J.D. Martinez Debunks Conventional Wisdom, Thinks a Tipping Point Is Near
Editor’s Note: the following post contains spicy language.
J.D. Martinez had just concluded a chat with a Tigers beat reporter when I approached him Monday afternoon. I sensed him preparing to escape my forthcoming interview request in the Joker Marchant Stadium clubhouse as I walked in his direction. He’d just risen from the cushioned chair in front of his locker and picked up a cardboard box of personal effects as I introduced myself. His body language wasn’t suggestive of much interest in engaging in conversation with me and, to be fair, I was a stranger. We had never spoken. He had just finished playing six innings of an exhibition game and was presumably was looking forward to the rest of the day.
But then I explained why I was interested in speaking with him. He rested the box on a laundry cart, freed his hands, seemed to warm to the idea (or possibly not), and opened up.
I wanted to ask Martinez whether baseball is on the cusp of a fly-ball revolution, whether we’re about to see the sort of approach already adopted by Martinez, Josh Donaldson and Justin Turner — all of whom have experienced great personal success — become more widely adopted and accepted in the majors. Jeff Sullivan and I have written quite a bit about the potential fly-ball revolution in recent weeks as you can read here, here, here and here. But Monday offered a chance to get a key perspective from an early adopter and perhaps a significant influencer.
Martinez said that, around the batting cages in Lakeland, Florida, this spring, more teammates have been approached him to talk about the philosophy that changed him from a slap-hitting, .387 slugging, 88 wRC+-ing Astros outfielder to a .540 slugging, 145 wRC+-ing star with the Tigers from 2014 to -16.
First, an example of Bad Martinez (2011-13):
And also Good Martinez (2014-16):
Martinez isn’t proselytizing his ideas on Twitter or Instagram like some of his fellow converts…
Just say NO…. to ground balls. #MLB #striveforexcellence pic.twitter.com/6YANrOZHQE
— Josh Donaldson (@BringerOfRain20) March 1, 2017
… but he is open about his philosophy when approached by teammates.
“People talk to me and I tell them straight up. I don’t bullshit,” Martinez said. “In the cage, I talk about it all the time. I’m not trying to hit a fucking line drive or a freaking ground ball. I’m trying to hit the ball in the air. I feel like the ball in the air is my strength and has a chance to go anywhere in the park. So why am I trying to hit a ground ball? That’s what I believe in.”
With his hands now free, Martinez demonstrates how he’s in search of a bat plane angle that will produce more balls in flight. He notes that statistics prove the value of a fly ball over a ground ball. In 2016, batters hit .241 with a .715 slugging mark and a wRC+ of 139 on fly balls versus a .238 average, .258 slugging mark and of wRC+ of 27 on ground balls.
He suspects there will be many more players buying into his beliefs. But he’s frustrated that it took him so long to discover a hitting philosophy that’s effective but also runs contrary to conventional teaching philosophy. He’s frustrated he still hears so much conventional wisdom.
“I always thought the perfect swing was a line drive [back to] the pitcher,” Martinez said. “I’d go out there and hit the ball perfectly, and it’s [a] single. Why is my perfect swing a single?
“You still talk to coaches ‘Oh, you want a line drive right up the middle. Right off the back of the [L-screen in batting practice].’ OK, well that’s a fucking single. To me, the numbers don’t lie. The balls in the air play more.”
Martinez found the philosophy in serendipitous fashion. When he was on disabled list in 2013 in Houston, a campaign he would finish with a .250/.272/.378 slash line, he became curious in some of the swing changes then-teammate Jason Castro had made in a career year. He began spending more time in the club’s video room analyzing Castro’s swing. And that June, while in the clubhouse, his attention turned to coverage of a story on cable news.
“I walk out of the and I saw Ryan Braun got [suspended] with PEDs,” Martinez said. “They kept showing his swing on replay. I thought ‘That’s the same fucking swing that Jason has been doing.’ I went up to Jason after the game and I said ‘I know what you did. You changed your whole path.’ In 2013, he was destroying the league. He was doing all these weird gadgets. I told him to give me the number to his hitting coach.
