GB%, LD%, FB%
Batted Ball Statistics are fairly straightforward: they express how many of a batter’s balls in play are line drives, ground balls, or fly balls. This includes balls that leave the park (home runs), so the sum of a batter’s batted ball statistics should be 100%. 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%), and they are expressed as the percentage of pop-ups a batter hits out of their total number of fly balls. 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:
Please note that the following chart is meant as an estimate, and that league-average batted ball rates varies slightly on a year-by-year basis. To see the league-average batted ball breakdown for every year from 2002 to the present, check the FanGraphs leaderboards.
| League Average | |
|---|---|
| LD | 20% |
| GB | 44% |
| FB | 36% |
| IFFB | 10% |
Power hitters will generally have higher fly ball rates (~44%), while contact hitters normally have high ground ball rates (50+%). And all hitters will hit their share of pop-ups.
Things to Remember:
● A line drive produces 1.26 runs per out, while fly balls produce 0.13 runs per out and groundballs produce 0.05 runs per out. In other words, batters want to hit lots of line drives and fly balls, while pitchers generally want to cause batters to 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 have limited power.
● This data is tracked by Baseball Info. Solutions (BIS), which is why it’s only available for players back until 2002.
Links for Further Reading:
BABIP: Slicing and Dicing Ground Ball Out Rates – Baseball Analysts
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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.
Am I missing something obvious, or is there a big difference between the production numbers cited here, and the ones in the linked Baseball Analyst article? (http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2009/01/babip_slicing_a.php)
Fangraphs:
“- 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.”
Baseball Analyst:
“However, when it comes to production, flyballs are more valuable than groundballs. To wit, including home runs, line drives produced .40 runs in 2007 and .39 in 2008, while the average outfield flyball yielded .18 runs in 2007 and 2008. Meanwhile, the average groundball generated .05 runs per event in 2007 and .04 in 2008.”
The groundball run rates are exactly the same, but line drive numbers are way off. Is the ratio cited in fangraphs mistakenly the run production per/inning?
Also, does anyone know where I can find the updated production numbers for 2011?
Thanks in advance.
Sorry, the difference is obviously R/O vs. R/PA. I missed that.
While all line drives could be called “well-hit”, the ground balls and fly balls cannot be distinguished as such. Some ground balls dribble to the pitcher while others burn down the 3rd base line. Fly balls are similar. Is there a stat available here where you can see the amount of balls hit from say, -5 degrees to +40 degrees with the horizontal, and with a minimum velocity? Call it the GW%, for Good Wood %.