Hard Knocks - Twins Spring 2019 Edition

[AlwaysinModeration]

So a week or so ago I came across a reference to a study (which I will need to dig up) pointing out one of the only things that you can take away from early season returns: hard hit balls.  Specifically, the operating theory was that players who hit balls really hard early in the season were likely to have an increase in their slugging percentage for the entire season.  The metric that was focused on was the (in my view, somewhat arbitrary) threshold of 108mph.  The site that was linked to was https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/, and on that site there was a way to pull up all of the early season 108mph+ hit balls.  The Twins had a few early on when I looked.

 

I was intrigued at the time, and wanted to go back and see how that played out going forward.  So I went back yesterday and started to do a little bit of digging, focusing on that 108mph bar.  How were the Twins faring, and were there any trends? 

 

I found some interesting information.  First of all, I found that the Baseball Savant site https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/ is awesome.  You can find a listing of every single batted ball by every player on every team, complete with a link to a video clip of the play.  I went through and looked at a bunch of the Twins' 108mph+ hits.  It's pretty easy to see why that arbitrary line was set - if a player hits a ball that hard, which is really, extremely hard, it is almost always going to result in a home run or an extra base hit, because the ball made it all the way to a wall.  The only exceptions are when the ball is hit right at someone.  There are a number of groundouts, lineouts and flyouts (also lineouts, really) among this group, but they are outs only when the player barely has to move.  Amazingly, this includes outfielders, too - they better be pretty close to a ball moving that fast, because otherwise it will rocket by them at that speed.  Clearly, hitting a ball in excess of 107.9mph is good thing.

 

So in pulling together some information about the Twins results, I decided to pull the numbers for the current Twins players, looking at their numbers over their entire careers, their 2018 season, and their results so far in 2019.  I started this yesterday morning, and then went to update for the double header yesterday.  There were four Twins' batted balls that surpassed the 108mph threshold; Cruz had two such balls, while Schoop and Cron also had one each.  (Renato Lopez hit four such balls yesterday - watch out for that guy).

 

Over their careers, three current Twins have managed to net 5% or more of their hits at 108mph or more:  Kepler (5.5%), Cruz (also 5.5%), and Cron (5.0%).  Schoop is next, with 4.7%.  No other Twin manages even 3% of their hits that hard, however, there is a group of three Twins who are between 2 and 3%:  Cave (2.6%), Garver (2.4%) and Buxton (2.1%).  All other Twins do it less than 1% for their career.

 

Turning to the numbers from last year, we can see that the biggest outlier was actually Cruz.  He hit 78 balls out of 519 ABs at least 108mph, good for 15%, way above his career norm of 5.5%.  Schoop had a down year (as we know), with only 14 extremely hard hit balls out of 473 ABs, or 3%, down from 4.7%.  Kepler was also down, at 3.6% (from 5.5%), but everyone else was in their general career range.  Polanco managed it1.3% of his ABs, up from his career average of 0.6%, and perhaps that is a trend worth watching, as we add in the early 2019 returns.

 

Which brings us to this year.  How has the team done to start off the season?  So far, the story looks very good.

 

Cruz:  9 out 46, for 19.5% of his at bats

Schoop:  6 out of 51 for 10.2%

Cron:  5 out of 53 for 9.4%

Buxton:  5 out of 56 for 8.9%

Kepler:  4 out of 62 for 6.5%

Polanco: 3 out f 65 for 4.6%

 

Of note...for as amazing as Garver has been to start the season, he actually hasn't hit one ball that matched or exceeded 108.  And Rosario has only one such hit - but that is actually not surprising, as he's only done it three times in his entire career!

 

Obviously, it's early, so all of this may just be small sample size. But it does make you wonder whether the new manager is emphasizing this in any way with the team.  The Baseball Savant website has page in which you can see the team averages.  Last year, the Twins were slightly below average as a team in terms of "hard hit" % (which they define as 95mph+), at 33.5% of their batted balls, compared to the league average of 34.2%.  This year:  the league average is still at 34.2%, but the Twins are at 40.4%.

 

While I was looking up the numbers, I perused a few other names to see how they stacked up.  Here are the number of career hits of 108 or greater for a few players of note:

 

Eduardo Escobar: 10

Willians Astudillo:  0

Brian Dozier: 4

Joe Mauer: 5

Tyler Austin: 20  (including 16 in 2018, for 6.5% of his ABs)

Logan Morrison:  82 - 2.5% for his career

 

The fact that the FO signed three guys (Cruz, Cron, and Schoop) who end at least 4.7% of their career ABs with a ball they hit at least 108mph, added to the fact that six of the Twins players (Cruz, Schoop, Cron, Buxton, Kepler, and Polanco) have seen a jump in their % of extremely hard hit balls this year compared to their 2018 or career numbers makes me think this is a point of emphasis for the front office and the new manager.

 

Or maybe it's just hitting against Baltimore?

 

 

[ashbury]

Not relevant to your post, but since I hadn't used this database before, I located (unless I botched the search) the HR with the lowest exit velocity this year. Eugenio Suarez hit one out at 86.7 MPH on April 11.

 

Not surprisingly, it was just inside the left foul pole.

 

https://cuts.diamond.mlb.com/FORGE/2019/2019-04/11/8a6c4b99-16e4ccf7-f018b2d7-csvm-diamondx64-asset_1280x720_59_4000K.mp4

 

Doesn't seem that weakly hit - that's the only disappointment of this little exercise.

 

Last season's low-EV winner was hit by our old pal Eduardo Nunez, at 80.5 MPH. But that was an inside-the-park job.

 

I love the Internet. There, I said it. _{^{(Don't tell Mrs Ash, she doesn't suspect.)}}

[diehardtwinsfan]

Always, just curious why you chose 108 MPH... But that said, very interesting data. I'm hoping that your observation is due to some of the changes the front office and management have had on the org this season. I do remember Parker's (I think) article earlier this year on just how ST was used with a purpose this season.

 

 

[USAFChief]

Joe Mauer career: 5.

[adorduan]

 

Joe Mauer career: 5.

Yup, and somehow still managed to carve out a really nice career.  I'll take results every time....

[AlwaysinModeration]

Dug up the article that caused me to first look at the numbers. It was a 2018 article by Rob Arthur, in which he says:

 

“For every mile per hour above 108, a hitter is projected to gain about 6 points of OPS relative to their predicted number.”