“I started looking at Trout, Braun, Pujols… Why does their swing look like that and my swing look like this? I’m doing everything the coaches tell me. I’m swinging down on the ball. In BP, I’m hitting low line drives everywhere. In games, it doesn’t play.”
After the season, Martinez traveled to California to work with a private hitting instructor, Craig Wallenbrock, who had worked with Castro. “We changed the whole foundation,” Martinez.
As with Turner, after one offseason of rebuilding, a star bat was created. Martinez’s story has been well documented — including here at FanGraphs, where Eno detailed Martinez’s swing changes in 2015. And more and more in the media and industry have since become curious. What’s perhaps changing is that the sport is reaching a critical mass. The Pirates have talked about OPS being in the air. More and more hitters are approaching Martinez and reading about the philosophies of Doug Latta and Chad Longworth and others.
New Signatures Tee's available now. CAUTION may be offensive to some!https://t.co/RD684Hb5dt pic.twitter.com/vCPtHAKPz6
— Chad Longworth (@clongbaseball) March 6, 2017
Does Martinez believe the philosophy is reaching a sort of tipping point?
“Oh, definitely,” Martinez said. “Hitting takes a while to catch up because of your old-school coaching, old-school mentality. Trying to hit down on the ball. Stuff like that. Once all that starts to go, I feel like the philosophies on hitting will trend forward. But everyone is so caught up on ‘I have to hire someone who has played in the big leagues because he knows what he’s talking about.’ But, to me, that’s not what it is about. It’s more about knowing your shit. You can tell when you talk to someone and they sit down there and they break it down and they show you every little move that the great hitters make and then the moves you make.”
While Martinez believes there is being progress made league wide, he already sees pitchers trying to combat his hitting philosophy.
“Pitchers are countering it right now. The pitchers are always ahead,” Martinez said.
What exactly are the adjustments being made to his swing path? Martinez and I had not, apparently, reached that level of trust.
“That’s one of things you don’t want to tell anyone,” Martinez said.
While Martinez would not reveal what he believes to be counter measures to his swing path, it appears pitchers are trying to elevate their fastballs against Martinez.
Fastballs thrown against Martinez in 2012:
Fastballs thrown against Martinez in 2016:
Martinez is seeing fewer two-seam fastballs, pitches against which a Martinez-like bat path typically has more success, according to The Book. Martinez is seeing fewer sliders and more curveballs. Martinez saw a career-high rate of curves last season (13.5%), which marked a 43% jump from what he saw in 2014 and 2015.
Of course not everyone is buying in. Max Kepler said the philosophy is “Completely bogus.”
“Whenever I’m in doubt, I try to hit long ground balls to level my swing back out. I’m the complete opposite of what I hear people saying now days,” Kepler said.
But if Martinez is right — and judging by the talk around Detroit’s batting cages, he is — then conventional hitting wisdom could perhaps soon be replaced, and if that should happen, there will be fascinating consequences for the sport.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
No groundbreaking/analytical comment to share, just thought this was a really cool read and interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing. As always great work!
+1. This – and the whole series this subject has turned into – is so fascinating.
Lol k, Kepler. Don’t listen to these breakouts. You do you, I guess.
This article’s rated PG-13. JD dgaf.
Was that a Tigers beat reporter or a Tiger Beat reporter?
Has anyone done any work to identify baseline ability for this to be optimal bat path? Thinking specifically bat speed and some measure of force, and in how many directions? Is this still optimal if the power only plays to the pull side?
It’s exciting to see hitters trying something different (and the world finally listening to Ted Williams)
Kepler wRC+: 93
Martinez wRC+ 143
I wonder whose opinion I should listen to?
Kepler’s FB% last season was 36.5%, 0.3% higher than Martinez’s 36.2%. It’s almost as if hitting more fly balls isn’t a guarantee of increased production.
