Ground Ball Rate Leaders Since ’10
January 11, 2012 at 6:41 pm by Ben Duronio under Atlanta Braves
Top 10 in ground ball rate since start of 2010:
Derek Jeter: 64.2%
Ichiro Suzuki: 58.6%
Elvis Andrus: 58.4%
Juan Pierre: 56.0%
Casey Kotchman: 55.6%
Yunel Escobar: 55.4%
Jason Heyward: 54.6%
Michael Bourn: 54.5%
Denard Span 53.9%
Brett Gardner: 52.8%
I have been on record saying I expect Heyward to come out and have a great season, somewhere near the tune of .265/.365/.455. Plus, 36% of the 813 of you who voted on our poll think Heyward will have the highest fWAR on the team, so more than a third of you think his numbers will more than rebound.
With that said, something needs to change with his ground ball tendencies. He can stay productive at that level, which he has over the past two years (yes a 98 wRC+ is still productive), but this ground ball rate needs to decline in order to achieve the level of greatness expected when he was ranked the No. 1 prospect in all of baseball.
The players above mostly small, light-hitting players. The average height of the other nine players is 72.33 inches, or six feet and 1/3 inches. The average weight is 192.2 lbs. Contrast that to Heyward’s 6″5, 240 lb listing. Obviously, Heyward’s size and shape is not quite in line with the other high ground ball hitters. While it is nice that Heyward has the ability to be a valuable offensive performer with a ground ball rate above 50%, the potential for him to be a franchise changing hitter will likely not be tapped with a rate that high. I think he can change, though I am not necessarily ready to say that he will. Until he proves otherwise, it is hard to project him hitting 30 or more homers any time soon.
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wow, this is eye opening. He really need to make the adjustment and start getting the ball in the air.
I agree he hits too many grounders. You also throw the term “great season” around a little too liberally. Nothing about a .265/.365/.455 is great for a RFer.
@2
Great for a rebounding year, not great in comparison to the rest of the league. Also, that line w/ his fielding and base running should make him a ~5-6 win player over 150 games. I can see how my statement was misleading though, my apologies.
Hopefully Greg Walker already knows this
He is too good a hitter to have such a ground ball oriented swing. The way he comes to contact though, if he doesn’t gets fooled his hips commit early and it produces that terrible ground ball to second that he hit about once a game last season.
Heyward will rebound, his diligence and work this off-season will be evident come Spring Training.
This is definitely something he needs to fix in order to get back to the upper part of the line-up. I like him hitting 2nd in most cases, but a #2 hitter shouldn’t be an obvious double-play candidate.
Agree, really eye-opening showing of a hurdle he needs to overcome. Hopefully he and the Braves know this as well.
If the Braves hadn’t traded Andrus or Escobar, they could have had 3 of the top 10 here. Yuck.
Not Braves related, but the only other outlier guy on that list is Kotchman. I haven’t looked at any other batted ball stats for him, but that stat alone leads me to think he was extremely lucky last year and is due for a HUGE drop off this season.
That’s kind of what you expect out of Kotchman at this point. He had tons of infield hits last year also, and he is no speed demon. His 2011 was a pure mirage, and he probably would not even qualify for the list due to plate appearances if he weren’t so fortunate last year.
Never played baseball a day in my life, but lots of golf. From just observation, a lot of baseball players seem to utilize an instinctive swing and succeed with it. Chipper, however, really seems to have worked hard at a great swing where he uses balance and a wonderful rhythm of body parts–hips, torso, shoulders–to maximize power AND control. Heyward, last year, did not look instinctive or Chipper-like. He looked like he was overthinking everything. Everything looked awkward and out of whack. Ben, your numbers confirm the validity of my expletives during the season–are there numbers for ground ball rates to the second baseman? I bet he would rank even higher.
I am really concerned that something has happened to his swing that will take lots and lots of work to fix. I am not brimming with optimism.
What happened to the frozen ropes he used to hit to left center?
Very interesting…
I wonder if it is meaningful to break this down pre and post thumb injury in 2010…
For 2011, I think his shoulder injury really hampered his ability to drive the ball. Despite what Chipper “supposedly” said, Heyward should have shut himself down for the year and rested his shoulder. He was basically worthless anyway, so why not take time to recover.
If his lead shoulder is healed this year, I think you see those “ropes” to left center more often this year…
First of all, I’m not into all these advanced stats but DO appreciate the modern ways of evaluation. Let’s start there. I do think the eye test is more telling than the sabermetrics in many regards. Let’s go there secondly.
That said, I’m reminded of some comments J-Hey has stated in the recent past on the order of “Upper cutting (fly balls) is not my game”. Or, “Line drives are what I’m about”. It would seem to me that J-Hey has his own system that he’s bought into and accepted.
If my interpretation is correct, then a hitting coach can only enhance J-Hey’s belief system and not be foolish enough to change it. Or, am I missing something with all this talk about stats being the more telling of future production?
I think we all agree that the injury was at least part of the reason. But it might be a combo of the injury AND a hitting coach that preached “aggressiveness”; leading to weak contact.
