D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports
I continue to find Statcast’s bat tracking data fascinating. I also continue to find it overwhelming. Hitting is so complex that I can’t quite imagine boiling it down to just a few numbers. Even when I look at some of the more complex presentations of bat tracking, like squared-up rate, I sometimes can’t quite understand what it means.
I’ll give you an example: when I looked into Manny Machado’s early-season struggles last week, I found that he was squaring the ball up more frequently when he hit grounders than when he put the ball in the air. That sounds bad to me – hard grounders don’t really pay the bills. But I didn’t have much to compare it to, aside from league averages for those rates. And I didn’t have context for what shapes of squared-up rate work for various different successful batters. What’s an analyst to do?
If you’re like me in 2024, there’s one preferred option: ask my friendly neighborhood large language model to help me create a visual. I had an idea of what I wanted to do. Essentially, I wanted to create a chart that showed how a given hitter’s squared-up rate varied by launch angle. There’s a difference between squaring the ball up like Luis Arraez – line drives into the gap all day – and doing it like Machado. I hoped that a visual representation would make that a little clearer.
First things first: I downloaded every ball in play from this year where Statcast recorded a bat speed, pitch speed, launch angle, and exit velocity. Then I manually calculated whether each batted ball was squared up. As a refresher, a batted ball is squared up if the ball travels at 80% of its maximum theoretical velocity, as measured by a proxy formula: 1.23 * bat speed + 0.23 * pitch speed at home plate, which is roughly 92% of pitch speed at release. If you’re interested in following along with me at home, you can find that data here. If not, bear with me, because I’d like to show you some pictures I made.
Gallery:
These are some of the visual representations of the squared-up rate of different hitters at various launch angles, showing how they differ in their hitting styles and success rates. The graphs provide valuable insights into the performance of these players and how they approach their at-bats. Each player has a unique profile based on their contact quality and launch angles, which can help us understand their strengths and weaknesses at the plate.