If you lump all fly balls together, perhaps. But why would you do that? Martinez hit the ball way harder than Kepler, (and Kepler hit twice as many infield flies). If Kepler had Martinez’s power, he might feel differently about the best approach for his own skill set. Obviously, no one is going to tell Billy Hamilton to start hitting more fly balls.
That’s my point. The cult of the fly ball is becoming incredibly obnoxious because “hit more fly balls!” is not a magic recipe for success. toronto1993 and Maverik312 mocked Kepler’s comment, both of them apparently oblivious to the fact that Kepler hit a higher percentage of fly balls last season. Martinez was more productive because he’s a better hitter, not because of their respective philosophies on fly balls. There is no one size fits all solution to hitting a baseball, the recent obsession with fly balls notwithstanding.
Right on. Totally agree that there’s no one size fits all approach.
But we know Martinez has tried several distinct approaches. We don’t know that about Kepler, so for him to call it “completely bogus” is probably part of why people are mocking him. You’re (fairly) complaining that some of these guys are pushing the argument past the point of sense (including Martinez himself), but Kepler is doing the same, but in the opposite direction. Maybe if heard more of what Kepler said it would be different, perhaps that quote was out of context and he had more to say.
Still, if we’re going to point out hyperbole, let’s be fair.
We know that what Martinez said was mathematically incorrect. The merit of Kepler’s comment is dependent upon the context of what he was responding to. If it dealt with the notion that every batter should be hitting more fly balls, then “completely bogus” would be an appropriate response in my opinion.
Basically, we’re trying to figure out the launch angle that hitters should be centered around. For someone like JD, it should probably be 15-20 degrees. For someone like Billy Hamilton, it should probably be 5 degrees. It’s not like JD is saying to try to hit moonshots every time, but avoid balls that land in the infield.
That’s pretty much it. Power guys in the air, speed guys on the ground.
it is when you hit them as hard as JD does
If it were that easy to completely reinvent their swing everyone would. Max Kepler reached the majors with his swing, he probably doesn’t see any reason to change what has worked for him. JD Martinez probably wouldn’t be in the majors right now if he hadn’t reinvented himself.
You should maybe point out that you just looked at their 2016 stats because Kepler only has 2/3 of a season under his belt.
Anyway, while we’re looking at 2016 stats…
Kepler BABIP: .261
Martinez BABIP: .378
Martinez consistently puts up high BABIPs, the .378 isn’t a huge outlier given he’s at .343 for his career.
BABIP correlates to how hard you hit the ball, and he is 3rd in MLB since 2014 in hard hit %. Kepler was probably unlucky, but in terms of “true BABIP” Martinez profiles as considerably superior.
Well, Joey Votto has a wRC+ of 158, so I’d suggest listening to him. Except Mike Trout has a wRC+ of 171, so listen to him instead. Of course, in 2015 Harper had a wRC+ of 197 so you should have listened to him then, but stopped listening to him last year since he only had 112. And wouldn’t you know it, his line drive rate went down 3% and his FB% went up 3%, so clearly he needs to hit more line drives.
So shall we keep using wRC+ to determine who to listen to, or shall we pick a slightly more robust measure?
Someone should inform J.D. Martinez that the numbers have consistently told us that the average line drive is worth almost twice as much as the average fly ball.
Sounds like he knows:
“In BP, I’m hitting low line drives everywhere. In games, it doesn’t play.”
He’s saying that in games it’s a bad thing to hit those “low line drives everywhere” because that’s only “a fucking single,” and justifying that by insisting that the numbers don’t lie when in actuality the numbers do not support his statements.
It’s true that a line drive is more productive than a fly ball on average. The problem is when the optimal outcome based on a swing plane is a line drive (very good) and a poor result is a ground ball (very bad). When a player has the sort of natural power Martinez has the optimal outcome should be a home run, and that swing plane still tends to generate plenty of line drives as is evident by his very strong LD% over the past 3 years.
