Why Don’t Soft Liners Get Any Respect?

We all know what teams value most in their batters today: hard, elevated contact. It’s easy to understand why. Pitchers are getting so good at missing bats, and defenders are getting so good at converting balls in play into outs, that making the most out of your contact is imperative.

There are other ways to make the most of your contact, though. You don’t need to hit the ball hard if you hit it on a line. Low line drives are valuable whether they’re hit hard or not; a 92 mph line drive and a 105 mph screamer that both clear the infield are each clean hits every time. Sure, the harder one might split the outfielders and turn into a double more often, but the difference there is marginal. Hit the ball at the proper angle, and you can mitigate any weakness in contact quality.

If you look at the way teams construct their rosters, it might seem like they’re ignoring this fact. Does everyone just hate the Ichiro Suzukis of the world these days? Maybe there’s untapped potential in minor leaguers who generate their contact in ways that don’t jibe with the analytical trends of the day. Heck, maybe there’s untapped potential in major leaguers who do it.

When I looked into this conundrum in 2019, I separated out batted balls into soft and hard contact, then graphed wOBA by launch angle for the two types. I’ll reproduce that graph here today, partially to set the stage for what I want to talk about and partially because it’s pretty. How hard you hit the ball has a lot to do with what the optimal launch angle is:

Hard-hit balls have two optimal angles; the dip in between is because hard-hit line drives at those angles often carry to outfielders rather than falling in front of them. Soft-hit balls have a smooth distribution; you want to hit them over the infield but not so lofted that they hang up for someone to catch. Everything else doesn’t work.

The net of these two graphs produces a flat range for “good contact”:

Looking at that chart, you can generically say that you want to hit the ball between, say, eight and 32 degrees (that’s the definition that Baseball Savant uses for a “sweet spot” batted ball). But how you hit it matters a lot, as you can see from splitting the dataset based on exit velocity.

These charts show one obvious thing: the highs are much higher on hard-hit balls. That’s just obvious; you’re not hitting a 90 mph home run. But the high point on that softly-hit ball line is still really high. Aaron Judge has a .575 wOBA on batted balls this year, tops in the majors. Balls hit under 95 mph with a launch angle of 16 degrees averaged a .740 wOBA this year. A weak hitter who could always hit line drives would comfortably outperform Judge.

One thing you could take away from this analysis is that not enough hitters accept their power limitations and instead dink and dunk their way to success. There’s just one problem: you’d be reaching the wrong conclusion. Clearly, if everyone could always hit line drives, they’d do exactly that. I invoked Ichiro earlier; maybe he’s not the best pure hitter in recent memory, but he’s certainly near the top of the list. There are few players with better bat control, and yet he hit line drives on just 20.9% of his batted balls. This isn’t some trick of his late-career peregrinations, either: in his first stint with the Mariners, he hit line drives on 20.4% of his batted balls. Freddie Freeman, another frequent answer to “best pure hitter” musings, has a career 27.6% line drive rate, the best among active players (actually the second best — shout out to Harold Castro, but Freeman’s sample size is juuuuuust a bit more impressive).

In other words, it’s not realistic to only look at the center of the distribution. Hard-hit batted balls have a greater margin for error; if you’re hitting the ball hard, you can hit it at eight or 32 degrees off the bat and do okay. If you’re not hitting it hard, you really need to cluster in the 10 to 24 degree range to get any work done.

Still, there’s variation among hitters when it comes to maximizing production on their softly-hit batted balls. Freeman pops up near the top of that list; 24.4% of his softly-hit balls have been at ideal angles. Luis Arraez, another line drive merchant, checks in at 23.3%. Ben Gamel is the best in the majors at 27%, and he’s having a decent season with the bat despite unimpressive raw power. Donovan Solano has a 130 wRC+ despite negligible power; he’s hitting 24.7% of his softly-hit balls in the 10 to 24 degree band where they do best, giving his production a huge tailwind.

