I understand now something that I didn’t understand at all two years ago, and I thought I would try to explain this to you.

            Basically, there is no such thing as a Fly Ball Hitter or a Line Drive Hitter.  OK, this is an over-generalization, I am stating as an absolute truth something that is only generally true.   I’ll have a paragraph in a moment, “Qualifications and Apologies”, but let me make my point first.

            For every five balls in play. . .leave strikeouts out of it.  For every five balls in play, a hitter hits two fly balls, two ground balls, and one line drive.   The ratio isn’t exactly the same for every hitter, of course, and the ratio isn’t exactly 2-1-2, of course.   But still, the statement is a lot more true than it is false.

            I had this idea, before I had actual data, that there were some hitters who hit mostly fly balls, and there were some hitters who hit mostly ground balls, and then there were the great hitters, who hit mostly line drives.   I believe, based on the things that people say, that that’s what most baseball fans think.  

            It’s not true.

            The reason it is not true is simple.

            Hitting a baseball is really, really hard.  You’ve got a baseball moving 90, 95 miles an hour, and you’ve got a wooden stick moving at a comparable speed, and you’re trying to bring them together so that they meet squarely.

            Most of the time, you miss.

            If you swing a little bit too low, that’s a fly ball (including pop ups as fly balls).

            If you swing a little bit too high, that’s a ground ball.

            If you hit it square, that’s a line drive.

            If you’re behind the pitch, you’ll pop it up.

            If you’re ahead of the pitch, you’ll roll the ball to an infielder.

            If you time it perfectly, that’s a line drive. 

            Everybody—and I mean everybody—is a little bit off most of the time. 

            Almost everybody swings a little bit too low about as often as they swing a little bit too high.   Thus, almost everybody hits about twice as many ground balls as line drives, and most hitters hit about as many fly balls as ground balls.   A 2-1-2 ratio.  

Qualifications and Apologies

          Of course, there are some hitters who chop down on the ball, trying to hit ground balls, and there are some hitters who try to hit the ball in the air.   However:

            1)  There really aren’t very many of them, on either side of that, and

            2)  It generally doesn’t work.  

            And

            3)  It doesn’t have much to do with why or how one hitter is different from another. 

            Most of the guys who do either of the above—chop down on the ball or concentrate on lofting the ball—are marginal players who have little impact on the game, or catchers or shortstops who are just trying to hang in the game.  There are two good hitters who chop down on the ball—Jeter and Ichiro--and Joe Mauer is a good hitter and a ground ball hitter.   I don’t think there are any really good hitters who have a huge uppercut.  

            There’s a simple reason for this.   It’s too hard.   Trying to center your bat on the ball is hard enough.   When you try to do something more than that, you’re making it harder.

            If you hit a line drive, you hit .700—actually about .725.    The math goes something like this:  for every 10 at bats that you don’t strike out, you’re going to have about 8 fly balls and ground balls, and you’re going to hit about .250 on those, so that’s 2 hits.   You’ll hit two line drives and hit .700 on those, that’s 3.4 hits for each ten at bats you don’t strike out—a .340 average.   The actual average of major league hitters who didn’t strike out last year was .329; we’re a little off, but we’re speaking in generalities, rather than calculating decimals.

            But if you chop down on the ball, you’re just creating more ground balls—on which your batting average is going to be low, even if you run like Rickey Henderson—and your line drives will be weak, so you’ll lose 75 points on those.  

            If you uppercut more than a little bit you’ll strike out more, and you will wind up hitting a lot of pop outs and fly outs.   

            No hitter actually hits fly balls on 50% of his at bats, over time, but some hitters are close to that number, and sometimes a hitter will stray over 50% for a single season. 

I believe the only major league regular last year who hit fly balls on 50% of his balls in play was Kevin Millar.   You know what his batting average was when he hit a fly ball?

            It was .181.   Yes, that included all of his home runs, but even so, that’s .181 with a .496 slugging percentage (on his fly balls), which becomes .147 with a .412 slugging percentage if you figure that half of his strikeouts are attributable to the uppercut.  

