GB%, LD%, FB%
Description:
These Batted Ball Statistics are fairly straightforward: they express how many of a batter’s balls in play are line drives, groundballs, or fly balls. This includes balls that leave the park (home runs), so you will reach 100% when you add all of a player’s ratios together. Major league ballplayers have a variety of swings, resulting in a large number of different batted ball profiles. Some batters hit lots of fly balls (typically power hitters), others put lots of balls on the ground (contact hitters), and many others fall somewhere in between.
Infield pop-ups are also tracked on FanGraphs (IFFB%), but these numbers are generally small and fluctuate from year to year. They’re the worst batted ball type for batters, as they are easy outs.
Context:
2010 Batted Ball Values
Note that groundball and fly ball rates are not ranked from “Best” to “Worst”, but from “Highest” to “Lowest”. A particularly high or low groundball or fly ball rate is not necessarily helpful, but some batters can also flourish in the extremes. It all depends on how a batter derives offensive value.
Things to Remember:
- A line drive produces 1.26 runs/out, while fly balls produce .13 R/O and groundballs produce .05 R/O. In other words, batters want to hit lots of line drives and fly balls, while pitchers want to make batters hit groundballs.
- Players that don’t hit many balls in the air (higher GB% with lower FB% and LD%) generally have higher BABIPs and batting averages, but they have limited power.
Links for Further Reading:
BABIP: Slicing and Dicing Groundball Out Rates – Baseball Analysts
1
Is there anywhere I could find results splits for batted ball types for individual batters (for example, what percentage of Albert Pujols’ line drives resulted in HR; what percentage of Josh Hamilton’s fly balls resulted in 2B)?
Hi, I had a question about line drive %. I was under the impression that it correlated fairly strongly with BA, but it seems there are some guys like Bartlett and Pennington who have pretty high LD % and still don’t hit for much of an average. Can anyone explain why that is?
A couple reasons:
1) Line drive rate is far from perfect. What’s the cutoff between a line drive and a looping fly ball? Weak hit bloopers are sometimes classified as “line drives”, so you have to keep in mind the data isn’t entirely perfect.
2) There’s more to hitting for average than just line drives. Yeah, they typically fall in for hits more often than other hits, but you can’t ignore a player’s GB/FB ratio either. And BABIP plays into it a huge amount.
Great question, thanks for asking!
Thanks for the answer Steve.