I honestly think that Larry Parrish tried to make some adjustments to Jason’s swing, and that made Jason think too much about his natural mechanics. I hope that Greg Walker will pick up on that fact and improve Jason’s fly ball ratio and AVG. You guys can call me crazy, but I predict a .285/.360/.475 season with 25-30 HRs for Jason. I still have very high hopes for him.
See, that’s the problem…
A .285/.360/.475 line is not high hopes for Heyward. That is a relatively pedestrian OPS of 835. Heyward is easily capable of putting up a .280/.380/.550 line, and THOSE aren’t even high hopes for him. HIGH hopes for Heyward would be a line of .300/.400/.600, which he has done for stretches of time. He is supposed to be some 1000+ OPS stud, and he has shown glimpses of being just that.
He must have rolled over on a middle-away pitch almost 5x per week for a chopper to 2nd. It was brutal to watch, especially when I have seen him hit those wicked liners into the gaps on the exact same pitch many times before that shoulder problem.
Heyward has 2 modes depending on health: 900+ OPS healthy beast mode, and 700 OPS unhealthy lame mode. The only question is how often Heyward will be healthy.
Again, never played, and not a hitting coach, but in my mind it’s not upper cut versus not upper cut. Great line drive hitters have often had a slight downward angle of attack on the ball. (In golf you hit down on the ball to impart upward flight.) With Heyward it was body mechanics, stuff out of sequence, which caused those wrists to roll. It was unbelievably low power at contact for such an incredibly strong guy. Those ground balls to second had no zip on them. They were looping grounders.
Maybe his injury-free instinctive swing is what we need. Whatever he was doing last year was painful to watch. His 900 OPS would bring us the pennant.
Nick, you are right about the numbers i guessed at not being very high hopes for Jason. However, he is only 23 and he’s coming off of a horrendous year. I should have stated that the numbers i projected are high hopes for next year. It would be fantastic if he hit for the kind of numbers you mentioned this season.
Nick S/17 -
Not sure how you can say an .835 OPS is pedestrian. It’s not quite MVP level, no, but it’d have led the Braves and been 35th among all major league hitters last season.
We don’t need Heyward to be an MVP caliber player any time soon. I’ll take the solid all around production we saw as a rookie, because even if that is his ceiling it’s still worth 5-6 wins a year.
Heyward’s swing is a mess. He bars his lead arm early in his swing and has to pull his right shoulder out of the way to get the bat through the zone. It causes him to struggle with change ups and good two seemers on the outer half, which are the pitches he either misses or rolls over on. He also does not get his hips rotating in time to give him the leverage to drive balls either. He has amazing eye-hand coordination with a lot of strength in his hands. If he could combine those skills with a cleaner swing he could really do some damage.
Part of the problem, I believe, is simply him needing to keep his head still and stay back.
I believe Heyward tweaked his swing a little last year to compensate for both the thumb, but more importantly, his right shoulder. His front hip and shoulder seemed to “bail out”. Put another way, he was starting his front half a bit sooner than previous years to cheat, or get out in front of above average fastballs.
Ok before we change Heywards swing on a single stat. Lets take a step back to look at possible factors to cause his swing to produce ground balls.
Heyward has just turned 22 recently. Which means it’s a good chance that he’s at the tail end of the normal males ‘strength spurt’ or completing the the final growth of muscle and joint tissue. Given Heywards size this could be a strong possibility. Playing over a 100 games of baseball while still growing could easily contribute the injuries he had this season.
Another factor is that Heyward bulked up over the offseason. His body was not fully adapted to the weight and most likely not rested enough for the coming season. And no I’m not inferring PED, there was nothing unatural about his growth.
Regardless if it’s caused by either or both, fatigue related injuries that impact his swing path that are the issue. A better plan for conditioning and rest will most likely fix Heywards issues, then tweaking his swing.
Only thing I want to see is that he stays healthy.
That is a major problem. When you’re not healthy, you tend to do things to keep yourself comfortable, instead of things that are necessarily correct. While comfortability does not necessary have to equal correctness, for Heyward, it was doing more damage to his approach than good.
I put McCann as the Braves’ MVP, for what it’s worth. I think that he’ll put together a full season of awesome next year.
.265 is a “great season”? What is this, 1968?
@26
you’re using batting average to define how good a season is? Yes, this must be 1968.
I am in a keeper fantasy baseball league and have an offer right now where I get heyward and give up drew stubbs and james shields. What should I do? I will probably keep madison bumgarner if I trade shields.
He keeps his shoulders level on every swing for some un-Godly reason. That’s ok on some pitches. However, when you look at virtually every good hitter in MLB history (especially Chipper Jones), they all have different swings for different pitches, placements, and situations. Sometimes, it’s ok to just slap at the ball when the pitcher gives you a backdoor slider on a 1-2 with a man on 2nd base. Look at Chipper…he does it all the time (especially now since he knows he doesn’t have the pop he used to) and he slaps it right over the shortstop’s head and gets the RBI.
It’s adjustments like this that make good athletes great hitters. I know it’s said entirely too much, but adjustments at the plate are something that Jason has simply not mastered yet. Once he does, we could very-well see his full potential.