Reviewing the newest advancements that Baseball Savant has made to swing data
Last year, MLB’s official site for advanced stats, Baseball Savant, released one of their most important tools that fans can use to understand hitters.
Bat tracking had finally made its way to the public, and fans were able to see significant data regarding hitters’ swings. Stats such as bat speed and swing length were hailed by many as very important additions to the MLB’s ever-expanding database of stats and metrics.
That being said, there were still some useful data that hadn’t made its way to the public until May 20, when Baseball Savant added more depth to swing data with swing path data.
Not only can fans learn about how hard a hitter can swing the bat, but now they can see the plane on which they do that.
The purpose of this newest advancement in Statcast data is to show how efficient a hitter is at driving the ball, or just making solid contact with it.
So, what type of data can baseball fans see, regarding their bat path?
At the surface, Baseball Savant lets us see four important things with their new tool: Attack angle, attack direction and swing path.
All of these can really provide a heap of useful information about a hitter that was once deemed hard to uncover, so let’s see what these do.
Firstly, I’d like to cover what I was most excited to see, and that is attack angle.
Attack angle is angle at which the bat is following as it impacts the baseball. Think of it like this: if you swing downwards in order to get on top of the ball, your attack angle will be negative, but your attack angle will be positive if you swing upwards in order to get under it.
Why this is important: optimal attack angles are very crucial to generating contact at what is known to be the sweet spot (between 8-32°). With an optimal attack angle, you can hit more line drives or fly balls, and more line drives and fly balls result in more extra base hits or homers. Keep in mind, though, that if you try to attack the ball at a very high angle, you will begin to see more pop ups or shallow fly balls. That is why you need to find the optimal attack angle so that you can generate batted balls in the sweet spot. The more you do that, the more you are going to make hard contact and drive the ball to the gaps or over the fence.
How would batters generate attack angle, then? Well, that’s where swing path comes in.
Swing path is the overall shape of a batter’s swing. It is calculated by taking the angle of your bat before contact is made, to show how steep your swing is as it approaches the ball. To paint a picture, a 0° swing path will be a very flat swing, while something like a 70° swing path will have people thinking that you’re teeing off for 9 holes of golf.
Why this is important: Swing path directly correlates to attack angle, because the steeper that you bat gets as it approaches the ball, the higher that your attack angle will usually be. Of course, however, you usually need an optimal swing path in order to have an optimal attack angle. That said, Mike Petriello of MLB.com wrote that this can help in understanding what types of hitters we look at. Freddie Freeman is famous for an uppercutting swing, with his swing path angle being very high. But it’s his own trait and he’s great at what he does, regardless of what his swing path is. He is just one of a few really solid exceptions to what I previously said, but my point remains: most hitters do need to have an optimal swing path to have more success at the plate.
Lastly, attack direction is another really useful tool to make sense of hitters’ batted ball tendencies aside from attack angle.
This tool reveals data regarding the direction that the bat is headed as it makes contact with the ball. This is visualized through more angles, this time horizontal, that show the bat’s direction in relation to either the pull side, oppo side or up the middle.
To simplify this, if you are a righty and your bat is traveling left at the point of contact, your attack direction will show an angle towards your pull side. If you usually have an inside-out swing or naturally try to swing towards the opposite field, it’ll show an angle towards the opposite field as well.
Why this is important: being more inclined to your pull side is a big factor towards success at the plate. It results in harder contact because when you pull, you are usually more extended at the point of contact than you would be if your bat traveled towards the opposite field. However, you cannot just be a dead-pull hitter — you need to be able to adjust to how pitchers are attacking you. So, if you are swinging too far towards your pull side, pitchers are going to start pitching outside, where it’s going to be incredibly hard to make solid contact while trying to pull the ball.
Now that you have an idea for what this brand new data is, I think it is helpful to show an application of it to one of the Cleveland Guardians’ hitters.
For this, I will be using 1B/DH Kyle Manzardo, mainly because I think that he can provide a really solid example of what I’ve been trying to teach.
Firstly, Manzardo is known for being a pulled fly ball machine. If you look at his batted ball data on FanGraphs, Kyle pulls the ball 44% of the time, and hits fly balls at a 53% clip. These two can be explained through the newly added swing data that Baseball Savant has graced us with.
So, let’s take a look at how deep Kyle gets with his swing. Manzo’s swing path goes down at a 37° angle swing path. Meaning, he is setting himself up to swing upwards. This is important for him to generate launch angle, because you can’t get under the ball without dipping your bat barrel a bit.
Consequentially, that swing path now allows Kyle to swing his bat upwards on the ball at an 18° angle, which is just enough to help him post a launch angle that resides in the aforementioned sweet spot. Again, this is important, because the more that Manzo finds the sweet spot, the harder he’ll hit the ball and the farther it’ll go. And of course, that means more singles, doubles and homers.
However, Manzardo’s attack angle isn’t the only factor for his tendency to pull fly balls. It’s his attack direction as well.
We’ve got the fly ball part down, but now we need to understand how he pulls the ball. Simply, Kyle is pulling the ball because that is the direction at which his bat is traveling at the point of contact. With an average 1° attack direction towards the pull side, Manzo doesn’t find himself going oppo often. And if he’s able to pull the ball more, the more he’ll be able to get extension and make harder contact with the ball.
I was very excited to see these new tools being introduced by Baseball Savant. Personally, I’ve always wanted to study attack angle, so I was pretty bummed out when I saw that it wasn’t part of the swing data added to Savant last year. But after some waiting, I am very happy that they have added this and a few other very helpful tools for swing data.
I also hope my explanation of this made enough sense, and that you learned something from this!