2015 is the only time Martinez has been a particularly fly ball-prone hitter, and last season’s 36.2% was only marginally higher than the 35.6% he posted as a rookie with the Astros. The idea that his transformation has been primarily due to launch angle is a total myth, as it’s far more attributable to the quality of his contact rather than the angle at which it occurs. The big difference between Houston Martinez and Detroit Martinez is that the former had a lot more soft contact and the latter has a lot more hard contact.
Yes, and the difference in how hard he hit the ball then vs. now could be launch angle.
I don’t see why you’re concluding it’s a myth. Why can’t the difference in his hard hit % be due to launch angle?
Because his launch angle hasn’t increased dramatically and because there isn’t a strong correlation between launch angle and exit velocity.
But the fact that he’s trying to hit the ball higher means he matching the plane of the ball better, which will lead to more consistent hard contact.
Line drives match the plane of the ball better than fly balls, but that’s still not the point. Read this Dan Farnsworth piece from December 2013 on Martinez’s swing changes. His improvement was absolutely not about simply hitting more fly balls, it was about fundamentally changing his swing to improve his quality of contact, which is why his fly balls now have a much higher average exit velocity than his fly balls did back then.
Swing planes match pitch plane, not batted balls. Line drives may get the biggest boost with that swing plane, but flyballs will also get a boost, since slight up is closer than flat.
No one should take “hit the ball in the air more” as the totality of instruction needed, sure. There’s also the fact that JD learned to keep the bat on plane and in the hitting zone longer by not allowing himself to pull off balls, and keeping his left side strong later into his swing. Among other things.
It’s probably not just that he hits more flyballs. It is probably more subtle than that.
No – it depends on how hard the fly ball is hit. See above.
Pretty sure he is talking about the balls that hit the L screen, which are 0-5 degree angles. Yes, you have a .500 AVG/OBP on those hits, but only a .550 SLG. Why try to hit those when you can hit .340 with a 1.050 SLG on flyballs? Yes, only guys with enough strength should go crazy in the FB direction, but it makes sense for him.
He’s quoted as saying “the back of the” screen. The author interpreted that as meaning the L-screen, but it’s not possible to hit “the back of the” L-screen without a ricochet. It’s far more likely that Martinez meant the screen on the back of the batting cage.
Even if it is the back of the cage, it’s still around 5 degree launch angle, which are the low end of hits categorized as line drives. The line drives with extra bases attached to them are in the 10-15 degree range, which is hitting the top of the cage. Breaking down hits into only 3 buckets is not enough for this type of analysis.
A 5 degree launch angle wouldn’t get over the L-screen to reach the back of the batting cage.
For balls hit below 14 degrees the outcome doesn’t depend on how hard, on average, the batter hits the ball. At each ground ball and line drive angle, the wOBA/CON for guys who avg 83 mph off the bat is the same as guys who average 95.
For balls hit between 14 and 42 it’s a totally different story – power matters greatly. There’s huge differences in the results between a Billy Hamilton and a J.D. Martinez.
“It’s just a single” – balls at 4 degrees have a wOBA/CON of .400. At 8 it’s near .600, and it peaks at 12 degrees at about .800. However, guys who average 91 mph (above average but not elite) average over .900 at 28 degrees. For a power hitter, anything from 8 to 35 is above .600. For a slap hitter, it’s 8 to 20 (a range less than half the size)
Guys who hit the ball hard will thrive in the 20’s. Guys who don’t shouldn’t be there.
Lines drives are pretty much always barrelled up, fly balls aren’t. It’s not really a fair comparison
I’m curious about what the optimal FB% is for players in general. You want to maximize line drives, since they are the best batted ball, but you also want to minimize grounders, since they are the worst. I have no data, but I would assume that to maximize LD, you would a near 1-1 GB to FB ratio. For someone with the power Martinez has, how much should he be willing to lower LD% to lower GB%? I would think his optimal mix would be with a FB% higher than what the maximum LD% would be. I’m not sure how to approach this problem, but I would assume his optimal angle would be trying to hit a line drive right to where the OF is positioned, with the variation putting the ball in front of them and over their heads.
