classified as hit with medium speed.
Hard% – Percentage of balls in play that were classified as hit with hard speed.
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Like it. Good to know that classifications for hard/med/soft are relative to batted ball type. How about A-rod leading the way with a 49% hard rate?
Watch out world! The Centaur is half-masted!
Ladies…
Do home runs count as balls in play for pull%?
Yes, home runs are included.
yes yes YES
more stats to play around with
Thank you BIS.
Awesomeness! Thank you so much!
Is foul ball data next?
(Read this post in a whispered voice.)
“It’s also important to know that prior to 2010, these were all graded visually. From 2010 onward, the batted ball type, hangtime, and distance hit are all used to calculate the soft/medium/hard classifications.”
How was it done since 2010 if not visual? Was Trackman used? If BIS, then isn’t that largely visual?
Prior to 2010, my understanding is that it was a stringer visually marking the ball as soft/medium/hard. Since 2010, while the distance / trajectory remain visually marked by stringers the soft/med/hard classifications are calculated via the distance, trajectory and hangtime / time through infield for groundballs.
This is great. Thanks for always improving the site. Could you please also add average fly ball distance and batted ball velocity?
Let me preface this comment by saying that I love FanGraphs and I think it’s fantastic that you’ve added this data. However, may I make one humble request: please make the MLB average outcomes easily available for esoteric data such as this. For example, it would be wonderful if when I hovered over a column header the MLB average value would display. That way when I’m looking at something like this batted ball categorization or a pitcher’s PitchFX movement values I could quickly determine how player X compares to his peers.
We’ll get these added to the averages section on the player pages, but in the meantime, you can always do this on the leaderboards:
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=0&type=2&season=2015&month=0&season1=2002&ind=0&team=0,ss&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=1,a
I tried to obtain league averages via the leaderboards, however you can’t use leaderboards to get it for splits since the batted ball table isn’t available here for splits such as batted ball type, batted ball location, etc. It would be interesting to see, for example, league ave hard/med/soft for pulled balls vs. others, for each type of batted ball, etc. Still, this new data is an awesome addition to what was already a great collection of data.