            Alfonso Soriano has a big uppercut.   His career batting average, when he does put the ball in the air, is .271—not adjusted for the strikeouts.   Most of the people you think of as “fly ball hitters”, like Jim Thome and David Ortiz and Mark Teixeira and Ryan Howard and Lance Berkman and Albert Pujols, really are not.   Most of them hit more ground balls than fly balls.   A few of them hit slightly more fly balls than ground balls.   For the most part, they have the same 4-2-4 ratio as everybody else.   Albert Pujols has an absolutely normal ratio of ground balls to fly balls to line drives.   So does Dustin Pedroia.   It has nothing at all to do with why Albert Pujols is Albert Pujols or why Dustin Pedroia is Dustin Pedroia. 

            What makes hitters different, one from another is:

            1)  How HARD they hit the ball,

            2)  How often they swing and miss,

            3)  How many pitches they take, and

            4)  How often they pull the ball. 

            Those things are really different, one hitter to another.   And, to an extent, of course, the fly ball/ground ball mix does figure into it.   Let’s look at those one at a time.

Fly Balls, and Fly Ball Hitters

            Fly balls are actually not 40% of balls in play, but more like 37-39%.  

            There is tremendous variation, among hitters, in what happens when they hit a fly ball.    There is relatively little variation in batting average among hitters when they hit a ground ball, and there is relatively little variation in batting average among hitters when they hit a line drive.   There is tremendous variation in batting average among hitters when they hit a fly ball.   Ryan Howard hits .450 when he hits the ball in the air, with most of the hits being home runs.   Juan Pierre hits .120, and most of the hits are singles and doubles.  Lots of guys hit less than .150 on balls hit in the air.  It’s a big difference.  

            For this reason, fly balls are, in a sense, the dominant element in the triangle.   Everybody hits .240 when they hit a ground ball, more or less, and everybody hits .725 when they hit a line drive.   But when they hit the ball in the air, everybody’s got his own number—so it is that number that gives shape to the player’s overall ability.

            When they hit a ball in the air and pull it, a lot of the big hitters hit .500, .600, even .700.   Of course, they don’t pull it all that often.   What makes Howard unique is that he hits the ball out of the park very regularly to all fields.   Nobody else does.  

            Most hitters actually hit more ground balls than fly balls—not a lot more, but a few.   The vast majority of hitters, for every ten balls in play, hit four ground balls, two line drives and four fly balls—the 4-2-4 ratio.   Some of the guys who chop down on the ball, like Juan Pierre and Willy Taveras, are 6-2-2, and some of the guys who really uppercut are 3-2-5.  Almost all of the good hitters are 4-2-4; the “fly ball” minority among them are guys who hit 4.2 or 4.3 fly balls per ten balls in play.  If all you mean by the term “fly ball hitter” is guys who hit more fly balls than average, obviously there are are hitters like that.   The average is about 37-39%; you can call anybody who hits 40-46% a fly ball hitter, I guess.

            But not everybody that you might think of as a fly ball hitter meets even that standard.   Richie Sexson?   He hits more ground balls than fly balls.  Always has.  Even in 2003, when he hit 45 homers, he hit far more ground balls than flies (215-154). Andruw Jones, the year he hit 51 homers, hit 202 ground balls, 202 fly balls, and 77 line drives.   A lot of guys who hit 30, 40 homers still hit more ground balls than fly balls.

            So does Ryan Howard.    When I first saw Ryan Howard, I thought that he was the second coming of David Ortiz.   They have obvious similarities as players—but when you profile them as hitters, they’re actually not even similar.   Very, very different.   David is something of a fly ball hitter—45% fly balls.  Howard fly ball percentage is actually a little low.   Ortiz doesn’t strike out a lot, by the standards of modern hitters.   Howard does.  

            But Ryan Howard hits the ball so phenomenally hard—and remember, we’re contrasting him with David Ortiz, who can crush a baseball himself—but Howard hits the ball so hard that he doesn’t need to pull it to get it to go out.  In his career, he’s hit 66 home runs to the opposite field, 57 to center, 54 to right.   David hits six times as many homers to right field as he does to left—actually a little more than six.    Radically different hitters—different strikeout rates, different ground ball rates, different pull rates, different bat speed.  