Sure. But there’s a limit to how many line drives you can hit in the game. The question is whether you want your slight mistakes to come as hard flyballs or hard groundballs.
The pitcher is trying hard for vertical error in contact, and it only takes a little to make a wide distribution of elevation angle, no matter how the batter tries to keep it narrow. You’ll get your balls scattered into the LD range, don’t worry.
Why would that be the case?
That’s a reasonable preference but it is not what J.D. Martinez was arguing. He clearly stated that he considers line drives to be sub-optimal, not that if he can’t hit a line drive he would prefer a fly ball over a ground ball.
Because Freddie Freeman has the highest career line drive rate since 2002 at 27%, and his highest qualified season is 31%. You now have to figure out how you want to distribute the remaining 70+% of batted balls.
That doesn’t mean there is a limit to how many line drives you can hit in a game, it means that it’s damned hard to hit a line drive. Great hitters make outs six tenths of the time, but the only limit to the number of times they can reach base in a game is their number of plate appearances. All I’m trying to clarify here is that Martinez was not correct in suggesting that for him or anyone else hitting a fly ball is a better result than hitting a line drive.
I wouldn’t put much faith in line drive rates that aren’t determined by Statcast. The definition of a line drive is a ball caught on a low angle by an infielder or a ball that falls in front of an outfielder for a hit. A fly is a ball caught by an outfielder, or over his head or well placed in the gap for a hit. Hit = LD, Out = FB. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
There’s a limit on how small you can get the standard deviation of your vertical angle on batted balls. You do what you can, and then you attempt to place the center of the distribution as is best for you.
If your point is literally only that his line drive outcome is better, not that he should try to hit line drives, then I award you a trophy of being Right On The Internet, but please take your victory bow now.
This is a good point. It’s not just the mean but the variance. The batter want to put as many balls as possible into a productive zone. If you have two guys with the same mean (and a productive mean) the one with the smaller variance will do better. Kershaw gives up both higher GB’s and higher popups. I was thinking it was bi-modal, but perhaps it’s just large variance, leaving fewer barreled balls in the middle.
Because of the second paragraph. The pitcher doesn’t want to let you hit all line drives.
In a vacuum, sure. But JD Martinez should not be judging himself on “the average line drive” as compared to “the average fly ball” he should be judging himself on “the average JD Martinez line drive” as compared to “the average JD Martinez fly drive”.
And I guarantee you that “the average J.D. Martinez line drive” has been worth more in wOBA than “the average J.D. Martinez fly ball.”
yes, of course. It’s not close.
But trying to hit line drives means more ground balls, and his fly ball OPS destroys his ground ball OPS. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just saying it’s not as simple as comparing line drives to fly balls. You have to compare the range of results from each approach.
In general I wouldn’t take a strict interpretation of his words here. He might not be great at communicating his thoughts precisely.
Bottom line: he started having success (massive success, really) when he went against conventional wisdom. It’s pretty hard to argue with his results, even if he’s not explaining them perfectly.
No, he didn’t. I already pointed out to you that Martinez’s FB% last season was almost identical to his FB% as a rookie in 2011. The entire reason I’m harping on this is to help people like you understand that Martinez’s dramatic improvement absolutely did not come from simply hitting more fly balls, it came from reconstructing his swing such that he improved the quality of his contact. Dan Farnsworth did a great job of describing some of those changes, including employing a wider base for more stability, adjusting his shoulder rotation to allow for greater arm extension, and moving his hands down to prevent the top hand from rolling over the pitch as frequently. The fly balls that Martinez hits now have a substantially higher average exit velocity than the fly balls that Martinez hit back then. It’s not simply a matter of hitting more of them, it’s a matter of hitting them more authoritatively.
You pointed that out to me after I wrote this comment you’re responding to. So to be fair, you didn’t “already point that out to me”. No biggie, but yeah.
But you’re also overstating that case.
