Article: What Can Statcast’s New Swing Metrics Tell Us About the Blue Jays?

[Leo Morgenstern]

The Blue Jays’ offense exploded for a 12-0 victory over the Athletics on Thursday. Everyone in the starting lineup reached base at least once. Altogether, the Jays went 18-for-41 (.439) with five walks, three doubles, and four home runs. They struck out just three times. 

It wasn’t Toronto’s most lopsided win of the season – that would be last week’s 14-0 drubbing of the Padres – but this was arguably a more impressive showing from the bats. They recorded more hits, more extra-base hits, more home runs, more walks, and fewer strikeouts in this one. The Blue Jays swung the bats harder than ever on Thursday (season-high 73.3 mph average bat speed), and it paid off in a big way.

Even before last night, the Jays were hitting much better in May than they had in April. They came into Thursday’s contest with 28 home runs, a 109 wRC+, and an average of 4.2 runs per game since the calendar flipped to May. They left with 32 home runs, a 116 wRC+, and an average of 4.5 runs per game, all of which rank top-five in the AL. That’s a huge improvement from the first month of the season, when they ranked among the bottom five in all three categories. 

The Blue Jays have a solid pitching staff and one of the best defensive units in the league. Still, they need to score runs if they’re going to compete for a playoff spot. Throughout the first month of the season, more often than not, it seemed like that wasn’t going to happen.

Now the question becomes: Which version of the Blue Jays offense are we going to see over the next four months? Was April or May more reflective of the lineup’s true talent?

There’s no way to know for sure (that’s why they play the games!), but any and all additional data we can get our hands on will inform our expectations for this team going forward. So, I was excited when Statcast came out with several new metrics earlier this month that help us to assess and quantify swings better than ever before. 

These four new metrics are called swing path, attack angle, ideal attack angle rate, and attack direction. You can find them all on Baseball Savant, and you can read about them in Mike Petriello’s in-depth explainer on MLB.com. I also recommend reading these pieces by Matthew Trueblood of Baseball Prospectus and Davy Andrews of FanGraphs to learn more about all the new data at our disposal. I won't lie, it's complicated stuff, but the best way to learn how to use these numbers is to read about them and play around with them yourself.

So, in an effort to further my own understanding, I decided to see what the new Statcast metrics had to say about the Blue Jays as a team. Here's what I found. 

The Blue Jays Have the Flattest Swings in MLB
Swing path, also known as tilt, describes the angle of the bat’s path (in relation to the ground) during the final 40 milliseconds before contacting (or passing) the baseball. A swing that is perfectly parallel to the ground would have a 0-degree swing path, although you’re unlikely to see such a flat swing in a game. The flattest swing by any major league hitter so far this year was a one-degree hack by none other than Toronto’s Anthony Santander.  

On average, Blue Jays hitters have the flattest swings in the league, with a 30-degree average swing path. For context, the league median swing path is 32 degrees, while the team with the steepest swings, the Tigers, has an average tilt of 35 degrees. In other words, the range isn’t huge at the team level. Still, it’s interesting to see the Blue Jays at one extreme of the list.

It’s critical to keep in mind that there isn’t such a thing as a “good” or “bad” swing path. It's not nearly that simple. As you might imagine, steeper swings are more closely correlated with whiffs, while flatter swings can lead to more contact and less power, but take that with a kosher-sized grain of salt. After all, the mighty (and strikeout-prone) Giancarlo Stanton had one of the flattest swings in the game last year, while contact king Luis Arraez had one of the steeper swings in the league.

Still, the fact that the Blue Jays have flatter swings than any other team could help explain why they have the lowest strikeout rate in the AL and the lowest whiff rate in MLB. But might it also mean their recent power surge is more mirage than reality? 

Maybe. But like I said, it’s not really that simple. For instance, Toronto’s average swing path in May is just as flat as it was in April. Yet, this month in particular, the team average has been dragged down by a pair of hitters with two of the flattest swings in the game: Alejandro Kirk and Santander. Kirk has never been much of a power bat, while a slumping Santander has actually hit for less power in May than he did in April. Aggregate team numbers can only tell us so much. 

