The Twins Led the League in Optimized Contact. So How Do They Get Better Next Year? - Caretaker Exclusive

[Davy Andrews]

In 2024, the Twins were the best team in baseball at pulling the ball in the air. With the entire hitting staff gone, what does that mean for the 2025 season?

Image courtesy of © Jordan Johnson-Imagn Images

So let’s start at the beginning. Going by weighted on-base percentage (wOBA, if you’re in a hurry), here’s the value of each kind of batted ball during the 2024 season.

• Groundball: .228
• Line Drive: .642
• Fly Ball: .420
• Popup: .014

Fly balls are good. Line drives are great. So long as you don’t pop the ball up, hitting the ball in the air is where it’s at. Let’s get a little bit more granular, now, and break down those air balls by spray angle.

• Pull: .792
• Straightaway: .427
• Opposite. 362

All three are still great, but pulling the ball in the air is even more where it's at; it's where "where it's at" is at. There are two big reasons for that: First, you tend to hit the ball harder when you pull it. Second, center field is where the fence is deepest and the best outfielders play. Even though pulled balls are hit harder, this season, the average pulled home run was hit at an exit velocity of 104.2 mph, while the average home run to center was hit 105.9 mph. It just takes more mustard to hit it out to center. Maybe you hate the focus on power and launch angle that has taken over the game, for aesthetic reasons. That’s completely understandable. But the numbers above are too clear to ignore. They’re why everybody is trying to pull the ball in the air.

So far, I’m guessing I haven’t surprised you, but maybe you will be surprised to learn that in 2024, no team pulled the ball in the air as much as the Twins. The Twins pulled 819 line drives and fly balls, which represented 7.2% of their swings, 13.4% of their total plate appearances, and 19.3% of their batted balls. All four of those numbers were the highest in baseball. Everybody is trying to pull the ball in the air, and the Twins were the most successful team in the league, not just this season, but in the entirety of the Statcast Era. Since Statcast started measuring these things in 2015, that 13.4% mark is the highest in baseball. In second place? The 2019 Twins, who pulled the ball in the air in 13.1% of their plate appearances, and who inspired Matt Trueblood to coin the statistical phrase "Bomba Rate".

In today’s game, Isaac Paredes is the poster boy for pulling the ball in the air. Doing so allows him to hit the ball out of the ballpark even when he doesn’t get all of it. In 2024, Paredes’s average home run was hit at just 99.8 mph. He was the only player in baseball who hit more than 15 homers and whose homers had an average exit velocity under 100 mph. That’s his specialty, and when Paredes put the ball in the play, he pulled it in the air 28.9% of the time, the highest rate of all qualified players. But you know what the Twins specialized in last season? Players who didn’t get enough playing time to qualify. If we drop the batted ball minimum to 200, Byron Buxton jumps into first place at 29.1%. That’s right, higher than Paredes.

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[old nurse]

Onviously I didn’t read the article as I do not have a yellow background. The Twins were in the middle of the pack in terms of runs, hits, OPS,, WRC, WOBA<and GIP. When you look at the the stats for the players, 30% of the PA were by players with an OPS+ less than 90. Two of the main culprits will leave via free agency Improved health of key players will also bring the numbers up. A cure for the sophomore slumps would also be of help. Maybe the will add a sports psychologist to the training staff 

[PDX Twin]

One could reasonably interpret this as saying that what you call "optimized contact" is not a very useful measure.

[Linus]

57 minutes ago, PDX Twin said:

One could reasonably interpret this as saying that what you call "optimized contact" is not a very useful measure.

This. One of the first steps in assessing data is a simple test for reasonableness.  By looking at the Twins offense one would surmise that there is noise in the data. For example: the Twins seem to try and pull everything. In your scenario any thing in the air to left is being counted as a good outcome. Maybe there are a bunch of sliders on the outside corner that get pulled to left and have no chance of doing damage?

[Guest]

I'm tired of "looking at the numbers", The fact is the Twins sucked when they needed to blow.

[Eris]

Trying to understand the totality of optimized contact. I didn’t see strikeouts mentioned. I didn’t see RBIs with 2 outs and RISP. 

[Whitey333]

Well that was about the biggest bag of nothing I've read in a long time on Twins Daily.

[mrcharlie]

Sorry, not buying.  The best offenses use the whole field for hits.  This article represents the idea that you can use stats to support any claim.  By most stats the Twins offense as a whole was in the mid range of MLB.  

[Heiny]

Lol.  Didn't read the article, but the headline sure made me laugh!

 

[old nurse]

23 hours ago, Eris said:

Trying to understand the totality of optimized contact. I didn’t see strikeouts mentioned. I didn’t see RBIs with 2 outs and RISP. 

Twins hit ,246, 11th best in all of baseball 

[Aerodeliria]

Fly balls to left are just outs and only  optimized when your team has more than three hits for the entire game...