Martinez’s rookie season was not even a half season, so I’m not sure why you’re isolating that. Look at his entire Astros tenure, and his entire Tigers tenure.
FB rates w/HOU: 35.6, 31.6, 34.1 – 975 PA
FB rates w/DET: 36.8, 43.5, 36.2 – 1654 PA
Not only that, but the 43.5 season has way the most PA’s overall, and the 31.6 was the most PA’s of the HOU years. Not going to bother with the math, but the difference is probably at least 3%. I’d guess more like 4.5%. The bigger difference is in his hard hit percentage, as you say, but this is still notable.
His line drive rate has also stayed about the same, so he’s not actually hitting fewer of them. Whatever he says, his results haven’t changed in that regard.
and this brings us back to a point several, including myself, have made in this thread: don’t take Martinez too literally. What he’s doing and how he’s explaining it might have a significant disconnect.
It’s also a massive strawman to say that “The entire reason I’m harping on this is to help people like you understand that Martinez’s dramatic improvement absolutely did not come from simply hitting more fly balls”
It’s been abundantly clear that I don’t believe he is “simply hitting more fly balls”.
This is another reason you’re getting downvotes.
I find it funny that me stating something mathematically true is getting downvoted. For those who want to see the evidence, here are the numbers for 2013 and 2014:
2013 GB wOBA – .213
2013 LD wOBA – .681
2013 FB wOBA – .346
2014 GB wOBA – .220
2014 LD wOBA – .684
2014 FB wOBA – .335
And these are the specific Martinez quotes that I am referring to:
Not trying to pile on because I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but the downvotes are because you’re talking down to people.
Up and downvotes are not always about being right. People care about tone and being a decent person in conversation. You’re not remotely approaching troll level but if you want to know why you’re getting downvoted, now you do. (and I’m not one of the people downvoting, to be clear).
Some of us actually like being down-voted because it’s mostly being done by sexual repressed white males(because that’s 95% of this site, authors and patrons)…so that’s a plus for me.
Missed in this _fascinating_ comments discussion is the definition of line drives. IIRC, mlb classifies line drives as 10 degrees < launchAngle < 25 degrees. It seems likely that the L-screen type liners described by JD Martinez would actually be classified as ground balls. Which would greatly reduce the expected value (based on general Fly/LD/Ground values)
It’s not even possible to hit the back of the L-screen without a ricochet, which leads me to believe that what Martinez actually said was not the L-screen but rather the back screen of the batting cage itself, as that’s a pretty common target for batting practice. To reach that, the angle would need to be in that 10-25 range, not a ground ball.
A 90 MPH batted ball hit at a 10 degree angle hits a 75 foot long cage 11 feet high, so that is the max angle JD was talking about. A 90 MPH ball hit at 25 degrees hits a 12-foot high cage 21 feet from home plate, basically what JD is looking for.
I think the lesson to be learned here is that this is yet another example of the gap between the language of analytics and outcomes, versus the right combination of words that allows an athlete to “get it” and visualize the physical motions that most consistently generate the best results, and minimize sub-optimal outcomes.
Someone on Fangraphs (Eno?) has written stuff about learning how to talk to players, and reflected that he should have reached out to the coaches more often earlier in his career, since they were the de-facto interpreters between the numbers and actions. Telling someone they need to hit line drives with some launch angle doesn’t actually help anyone hit more line drives at the right launch angle, so a good hitting coach finds the words to coax the right motion out of players. But people react differently, and good advice in one instance may make no difference (or have a detrimental effect) in another, which is what I guess happened with young Martinez. He obviously found someone who speaks his language, but I’m not sure that means that the “old school” coaches and mentality are leading everyone astray, or that he’s stumbled on something that extraordinary.
twice as much what? certainly not SLG…
Great work, Travis, asking the questions that got these comments from J.D.
Seems odd to mention Braun’s swing along with Trout and Pujols when wanting a swing that gets lift on the ball. Braun has averaged over a 50% GB rate the last 3 seasons combined.