Of course, it’s still better to optimize your hard contact. Willy Adames is the best in the business at that this year; 39.8% of his hard-hit balls are hit between 20 and 35 degrees, the ideal angle for doubles and homers. He strikes out too much and has posted a .251 BABIP, by far the worst of his career, but he’s still delivering an above-average season thanks to his extra-base hits. Mookie Betts isn’t far behind: at 32.9%, he’s 11th in baseball (minimum 50 hard-hit balls), and on pace for an easy 30-homer season as a result.

It gets worse for our beloved soft-contact merchants. There’s a lot more noise at the top of the soft contact at optimal angles leaderboard than there is for hard contact. To put some numbers to that statement, I went back through the last five seasons and took every batter with at least 50 batted balls below 95 mph. I looked at what percentage of those batted balls were hit at “optimal” angles – I defined that as 10 to 24 degrees, but you could make different cuts if you were so inclined. I did the same for batted balls hit over 95 mph, using 20 to 35 degrees as optimal.

From there, I looked for consecutive seasons for the same batter. All told, I got 1,121 observations of a hitter putting together 50 softly-hit batted balls in consecutive years. This let me test whether how frequently a player hit their softly-hit balls at optimal angles in year one did a good job predicting how frequently they hit them at optimal angles in year two.

To put it simply, year one had little to do with year two. In numbers, the r-squared came out to 0.049. If you wanted to predict how frequently a hitter would hit that 10 to 24 degree band in year two, you’d weight their year-one optimal contact rate at 19%, and the league average rate at 81%. The 20 best seasons for optimal contact rate averaged 28.5% in year one. The next year, those 20 players produced an 18.8% mark, hardly above the 16.7% league average.

There’s not much there. One way to think about it is that if you look at all the softly-hit batted balls that weren’t hit in that 10 to 24 degree band, they’ve averaged a .135 wOBA in 2022. That’s pitcher-hitting level production. Balls hit between 10 and 24 degrees, on the other hand, have produced a .579 wOBA, an excellent mark. If you put up one of the very best marks of the past five years when it comes to optimizing your soft contact, the data says that you should expect to beat league average by two percentage points the following year.

That’s honestly not very valuable. If you hit 300 balls below 95 mph – a top 15 mark in most full seasons – we’re talking about six extra valuable batted balls on average. Do a little wOBA math, and the value of those six batted balls works out to roughly two runs. I’ve done a ton of simplification there, some of which isn’t mathematically rigorous, but as a rough guide, you just shouldn’t put much store in a player duck snorting and flaring his way to success in a given year.

That doesn’t mean that players don’t have a skill, merely that the noise is quite large, and one year just isn’t enough to believe it. David Fletcher has hit 1,380 balls below 95 mph since 2018, and he hits them at an optimal angle 23.7% of the time, far above league average. He truly does seem to exert some sort of skill. Meanwhile, Joc Pederson, whose softly-hit balls are almost all mis-hits, checks in at 11.4% on 690 softly-hit balls. If you’re trying to hit fly balls, your weak contact stands to suffer.

On the other hand, players show far more skill when it comes to the rate at which they hit their hard contact at advantageous launch angles. When I used the same methodology – every observation of a hitter putting together consecutive 50 hard-hit batted ball seasons starting in 2018 – I got 483 results. The r-squared of year two compared to year one was 0.21; changes in year-one sweet spot rate (forgive me, I’m running out of terms for batted balls hit at good angles) explain 21% of year-two variation, in other words. If you wanted to predict year-two rate based on year-one rate, you’d use 55% league average and 45% year-one rate.

Softly-hit batted balls have it rough. For one thing, hitting them at the ideal angle is simply worth less than getting it right on a hard-hit ball. Even worse, batters are better at repeating their success when they hit the ball on the screws. Teams might not use these exact numbers in their internal analysis. They might use wildly different numbers, in fact. I’m still comfortable that they’re reaching the same conclusion. Why don’t teams value hitters who make the most of their soft contact? It’s not worth that much anyway and few players demonstrate a true skill for it. That about sums it up!