Good hitters concentrate on trying to square up on the pitch, center the bat on the ball.   When you center the bat on the ball and have outstanding bat speed, what happens is:

1)  You get a good share of line drives, and

2)  Your batting average on fly balls is good, because the fly balls often leave the park.

            But when a hitter concentrates on hitting the ball in the air, what happens is

1)  He strikes out more, and

2)  His batting average on fly balls goes down, dragging his batting average down further.

The difference is the difference between Carlos Pena in 2007 and Carlos Pena in 2008.   In 2007, Pena had a normal ratio of ground balls to line drives to fly balls (133-64-158).    He hit .420 on fly balls.

Last year he lapsed, to an extent, into his habit of trying to loft everything.    His fly ball ratio went up (104-59-165), but his batting average on fly balls dropped to .340.   Not that there’s anything wrong with that; he was still an extremely effective hitter, but--the more fly balls you hit, the less effective they become. 

Ryan Ludwick, a fly ball hitter, had a great year in 2008, but Ludwick hit 105 Line Drives.   That was very unusual—he had almost as many Line Drives (105) as Ground balls (109).   It’s questionable whether that is a sustainable performance model.   We’ll see.    My guess is that in 2009, his line drive percentage drops, and his batting average falls 30-40 points.

            Again, I didn’t know any of this stuff two years ago, and this my job.  You shouldn’t feel stupid for not knowing it.   I always assumed that there were guys who hit 400 fly balls a year.   It’s not that way. 

Line Drives, and Line Drive Hitters

            Moe Drabowsky was a quotable relief pitcher who had been around the majors a long time before he was a teammate of Joe Torre in 1971, when Torre won the MVP Award.   I’m going to have to give you this quote from memory, so it’s probably not exactly right, but Drabowsky after the ’71 season said something like “Joe Torre had the greatest year I ever saw.   I’ve been around a lot of great hitters.  I was a teammate of Ernie Banks when he won two straight MVP Awards, a teammate of Hank Aaron in ’61, Rocky Colavito for a couple of years, Frank Robinson when he hit 49 homers and won the Triple Crown in ’66, Boog Powell when he won the MVP Award last year.   But Joe Torre this year hit three or four line drives every day.  I’ve never seen anybody else do that.”

            Torre had a fantastic year, and I have no doubt that he hit a huge number of line drives.   But if you hit one line drive a day—one—that’s a huge number.   Dustin Pedroia won the MVP Award last year; he hit 129 line drives. 

            Almost everybody hits 19 to 22% line drives.   Pedroia last year hit 21%.   Kevin Youkilis hit 22% line drives, Teixeira 21%, Ryan Howard 22%.   Juan Pierre has a career average, in the years since we have been tracking this (dating back to 2002) of 22%; Barry Bonds is at 21%.  Jim Thome’s at 20%.  Chipper Jones hits 22%.  Jeter’s at 21%. 

            What makes the difference, then?  Well, first of all, striking out.  When you hit a line drive, it’s usually a hit.  When you strike out, it’s never a hit.   Fewer strikeouts means more line drive hits.

            Second, there’s a difference in how hard different players hit the ball.   The average hitter hits about .725 when he hits a line drive.   Pedroia, who hits the ball quite hard, hit .746 last year (on his line drives).  Ryan Howard in his MVP year hit .795 when he hit a line drive. 

            Third, since line drives are mostly hits, even small variations in the percentage of line drives become significant.   

            And fourth, some guys do hit more line drives.   There are two players that I know of who hit 25% line drives:  Todd Helton, and Michael Young.   Young gets 200 hits every year for a reason:  he centers the bat on the ball better than anybody else, at least now that Helton is older and not as quick as he used to be.  

            The weirdest Line Drive data of 2008 was Rickie Weeks’.   First of all, Weeks hit exceptionally few line drives—15%.   His bat was either just under the ball or just over it, just ahead of it or just behind it.  Second, his batting average on line drives was just .527—about as low as I have ever seen.  He clearly was not entirely “right”, as a hitter—but he also was hitting in tough luck.  

