Offseason Plans

[D-train]

It's hard to tell from BABIP what is going on though. Could be the grass, could be difficulty making good contact, or a combination of the two. I'm wondering if there are stats from which you can determine the kind of contact as well as rate. For instance, do hitters tend to foul off more pitches and make weaker contact? Maybe the angle of the ball's trajectory off the bat along with exit velocity would tell the story.

You can do it for individual players but that would be quite a project to aggregate all of their home road splits.

[ice99]

It's hard to tell from BABIP what is going on though. Could be the grass, could be difficulty making good contact, or a combination of the two. I'm wondering if there are stats from which you can determine the kind of contact as well as rate. For instance, do hitters tend to foul off more pitches and make weaker contact? Maybe the angle of the ball's trajectory off the bat along with exit velocity would tell the story.

You might want to look into xwOBA.

https://technology.mlblogs.com/an-intro ... d6070ba52b

[Jack Merridew]

It's hard to tell from BABIP what is going on though. Could be the grass, could be difficulty making good contact, or a combination of the two. I'm wondering if there are stats from which you can determine the kind of contact as well as rate. For instance, do hitters tend to foul off more pitches and make weaker contact? Maybe the angle of the ball's trajectory off the bat along with exit velocity would tell the story.

You might want to look into xwOBA.

https://technology.mlblogs.com/an-intro ... d6070ba52b

Thanks, that may be useful. Comparing xwOBA to wOBA at Tmobile should give some idea of how much the field conditions are impacting balls in play. Also, comparing the Mariners home xwOBA to road xwOBA should give some clue as to contact % and quality. Now where can i find those numbers?

[Donn Beach]

Seems like Baseball Savant's statcast search engine be a something to try. I mean if someone knew how to use it. That be the actual bat and ball

[Jack Merridew]

Thanks - i tried to look it up with Statcast and came up with this page, but i can't find any way to search splits like home/away...

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderbo ... =136&min=q

I only had time to look at this year's numbers and the Mariners' wOBA was 6 points lower than their xwOBA.

It appears that Fangraphs is adding xwOBA to their tables as there is now a column for it but unfortunately is empty. But once they put in the values it should be possible to look up the home and away splits.

https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx? ... &players=0

[Captain 97]

Fangraphs allows you to look at team splits and you can look at Line drive, ground ball and flyball percentage as well as hard hit, medium hid and soft hit percentage.

At Home the M's hit line drives 18.5% of the time while on the road they hit line drives 19.8% of the time. AL average is 20.4%. A diference of 1.3% would equal about 40 fewer line drives by the team over the course of the season. They hit a few more ground balls at home. 41.7% verses 41.3% on the road. The Soft hit % is even more drastic. They hit the ball softly 20.4% of the time at home and only 17.9% of the time on the road. That equates to about 78 more weakly hit balls at home than on the road. Conversely they hit 31.9% of their balls hard on the road and only 29.3% hard at home. Which equates to about 80 more hard hit balls on the road than at home. AL averages for soft hit is 16.3% and for hard hit is 32.2 %

Switching ot over to the pitching side and seeing how are pitchers fare at home and on the road, The M's opponents at safeco had a Line Drive percentage of 20.6%, a soft hit percentage of 17.1% and a hard hit percentage of 31.9%. On the road the M's opponents had a Line Drive percentage of 20.7%, a soft hit percentage of 14.5 % and a hard hit % of 34%

So in conclusion hitters both for the M's and for their opponents have fewer line drives, more softly hit balls and fewer hard hit balls at Safeco than they do at other ball parks. I think its safe to conclude that its more than the grass and that the contact is not as good at home as it is on the road.


https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/split ... &sort=-1,1

[D-train]

Fangraphs allows you to look at team splits and you can look at Line drive, ground ball and flyball percentage as well as hard hit, medium hid and soft hit percentage.

At Home the M's hit line drives 18.5% of the time while on the road they hit line drives 19.8% of the time. AL average is 20.4%. A diference of 1.3% would equal about 40 fewer line drives by the team over the course of the season. They hit a few more ground balls at home. 41.7% verses 41.3% on the road. The Soft hit % is even more drastic. They hit the ball softly 20.4% of the time at home and only 17.9% of the time on the road. That equates to about 78 more weakly hit balls at home than on the road. Conversely they hit 31.9% of their balls hard on the road and only 29.3% hard at home. Which equates to about 80 more hard hit balls on the road than at home. AL averages for soft hit is 16.3% and for hard hit is 32.2 %

Switching ot over to the pitching side and seeing how are pitchers fare at home and on the road, The M's opponents at safeco had a Line Drive percentage of 20.6%, a soft hit percentage of 17.1% and a hard hit percentage of 31.9%. On the road the M's opponents had a Line Drive percentage of 20.7%, a soft hit percentage of 14.5 % and a hard hit % of 34%

So in conclusion hitters both for the M's and for their opponents have fewer line drives, more softly hit balls and fewer hard hit balls at Safeco than they do at other ball parks. I think its safe to conclude that its more than the grass and that the contact is not as good at home as it is on the road.


https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/split ... &sort=-1,1

Thanks for all of that. Good stuff. So maybe a combo of Batters eye, grass and ancient Guardian burial ground.

[Jack Merridew]

Fangraphs allows you to look at team splits and you can look at Line drive, ground ball and flyball percentage as well as hard hit, medium hid and soft hit percentage.

At Home the M's hit line drives 18.5% of the time while on the road they hit line drives 19.8% of the time. AL average is 20.4%. A diference of 1.3% would equal about 40 fewer line drives by the team over the course of the season. They hit a few more ground balls at home. 41.7% verses 41.3% on the road. The Soft hit % is even more drastic. They hit the ball softly 20.4% of the time at home and only 17.9% of the time on the road. That equates to about 78 more weakly hit balls at home than on the road. Conversely they hit 31.9% of their balls hard on the road and only 29.3% hard at home. Which equates to about 80 more hard hit balls on the road than at home. AL averages for soft hit is 16.3% and for hard hit is 32.2 %

Switching ot over to the pitching side and seeing how are pitchers fare at home and on the road, The M's opponents at safeco had a Line Drive percentage of 20.6%, a soft hit percentage of 17.1% and a hard hit percentage of 31.9%. On the road the M's opponents had a Line Drive percentage of 20.7%, a soft hit percentage of 14.5 % and a hard hit % of 34%

So in conclusion hitters both for the M's and for their opponents have fewer line drives, more softly hit balls and fewer hard hit balls at Safeco than they do at other ball parks. I think its safe to conclude that its more than the grass and that the contact is not as good at home as it is on the road.


https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/split ... &sort=-1,1

Good work there - thanks for that! Would you agree that a difference between wOBA and xwOBA would indicate mainly the effect of the field conditions? I think i read somewhere that xwOBA takes park dimensions into consideration, so that would just leave the grass and air density i suppose.

Also, is there a stat for percentage of swings resulting in balls put in play?

[Jack Merridew]

The Mariners' strikeout rate at Tmobile was .291 while only .267 on the road.

[Captain 97]

Fangraphs has contact percentage numbers but they don't allow you to view them as home/away splits.