Red Sox Roll Out the Barrels

[Marbleheader]

I guess this has been around for a year or so now but I've been following it this season.

The 'barrel' stat uses launch angle and exit velocity to identify which players are barreling up the ball and making the best contact. For example, a ball with an exit velocity of 100 and a launch angle between 26 and 33 degrees is considered a barrel. Such contact results in a 1.500 OPS on average.

According to Statcast data, the Red Sox currently have the #1 (JD Martinez, 11) and #2 (Mookie Betts, 9) barrel leaders in all of baseball. Before he got hurt, Xander led the league with 6.

In terms of % of pitches barreled, for players that have seen at least 100 pitches, the top 5 players are :

1. JD Martinez, 4.0%
2. Xander Bogaerts, 4.0%
3. Max Kepler, 3.92%
4. Javier Baez, 3.85%
5. Mookie Betts, 3.69%

I find it interesting and hopefully some of you do as well. Live barrel updates are on Twitter @mlbbarrelalert

 

[brandonchristensen]

JD Martinez certainly matches the smell test. He's just had extraordinarily bad luck with the placement of his moonshots.

 

[Marbleheader]

For example, JD absolutely smoked this off the wall. While it only resulted in a single and won't show up in any of the power stats, barrels still count these balls that are crushed, even if they are for outs.


Benintendi, Swihart and Leon picked up their firsts of the year today.

 

[Sprowl]

We've got the O's on the run!

More seriously, it has taken a few years to make productive use of HitFX data, but it seems that more ball clubs and hitting coaches are looking into launch angle and velocity as data to guide approaches to hitting.

The next steps would probably involve incorporating pull-vs-slice angle, pitch velocity and type, and at-bat count (first pitch all the way to 3-and-2) to see what situations are most conductive to productive swinging for the downs.

I assume that each club's analytic specialists have already done that, but I haven't seen it publicly available. Where is the best publicly available data for this sort of analysis?

 

[Marbleheader]

This is where I go to search, Sprowl:

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/statcast_search

For example, I saw 3 of the Red Sox barrels today were off sinkers. So I pulled up barrels with pitch type as sinker, because I figured that was probably pretty rare. As of yesterday, they only had one such hit all year. Whereas, with 4 seam fastballs, they had 17 entering today.

 

[Pilgrim]

JDM also leads the league in Fangraphs hard hit %... hes at 63% and the next closest guy is 53%.
Hes going to rake this year.

 

[Soxfan in Fla]

JDM also leads the league in Fangraphs hard hit %... hes at 63% and the next closest guy is 53%.
Hes going to rake this year.

And JDM started slow the first week.

 

[Marbleheader]

JDM and Mookie still 1-2 in all of baseball with 14 and 13.

 

[ledsox]

I saw quality of contact leaderboard yesterday on MLB Now. xwOBA was the metric.
Mookie was far and away the leader. JDM was #2 in MLB. A year ago (end of last April) no Sox were in the top 10

 

[Marbleheader]

To no one's surprise, Mookie is barreling up the ball at a ridiculous rate. 4.56% of pitches and no one else in the league is even at 4%. Quantitatively, he's up to 22 and the next closest player, Gallo, has 19.

 

[Reverend]

To no one's surprise, Mookie is barreling up the ball at a ridiculous rate. 4.56% of pitches and no one else in the league is even at 4%. Quantitatively, he's up to 22 and the next closest player, Gallo, has 19.

To elaborate on the Baseball Savant tool, there is also a game feed tool (under Applications on the right side of the main menu bar) where you can choose a game and get all contact stats as they come through:
https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/gamefeed

One caveat: If you reload at the right time, it can be faster than whatever channel/station/feed you might be watching, so it can spoiler a game.

 

[nvalvo]

Something to keep an eye on: JBJ has an xwOBA of .322, waaaaaaaay better than his actual results, and by far the largest discrepancy among Sox regulars.

 

[Pitt the Elder]

Something to keep an eye on: JBJ has an xwOBA of .322, waaaaaaaay better than his actual results, and by far the largest discrepancy among Sox regulars.

JBJ also has a hard hit % of 36.7% and an exit velocity of 89.5 mph...to put that in perspective, last year Mookie had values of 37.7% and 88.4 mph. The difference? Mookie's launch angle was 14.1 degrees and JBJ's is 9.4 degrees. He is not lifting the ball.

 

[nvalvo]

JBJ also has a hard hit % of 36.7% and an exit velocity of 89.5 mph...to put that in perspective, last year Mookie had values of 37.7% and 88.4 mph. The difference? Mookie's launch angle was 14.1 degrees and JBJ's is 9.4 degrees. He is not lifting the ball.

True. xwOBA takes launch angle into account, though...