Driveline Baseball Interview, Part 4: The MLB Swing Revolution

Swing Revolution

Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: Also, on Launch Angle/Exit Velocity, what is still misunderstood/misrepresented in coverage of the trend?

Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: Launch angle and exit velocity are simply measurables, accurate measure of ball flight, of what coaches consistently talk about. Every coach wants to hit the ball hard with a good trajectory, they just use different terms and then get angry with one another for various reason.

It seems pretty ridiculous that people argue about it especially considering some coaches say they just want players to ‘hit the ball hard’ and not focus on ‘exit velocity’. Though (I hope) there are only a few of them, they do exist. With the technology we have now, you can actually get a number on how hard an athlete is hitting the ball versus the eye test so it’s silly to just disregard that ability. It really is a great tool because you can track and measure progress over time to make sure athletes are improving.

Easily the most misunderstood part is whether athletes should hit fly balls or not. The short answer is obviously yes. The issue is some people like to cite batter average numbers that show that line drives are the best and groundballs and flyballs aren’t good. The issue is that in the past fly balls and grounders were calculated solely by stringers, people watching the game marking down what the batted ball was.

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There are two issues with this. The first is parallax error. Each press box is at a different angle to the field, meaning batted balls are going to look different between each park. Second, there isn’t strict classification on what makes a fly ball a fly ball and what makes a line drive a line drive. Up until Statcast it was the best way to classify batted balls. Now that we have Statcast, we can get more precise.

We can look at batting averages based off of launch angle and exit velocity and we can pretty clearly see that hitting the ball hard in the air is the most beneficial outcome. Yet some still get caught up in the grounder, line drive, fly ball debate. Instead you should be looking at what launch angles and exit velocities produce the best batting average and slugging percentage and how can I practice achieving those launch angles and exit velocities to make either yourself or your players successful.

Next: Trout has a big birthday

Thoughts:

Certainly, I can say I was in the camp that discussed that there was a launch angle that was too high and that all fly balls were not optimal, but Michael makes an excellent point in reviewing previous data on fly ball vs. line drive in that you’re not viewing on launch angle, you’re viewing on result of the hit from a stringer.

The data of results of various launch angles is now more easily accessible to the average fan who is willing to dig through MLB.com’s Statcast website, so we can compare things much better.

Enjoy the video from Josh Donaldson. The way he approaches hitting is something that most of us never heard in little league for sure!

We’ll be back with more this week!