The Braves aren’t hitting it too high… not that anyone accused necessarily accused them of doing so
Who doesn’t love a good shower argument? You know, the thing where you’re silently crafting cutting ripostes to counter a hypothetical adversary. The thing is, I’m guessing shower arguments are generally prompted by actual things one encounters and doesn’t get a chance to effectively combat. This article, though… well, let’s just say, it’s not a response to an actual argument. But hopefully you still find it interesting.
On June 9, in what would become the latest in a deluge of disappointing losses by the Braves, there were only three barrels between the Braves and the Nationals. One of these, by Jarred Kelenic, delivered a three-run homer in what was essentially garbage time, so we won’t bother with it. Instead, there was something else that struck me in that game. In the third inning, Marcell Ozuna hit a barrel at 102 mph off the bat, and a launch angle of 35 degrees. It traveled 368 feet to right-center and fell harmlessly into a glove — yet another barreled out for the Braves, who lead MLB in the quantity of such, and are second in MLB in the rate of their barrels becoming out. Not much later, Hurston Waldrep, in his MLB debut, badly misplaced a fastball to Keibert Ruiz, who also hit a barrel, at 100 mph off the bat (two mph slower than Ozuna), and a launch angle of 33 degrees (two degrees lower than Ozuna). That one, of course, easily cleared the fence in right for a three-run homer that turned the game around against Atlanta.
When I saw Ruiz hit his homer, I flashed back to Ozuna’s fly out, and had a stray thought: what if the Braves were simply hitting their well-struck balls “too high” given the average baseball’s increased drag in 2024? If I were more canny, I’d probably have stopped before I got too far because A) it’s not like Ruiz really hit his drive much “lower” than Ozuna did, and B) the real issue is clearly the degree of pull, or radial angle. But, instead, I started digging, and found something interesting enough to make this post.
Let’s start with some basic ground rules. First, yes, the average baseball in 2024 has more drag than in 2023. MLB is hosting evidence to this effect on their own website; there’s not much to debate here. Since MLB has collected these drag data, the median drag coefficient in 2024 exceeds that in all past full juiced ball years except 2016 and 2022. Second, there are clear variations in performance of barrels based on launch angle.
In 2023, barrels were hits somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the time, with those in 20-25 degree range being most likely to go for hits, and “extreme” lofted barrels at 36 degrees doing so a bit less than 60 percent of the time.
Litany of disclaimers: Yes, I realize the above doesn’t adjust for exit velocity. I also realize that barrels themselves are a moving target, with higher velocities allowing for more extreme angles to still count as a barrel. This chart is, in some ways, some sort of ouroboros-ian cardinal sin, but it’s mostly here to convey a point. Also, the reason why some launch angles are grouped is because I wanted each bar to reflect a similar-ish amount of total barrels — somewhere between 5ish-10ish percent of total barrels hit. Also, I’m going to add another problem later where I compare total 2023 numbers to through-early-June 2024 numbers, but again, it’s largely to convey a point.
Of course, the idea isn’t just to have your barrels go for hits — the kind of hit is important, too. As such, there’s a bit of an inherent tradeoff: lower barrels are more likely to be hits but less likely to be homers. wOBA inherently deals with this tension for us; we don’t need to do any extra mental math about the preferred angle for a barrel if we have wOBA, which we do.
Basically, in 2023, assuming you qualified for a barrel, there wasn’t too much variation in average success assuming you lofted the ball at anywhere between a 22 degree and 31 degree launch angle, which is really most of the barrel range. If you wanted to simplify things and try to call something a “prime barrel” based on its launch angle alone, about 60 percent of all barrels qualified. The only particularly “subprime” barrels were those hit at the lowest angles; even those lofted, 36-degree-plus barrels became homers often enough to make them perform pretty well considering how often they became outs.
When we get to 2024, though, things are, of course, very different. When we think about “changes in the ball” these days, we mostly think about drag, and when we think about drag, we mostly think about diminishing distance that has some correlation with how much time the ball spends in the air. To that end, a priori, we would expect the “punishment” from a higher-drag ball to disproportionately affect higher-launch angle barrels. Is that what we see?
