Introduction and Home Run Analysis
Home runs are game-changing happenings in daily baseball, and even if you haven’t played daily baseball yet and have merely looked at the scoring across sites, this isn’t breaking news to you. If you’re a grizzled daily baseball vet, you’re also likely familiar with the lemming trend of chasing homers. This lesson will help you legitimize home-run breakouts from 2015, identify hitters who had good fortune, and identify hitters who should be in store for a home-run outburst in 2016. The information in this lesson can help season-long gamers, but it’s primary purpose is to help daily gamers. With that in mind, I’d be doing you — the reader — a disservice if I didn’t immediately address park factors.
Park factors won’t be analyzed in-depth in this lesson, but they should be a major piece of your daily baseball research. If two left-handed batters have similar power-hitting profiles and are facing similarly talented pitchers, the one who’s playing at Great American Ball Park (129 park factor for homers for lefties, per StatCorner) should be considered more likely to reach the seats than the one playing at PNC Park (99 park factor for homers for lefties).
With the park factors caveat addressed, this lesson will provide you the resources necessary to thoroughly dissect the legitimacy of the home-run output of hitters while also getting ahead of the curve of a potential home-run heater. The first resource I lean on heavily is FanGraphs. FanGraphs provides batted ball data such as line-drive, ground-ball, and fly-ball rates as well as soft-hit, medium-hit, and hard-hit ball percentages. Those stats are of great importance when diving into home-run research. Another stat that should be analyzed is HR/FB (home run per fly ball) rate. These are the stats I’ll most frequently refer to in this lesson.
Another resource used in this lesson is the home run and fly ball leaderboard found at Baseball Heat Maps. Looking at the average distance of just home runs cuts off valuable data since it entirely eliminates other fly balls, such as near home-run misses. The top of the leaderboard is littered with the type of raw-power phenoms one would expect to find there. The final resource I’ll use in this lesson is Baseball Savant. This site features useful information such as exit velocity of batted balls as well as max home-run distance. Maximum distance on homers is a strong indicator of raw pop, and as is the case with the top of the Baseball Heat Maps’ leaderboard, the top of the exit velocity and max distance leaderboards at Baseball Savant feature the biggest power hitters in baseball, too. With these tools in your tool belt, you’ll be able to gain valuable information about the home runs and power production of players that will help you immensely in daily games.