Did you know that in 2024, Byron Buxton was the best ground-ball hitter in baseball? Of course you didn’t know that. Why would anyone know that? It’s information that offers no tangible benefit to anyone. It barely qualifies as trivia. But now you know it. In 2024, Buxton hit 75 ground balls, and on those ground balls, he batted .400 with an absurd 155 wRC+. The league as a whole batted .249, with a wRC+ of just 41. Buxton was more than three times better than the average player! To be clear, this means nothing at all. Buxton is a career .304 hitter on groundballs, with a wRC+ of 68. In 2024, he hit his grounders harder than usual, but not the hardest he’s ever hit them. It’s just a fun fact—one that you can use at holiday parties to signal to people that they shouldn’t waste any more time talking to you. Having the ability to successfully chat people up is a useful gift, but even more useful is the ability to say something so specifically meaningless that they’ll leave you alone. That’s our goal for the day. We’re ice fishing for fun, useless stats.
Here's our second stupid fact of the day. Stathead has a split finder feature, in which it separates pitchers into groundball pitchers or fly ball pitchers. Against fly ball pitchers, the Twins were the best team in baseball. Their .782 OPS was the highest in the league, and their 114 home runs trailed only the Yankees. That part makes sense. The Twins have cultivated a team full of hitters who try to pull the ball in the air. They’re going to fare well against pitchers who throw four-seamers up in the zone. If we look in the other direction, you won’t be surprised to learn that against groundball pitchers, the Twins ranked all the way down at 25th, with a .667 OPS. In fact, if you look at the past five seasons, the Twins still rank all the way down at 25th. That’s one of the dangers of cultivating a team with a singular focus, rather than a diversity of approaches and swing paths. Everyone will have the same weakness. Wait, we’re coming dangerously close to pulling a lesson from our statistics, and that’s not what we’re going for at all. Let’s get back to nonsense: You know how the Twins were the best team in baseball against fly ball pitchers? Well they also grounded into the most double plays against fly ball pitchers. They grounded into 60 double plays against fly ball pitchers. How is that even possible? Against groundball pitchers, they ranked all the way down at 21st!
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