We Have a Pop-Up Controversy
Think about what you know about hitters and pop-ups. Pop-ups, for all hitters, are bad. They might as well be one-pitch strikeouts. And, you know who doesn’t hit them? Joey Votto. You know that Joey Votto pretty much never hits a pop-up. It’s among the many things that make him extraordinary. Joe Mauer also doesn’t really hit pop-ups. Christian Yelich. Ryan Howard. Shin-Soo Choo. On and on. And there’s Howie Kendrick. Kendrick doesn’t hit pop-ups. But:
@based_ball ICYMI: Howie Kendrick hit a pop-up today. (leading off the 7-th inning).
— Santiago Padilla (@SantiPadillaR) September 25, 2016
That was tweeted at me yesterday. And when I checked the live statistics on FanGraphs, Kendrick had an infield fly. Yet when I check those same statistics today: nothing. It’s as if it’s been erased. Here is the batted ball in question:
Fielded comfortably by the second baseman. We’d all identify that as a pop-up, right? In one sense, then, Kendrick did pop up yesterday. You could say it’s the most important sense. Yet, here’s the leaderboard, when I look at everyone who’s batted at least 500 times over the past three calendar years. This is why this matters. (It doesn’t matter-matter, but, you know.)
Kendrick is the only guy with double zeros. Everyone else has hit at least one infield fly. So, what are we supposed to do, here?
In truth, it’s not that much of a mystery. We get batted-ball data from Baseball Info Solutions, and they have a specific definition of what makes an infield fly. Yesterday, when I checked the live stats, those were getting fed in by MLB Gameday, and that has a different, looser definition. So Kendrick’s fly ball was a pop-up by one definition, but not by both. If you take the BIS data as gospel, Kendrick objectively remains without such a blemish. But you can’t really say Kendrick hasn’t hit a pop-up. He just hasn’t hit one particular kind of pop-up.
Heck, this was just a matter of weeks ago:
The last time I checked, the BIS cutoff was 140 feet. That is, any fly ball hit more than 140 feet wouldn’t count as an infield fly. Kendrick still hasn’t popped up within the infield. But these flies flew only a little beyond 140. And now that we have Statcast, we can try to run some numbers ourselves. We’re still going to have to define things arbitrarily, and Statcast sometimes has trouble picking up batted balls hit at extreme angles, but let’s just see what we can do for 2016. Why don’t we set a cutoff at a launch angle of 60 degrees?
Joey Votto has zero such batted balls. Christian Yelich, zero. Joe Mauer, one. Howie Kendrick, one. Starling Marte, one. I don’t know how many batted balls are missing from the sample, so it’s not authoritative. But, it’s something. No definition of a pop-up is going to be the definition of a pop-up. This is the issue with bucketing. But Howie Kendrick either has a pop-up or two, or he doesn’t. According to the numbers we have here, Kendrick hasn’t popped up once in three years. That’s amazing! It still, no matter what, reflects a legitimate ability of his, but his is a soft zero. There’s no arriving at a one true answer.
Howie Kendrick most certainly doesn’t hit pop-ups. Except for the rare occasions when he does. Welp?
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
does pop up percentage correlate with fly ball percentage?
Basically. If you tend to hit the ball at a lower angle, then even your flies will be hit at a lower angle than most.
I should say, though, the relationship is not *that* strong.
Do you know if some hitters show higher variance in launch angle than others?
… Well heck, I could grab the data and answer that myself.
I would assume that better hitters have more hits in that 10-30 degree band which is most productive. deviating from that either way is bad so it makes sense good hitters avoid deviations.
on the other hand jose Bautista is a pop up machine and he is one of the most productive hitters of the last decade so you probably can’t avoid deviations at least to one direction in some cases if you have an extreme pattern (although some can).
BTW I would be interested if grounder machines like yelich have more “pop downs” or chopper at more than minus 10 degrees or so than average.
makes sense. BTW I have always wondered if high ball hitters tend to pop up more. trout doesn’t pop up much despite hitting a fair share of flies but he is a low ball hitter. Bautista on the other hand pops up a lot and he likes the ball up in the zone.
makes sense in theory because it is easier to miss under the high pitch but not sure if there is any correlation
It also makes sense in theory because the shoulders are at a relatively fixed height. When hitting high balls, the bat is roughly parallel to the ground, so a slight miss will deflect either up or down. Whereas when hitting a low ball, the bat is closer to a 45 degree angle with the ground, so deflections will be down and to the pull side, or up and to the opposite field, neither of which is a pop-up.
I’m pretty sure even Howie Kendrick considers that first one a popup. He looks straight up at it after it leaves the bat. If you can look straight up at a ball you just hit, that’s a good sign you popped it up.
Baseball-Reference credits Votto with 17 popups over the last 3 seasons, and Kendrick with 12. All of those plays were made by infielders, so they sound like pop-ups to me!
http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/event_finder.cgi?type=b&id=kendrho01#gotresults&year=2014&year_to=2016&divisory=1&from=button&type=b&id=kendrho01&event=modBIP&out_type=&criteria1=batted_ball_type—P-F—Pop_Fly—bbt&ajax=1&submitter=1&z=1&z=1
Heh, I was always curious what exactly the used as their definition of a Pop Up, so that was interesting. Also interesting was the fact that Ryan Howard has 14 IFHs!
Howard’s 14 IFHs is just wild. I’m guessing a lot of these were weak dribblers against lefties, before he mercifully became a platoon guy.
Since we’re looking at IFFB to represent “pop up” then I’m going to assume pop up is a colloquial term for IFFB. Wouldn’t that just be a fly ball in the infield? Why does BIS even have a cutoff distance? The infield is the infield, where the dirt stops, the outfield is beyond that. If the ball is not caught between the edge of the dirt and home plate, it’s not an IFFB.
I realize this isn’t the reality, because there is some established distance for a source, like BIS = 140. Why? Maybe because a few infields are different depths, so they’re trying to normalize the fields? They don’t do that for home runs, though. Outfield walls are different distances, but they just don’t call 340 ft a HR.
Kendrick’s face says it’s a popup, too.