Remember as a kid when you would dip your back shoulder and try to crank one out of the park? You were successful about once a season, but it turns out you had the right idea … for daily fantasy sports purposes, anyway.
If your coaches were anything like mine, you often heard the “hit the ball on the ground” lesson: “it takes two players to get you out if you put the ball on the ground, only one to catch a fly ball.”
Chill, coach — chicks dig the long ball.
What a ground ball gets you
Let’s sift through the options of what could happen if a player hits the ball on the ground: It’s an out unless it’s scorched and in just the right spot, or hit very soft. Based on which numbers you trust, ground balls result in hits 20-25 percent of the time. So right away, your hitter has a batting average of .200-.250.
Breaking it down a bit further, a sharp grounder up the middle results in a single. So do ground balls that get through the shortstop and third baseman and the first and second basemen. So hitters that predominantly hit ground balls are starting with worse batting averages, but they also have a lower Isolated Power (ISO).
The only extra-base hits that come from ground balls are the ones that are hit sharply down the line and a batter is hustling out of the box (because that happens so often). In that case, you have a double — maybe a triple if the corner outfielder falls down twice then throws to the wrong base, or if that outfielder’s name is Manny Ramirez.
This screenshot taken from the FantasyLabs Trends page shows that hitters who put it on the ground 60 percent of the time have a Plus/Minus of -0.52.
Even little league coaches agree that line drives are best. They result in a much higher batting average and wOBA.
Borrowing some percentages from Beyond The Box Score, less than 17 percent of home runs from 2006-13 were line drives.
Fly balls are where it’s at, despite what Coach Hit-It-On-The-Ground told you. They result in the lowest batting average, but the highest ISO by far and a strong wOBA, too.
The upside is in the air (pun intended).
This helps show our point. I intentionally took out the players that hit the ball in the air between 80-100 percent of the time. It was a really small sample, and just stupid to think that we always want fly balls — that eliminates the line drive.
This might be a more fair look. We know from the Trends page that players hitting 1-5 in the lineup are on the good side of the Plus/Minus fence at an average of +0.47. The top photo here adds in players that hit the ball in the air 40-80 percent of the time, and the bottom shows the players who put the ball on the ground at that same rate.
That’s a good way to narrow down your player pool.
For all you nine-year-olds reading this article, next time your coach tells you to hit the ball on the ground, just tell him that chicks — but more importantly — DFS players, dig the long ball.
Dip ‘n rip, baby.