            It is not unreasonable to describe some guys as “Line Drive Hitters”, as long as you remember what you’re talking about.   You’re talking about guys who hit 23-25% Line Drives, as opposed to the norm of 19-22%.

Ground Balls, and Ground Ball Hitters

            Now, there are ground ball hitters.   Early in the article I said that there is really no such thing as a Line Drive Hitter or a Fly Ball hitter, but I didn’t say there is no such thing as a Ground Ball Hitter.   There are hitters who deliberately hit ground balls, and who hit the ball on the ground more than 50% of the time.

            Ground ball hitters have very recognizable ground ball patterns, quite different from the norms.  They are guys who hit .100-.150 when they hit the ball in the air—as many hitters do--so they figure “what’s the percentage in that?”   One of the things you read very often about Ichiro is that he is tremendously strong, and when he chooses to turn on a ball he can hit it out.  This may be true, but Ichiro’s career batting average when he hits the ball in the air is .184.  

            Ichiro since 2002 has hit 2300 ground balls, 900 line drives, 996 fly balls.   That’s a normal split for these guys; that’s almost the exact ratio that all of these guys have—closer to a 5-2-2 ratio than 6-2-2, and, even though they chop down on the ball, they usually hit more fly balls than line drives:

My general feeling about Ground Ball Hitters is:  You can have them.   There are a few guys who make it work for them.  Ryan Theriot.   Skip Schumacher, last year at least.  A few guys make it work.   Joe Mauer is a great player.

            But the typical Ground Ball Hitter is. ..well, Juan Pierre.   Do you know what Juan Pierre’s batting average is, when he hits a ground ball?   It’s .237.   Since 2002, Pierre’s batting average on ground balls is .237—and that’s almost all singles.

            You can understand what he is doing; he hits .122 on fly balls, so what’s the point in that?   He’s trying to eliminate that “.122” sector from his batting average.

            But. . ..237, all singles?   Who wants that, either?   And that’s one of three problems.   The other two are:

            1)  He is NOT significantly increasing his percentage of line drives.  Pierre has a career mark of 22% Line Drives, not much different than anybody else, and

            2)  When he does hit a line drive, he doesn’t hit it very hard, so his batting average on line drives is lower than the norm.   Pierre has a career batting average, on Line Drives, of .666, which sounds good but isn’t.  It’s 50, 60 points below the norm.  

            Most of these guys are below the norm—Taveras .648, Pena .627, Gathright .693, Bloomquist .684.   Jeter, Mauer, Ichiro—those guys hit the ball hard, and they hit .720-.750 on line drives.  That’s great.   The other guys. . .they’re just trying to stay in the league, and they’ve got an idea of how to do it, and they’re still in the league so I guess it must be working for them.  

            Some guys drive their ground ball percentage up by bunting.   Bunting for a hit is a good play, if you can do it.   But if you don’t hit the ball hard, the theory of “chop the ball and run” really doesn’t work.   You remember what I was saying before, that power hitters hit .350, .400 or more when they hit the ball in the air, but singles hitters hit .150 when the hit the ball in the air?   People think that speed is like that for ground ball hitters, that ground ball hitters hit for a high average when they hit the ball on the ground.

Well, yes.   Sort of.    Fast guys hit for a higher average on ground balls than slow guys do.  

The thing is, Jacoby Ellsbury hit .264 on ground balls last year—and it’s all singles.   Joey Gathright hit .269 on ground balls.    Yeah, that is better than the slow guys do; the slow guys hit .190 or .210 on ground balls.   Adam Dunn in 2006 hit .136 on ground balls.   But still, .260 and it’s all singles. . .what’s that really worth?   Not very much. 

            Well, I’m wandering now into things that I’ve known all along.  Before I had the data, maybe I would have bought into that slap-and-run theory, at least for some players.  Before I had the data, I would have thought that maybe some hitters hit 60% line drives. Before I had the data, I thought there were true “fly ball hitters”.   There aren’t.  

            Until the last year, I never knew that almost everybody really hits about 40% fly balls, 40% ground balls and 20% line drives.   I didn’t realize that a lot of players hit .150 when they hit the ball in the air, while others hit .370 and up.   I am glad to know these things, and I wanted to share.