As far as hit probability goes… kinda? It’s a fairly weak relationship, which may be a sample size thing. (Remember, we’re not adjusting for exit velocity… but then again our cuts of barrels by launch angle aren’t that small.)
If you look at wOBA, though, it’s more clear cut, though still pretty real world data-y and not perfect. Still, it’s pretty easy to plot a basic curve that essentially explains most of the year-to-year decline in wOBA on barrels purely as a function of launch angle and nothing else. Or, if you don’t care about curves, suffice to say: the greatest wOBA declines are very specifically clustered around launch angles of 30-35 degrees.
(It occurs to me that you could just as easily get hangtime data and make this chart more of a fait accompli than it already is.)
Anyway! The ball has more drag! Don’t hit it as high as you did in 2023 if you don’t want to be penalized for it, right?
Alright, let’s go back to ground rules for a second. In 2024, the Braves have:
- The second-lowest hit rate on barrels (61 percent, compared to 68 percent for league average);
- The lowest wOBA on barrels (around 1.020; league average is 1.210);
- The seventh-highest expected hit rate on barrels (75 percent, i.e., the Braves have a 14 percent shortfall, by far by far by far the biggest gap in baseball);
- The 16th-highest xwOBA on barrels (around 1.290, i.e., the Braves have over a .250 shortfall on barrels, by far by far by far the biggest gap in baseball); and
- The third-highest exit velocity on barrels.
So, I can see you right now, saying, “no sweat, I got this.” This is your shower argument (how are you reading this post in the shower, though?). The draggier ball in 2024 kills barrels hit at 30 degrees or more. The Braves hit their barrels really hard, but are being comparatively killed on barrels. Surely, surely, surely they are hitting a bunch of barrels in a manner that’s getting them air resistance’d to hell and into gloves, right? Right?
Wrong.
No, that would be too simple. That would give us something concrete to point to. “The Braves like lofting the ball and having it carry out of the ballpark. The ball isn’t carrying, and hence, the Braves are sucking.” It’d be a diagnosis of sorts, even if the cure would probably be unclear and/or complex. Instead, the reality is… stupid.
Are the Braves hitting barrels at or above 30 degrees (the ones most affected by drag) at a rate greater than league average? No. In fact, they are generally hitting a lot fewer barrels at 28 degrees and above. Instead, they have a bunch more barrels at some of the lowest degrees.
Remember the thing about those low-degree barrels: decent hit probability, but lower chances of a homer, and hence lower wOBA. Somehow, the Braves are hitting more of those barrels, but also hitting them at fielders. This is actually bonkers. (Those last two were in the same game, by the way.)
Remember when we talked about “prime barrels?” In 2023, that was really anything from 22-31 degrees of launch angle. In 2024, it’s really just 24-25 degrees, which have performed much better than anything else. The Braves have 22 such barrels, seventh-most in MLB. Nine of them are outs. It should perhaps be obvious to you that no team has more outs on those 2024 “prime barrels.”
Bottom lines:
- The “2024 baseball,” to the extent such a thing exists, has more drag than prior baseballs.
- Relative to 2023, barrels hit at launch angles of 30 degrees or above are adversely affected more than other kinds of barrels.
- The Braves, however, aren’t hitting more of those types of “higher” barrels.
- Instead, they’re hitting more low barrels, which tend to have higher hit rates “in exchange for” lower homer rates… but are finding low hit rates on those as well.
So, what do you do about this? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone knows. There’s a documented human tendency to try to do something to fix things, even if the something you’re doing isn’t at all related to the problem you’re trying to fix. (My wife and I both hate doing housework. Our house is much cleaner when we have a problem we can’t actually solve, like a sick kid that’s already gotten the medication they need.) Even in baseball parlance, you hear stories about “guys trying to do too much,” whether that’s taking extra risks on the basepaths or “trying to hit a three-run homer with no one on base.” (I’m not saying players actually do this, just that the commentary seems to fixate on it being a thing.) The tempation to do something here is strong. At least we know that the problem isn’t the Braves hitting it “too high” — though I doubt anyone legitimately thought it was, anyway.
Disclaimer reprise: at some point, the 2024 classification of which balls were barreled will change, given the changes to the ball. I’m not sure what’ll happen to the information presented in this post. I’m also not sure why it hasn’t happened yet.