This is the fourth piece in a series of articles looking at batted ball data for batters and pitchers.
Statistics like exit velocity, batted ball distance, and hard hit rate are still relatively new to many daily fantasy players. FantasyLabs Co-Founder Jonathan Bales recently put out a video on how to use batted ball data within our Player Models. This series uses the suite of Labs Tools to explore the DFS value of Statcast data.
Hard Hit Rates
Common sense dictates that the softer a ball is hit the better that is for the pitcher. In general, that’s what our Plus/Minus metric shows us:
From 18 to 40 percent, there is a steady regression in Plus/Minus as the hard hit rate for pitchers increases. Outside of that range there is some noise as sample sizes become much smaller.
Fly Ball
It is often assumed that giving up fly balls is bad, but fly ball rates in a vacuum can mislead. Using our Trends tool, we can see the relationship between fly ball and hard hit rates in pitchers on FanDuel:
Not surprisingly, a pitcher giving up a high percentage of fly balls with a low hard hit rate is productive. As a pitcher allows harder contact, each statistic in the trend gets worse. The drop off in Plus/Minus and Consistency Rating from the elite to the average subgroup is particularly significant.
Line Drive
Line drives are the batted ball events that most frequently lead to hits, yet when line drive and hard hit rates are combined the latter rates matter more:
Despite the drastic Plus/Minus and Consistency differences in this cohort between pitchers with elite and average hard hit rates, their ownership is almost identical. (Pro subscribers can review ownership in our DFS Ownership Dashboard.) There is likely an edge in using pitchers with low hard hit rates and elite line drive rates.
Ground Balls
More often than not, pitchers look to induce ground balls, as they are the batted ball events most likely to result in outs. The league average is about a 44 percent ground ball rate. The highest points average of any subgroup belongs to the pitchers with elite hard hit and ground ball rates:
Of course, with their high ownership rates such pitchers have been historically popular, which is something to keep in mind when using our Lineup Builder to create your DFS rosters.
Putting It All Together
Hard hit rates are important when analyzing pitchers, but knowing the stats to use alongside them is as important. It is when used in combination with other Statcast metrics, Labs statistics, and Vegas data, that hard hit rate offers its biggest edge.
——
Previous installments of the Statcast(unate) Event series can be accessed via my author page.