I see the error in my comment.
Braun had a 43% GB rate from 2007-2012. That is the time period I assume he is referencing for Braun’s swing. The fact that Braun is over 50% GB for the last 3 years means nothing, except Braun could be added to the “Which Hitters Could Benefit From Lift?” post by Jeff.
According to Baseball-Reference
Tony Gwynn:
hit ground balls 49.6% of the time with a.260 BABIP
hit line drives 23.5% of the time with a .735 BABIP
hit fly balls 26.5% of the time with a .183 BABIP
Ichiro:
ground balls: 55.4% .305 BABIP
line drives: 21.3% .708 BABIP
fly balls: 21.7% .162 BABIP
if you’re fast ground balls can be your best friend as long as it doesn’t lead to a double play.
I think the whole issue here is that hitting coaches have, for a long time, been teaching *everyone* to approach hitting like Tony Gwynn, and that just doesn’t work for a lot of guys.
I think the whole issue is that some people think there’s one way to hitting that fits everyone, and that just isn’t the case. We’re in danger of overcompensating for past errors.
I really doubt that there are many professional hitting coaches who have been teaching the same approach to everyone.
That is the whole point of the article, coaches kept telling Martinez to spray the ball around like Tony Gwynn.
Please point me to the part where coaches were telling Martinez to spray the ball around like Tony Gwynn.
Don’t forget that SLG is part of hitting too. Gwynn had a .429 SLG on those flyballs, while his GB SLG was .284. Overall, his OPS+ was a bit higher on flyballs (39 to 29).
Will someone please give Maikel Franco and Yasiel Puig JDM’s phone number?
FWIW, over J.D.’s 3 good years:
1) His fly-ball rate is just slightly over the median (and last year was his lowest FB rate of the three); and
2) His BA and SLG rank top-10 in *both* fly balls and ground balls, among those with 200 such ABs. (Obviously, actual SLG is much higher on fly balls.)
Just thought I’d muddy the waters a bit. 🙂
Some of you just come here to argue and analyze comments, I swear it.
Cool read. JD swears a lot and Kepler is German. Move along.
I really have to think if this pendulum swings too far one way, the pitchers’ adjustments will wreck the gains, though. No strategy continues to work when overused.
Me trying to explain my pull the ball in the air approach to my highschool coach almost got me kicked off the team. I’ve always wonder why coaches are usaully the last ones to pick up on the new ideas of baseball. I can understand why on the highschool level, but in the major leagues I feel they should be the ones introducing them.
“Me trying to explain my pull the ball in the air approach to my highschool coach almost got me kicked off the team.”
I’m imagining my high school self trying to explain a different hitting philosophy to my high school coach, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I almost got kicked off the team too. However, I would guess that lack of tactfulness on the part of my teenage self would be more responsible than the close-mindedness of my coach.
annnnd max Kepler has done jack squat nothing in this league…so notgunnalistentodatguy
He’s been in the majors for 2/3 of a season. Chill out.
I don’t know what y’all are arguing about, but I do know that baseball talk with ‘spicy language’ is roughly 237 times more fun than baseball talk without it.
With MLB proposing to raise the strike zone back above the knees, are we going to see even more fly balls? Seems like this rules change would benefit Martinez et al.
Should’ve asked JD who’s trying this out this year. Nick Castellanos perhaps? Interesting way to identify some possible fantasy breakouts. Great Article
“we’re going to hit it hard and we’re going to hit it in the air.”- Ted Williams said in 1971 in his book regarding launch angle.
https://www.ballplayerplus.com/ted-williams/
Per Fangraphs article above: “He suspects there will be many more players buying into his beliefs. But he’s frustrated that it took him so long to discover a hitting philosophy that’s effective but also runs contrary to conventional teaching philosophy.”
Not sure why this is considered a “contrary” or “new” philosophy or “HIS” beliefs… Greatest hitter of all time said the same thing 50 yrs ago. 6th greatest ISO of all time.