The Blue Jays Have the Lowest Average Attack Angle in the AL
Attack angle describes the vertical angle at which the bat is travelling as it makes contact with (or passes by) the baseball. As MLB.com's Tom Tango explains, attack angle is “predominantly a function of timing” rather than swing path. In other words, it’s mostly about when during the swing the bat hits the ball, rather than the path the swing is taking. A late swing is more likely to have a negative attack angle, while an early swing is more likely to have a high attack angle.

Once again, there isn’t really such a thing as a “good” or “bad” attack angle. However, as is the case with launch angle, most of the best contact comes in a sweet-spot range that’s neither too high nor too low. An attack angle too low will send the ball straight into the dirt, while an attack angle too high will pop it up. Statcast defines the “ideal” attack angle range as five to 20 degrees.

Toronto’s eight-degree average attack angle is the lowest in the AL and the second-lowest in MLB. So is their ideal attack angle rate (the percentage of their swings that fall between five and 20 degrees) of 48.4%. The league averages are 10 degrees and 51.5%, respectively. 

This seems to suggest the Blue Jays have been late swingers this year. I'm not surprised by that, considering they have the lowest pull rate in the American League. What's more, opponents have attacked the Blue Jays with velocity all year. This team has seen four-seam fastballs or sinkers for 49.5% of pitches, compared to the 47.3% league average. On a related note, the average velocity of all pitches the Blue Jays have seen is 89.8 mph, the fastest average velocity in the AL.

When it comes to individual players, the one who stands out the most (by far) is Vladimir Guerrero Jr. His average attack angle is the lowest among all qualified MLB hitters, while his ideal attack angle rate is the lowest in the AL. Among Blue Jays batters (min. 30 PA), his ideal attack angle rate is almost six points lower than anyone else's. It’s also about five points lower than it was last year. Guerrero might never be a guy with high attack angles, but it sure seems like poor timing is holding him back from reaching his full potential right now.

The Blue Jays Rank in the Middle of the Pack in Attack Direction
Attack direction is pretty much the horizontal companion to attack angle. It measures the angle at which the bat is travelling as it makes contact with (or passes by) the baseball, but it is measured in relation to the front of home plate rather than the ground. That means it tells us whether the bat is moving toward a hitter’s pull side or oppo side at the moment of contact. 

Toronto’s average attack direction is two degrees to the pull side, which is right around league average. As with all of the other metrics we’ve discussed, it’s not necessarily better or worse to have a heavy pull-side or heavy oppo-side average attack direction. That said, swings with a pull-side attack direction are going to lead to pulled contact, which usually results in more extra-base hits.

It's interesting to find the Blue Jays sitting in the middle of the pack with a slight pull tendency according to this metric, considering they have such a low pull rate this season. However, one thing to consider is that their pull rate on fly balls is right around league average. So, when vertical angle isn't an issue, the Blue Jays are pulling the ball just fine. However, they're far more likely to be late (and therefore hit the ball to the opposite field) on the balls they hit into the ground. 

Among individual players, Tyler Heineman stands out with a 13-degree pull-side average attack angle. That’s the fifth most extreme pull-side swing in the league (min. 50 swings). The fact that Heineman is pulling the ball so much has played a big role in helping him maintain such ridiculous offensive numbers despite his slow swing speed and low exit velocities. 

***

I chose to dig into the Blue Jays' team-wide numbers as a fun way to get my feet wet, but I quickly realized that the new Statcast swing metrics are much more useful for analyzing individual players. For one thing, looking at team averages can hide extreme profiles on both ends of the spectrum. Moreover, what works for one player won’t necessarily work for another. The best swing for Vladdy isn't the best swing for Bo, so there's only so much we can learn from combining their swing data. I also realized that the best use for these metrics is comparing a player's swing from one season to the next, so as to better understand what he might be doing differently. Needless to say, there's a lot more for me (and all of us) to learn about how to use these new stats, and a lot more to learn about how the Blue Jays swing the bat. We're still just scratching the surface.

View full article

[hanton]

vlady and bo are the very bottom of the majors when it comes to attack angle, Vlady is dead last and Bo is bottom 10.   Our player development system is trash - don't know what they teach in the minors - do they just ignore swing path? .....etc or are they actively teaching young hitters to flatten their swing?, "short to the ball and long through it", "knob to the ball" "direct to the ball" ...etc dumbest sayings ever