Dead Ball Victims - Power Hitter and Home Run Decliners for Fantasy Baseball

May 19, 2022

Jon Anderson breaks down fantasy baseball home run decliners - MLB hitters struggling to hit for power and HRs due to the changed baseball in the 2022 season.

Things are different this season. The offense is down across the board and we are seeing hitters have a lot of trouble hitting for power. These aren't unprecedented times, but we got so used to the juiced-ball homer-happy era that it feels very strange to be back to the days of the early 2010s.

Some of the low numbers on the offensive side can certainly be chalked up to the early months of the season, the cold weather, and the short Spring Training. But it would seem that most of the blame must go to the makeup of the baseball and the presence of humidors in all 30 ballparks.

Now, these humidors won't have the same effect all year. Their impact depends on the humidity of the air in the stadium - so they might actually end up helping the offense a bit in some situations if I'm understanding that correctly. We could end up getting back up pretty close to last year's numbers, but for right now, it would seem that power numbers are going to be tougher to come by.

Power Stats for 2022

At this moment, the league is slashing just .234/.307/.376 with a home run every 38.8 plate appearances. In 2021, it was .244/.317/.411 with a homer every 30.6 plate appearances. So it takes eight extra plate appearances to expect a home run to be hit now, a significant change. If we zoom in, we find that most of the differences are occurring on fly-balls. Here are some numbers on fly ball performance compared to last season.

So we know that fly ball performance has declined, and we can feel decently confident that it will stay down relative to recent seasons. What we want to find out now is who this impacts the most. I ran through a few checks in the data to see what we can find.

Expected wOBA on Fly Balls

This is a pretty rough first cut at this, but it's interesting to see. I looked at xwOBA on fly balls and compared 2021 to 2022. We still have some guys with very few fly balls hit this year, and I only restricted this to players with at least 10 fly balls hit this year, so we are certainly still dealing with a lot of variances here. Here's the leaderboard.

You can sort those columns or search for the player you want there. Any data point you see here, especially the 2022 marks, could be the result of things other than baseball. Maybe these players have just been hitting fly balls at an angle above the optimal range more than they did a year ago. It would be irresponsible to say that just because a hitter has a much lower xwOBA on fly balls this year as compared to last year, it's definitely a result of the new baseball and humidors hurting them - that's what I'm trying to say here.

Now let's keep that in mind and we'll move on to the next metric.

Home Runs Per Fly Ball

Now, we're doing the same thing but comparing each player's home run per fly ball rate. As we saw at the beginning, about 17% of fly balls went for homers last year, and in 2022, it's down below 14%. 15% would seem to be a good reference point for what is "normal," but of course not every hitter would have that expectation - guys that hit the ball harder are going to have the skill of seeing more of their fly balls fly over a fence. Here's the data.

Once again, we don't know right away what explains the big differentials we see here just based on what I've shown so far. This would easily be explained by a hitter just hitting the ball much less hard in 2022, which changes to the baseball wouldn't really factor into. I'm not making any statements with these data, we're getting there!

Same Launch Attributes, Worse Results

What I did next is find players whose fly balls look like this:

• Similar average exit velocity
• Similar average launch angle
• Much worse outcomes

I'm no physicist, but I do feel pretty confident that the changes in the baseball aren't going to make much difference until after the ball is put into play.

"an object in motion will tend to stay in motion unless acted on by Rob Manfred and/or a humidor" - JonPGH Newton

What this means to me is that if we isolate players that are hitting fly balls about the same off the bat but seeing much worse results, we could then probably place some more blame on the environmental changes. So I did that, let's see some results.

We didn't get a ton of results here since I added so many parameters. I was looking for only hitters that had velocity differentials of two miles per hour or less, and angle differentials of three degrees or less (in either direction).

We see a mixture of hitter "types" here. Seth Brown and Rhys Hoskins top the list, and those are some heavy swingers. I would not have thought that the baseball would have a huge effect on their power given the raw swing speed they possess. What seems to be the case there is that these two have been guys that hit their fly balls really high in the air. The average fly ball is hit around 37 degrees, those two are both averaging 39 degrees on fly balls this season. Not hugely over the average (the highest values we see on the average angle on flyballs are 42-44), but above it to be sure.

We also see the more suspected players here like Trea Turner, Yuli Gurriel, Dylan Carlson, and Harrison Bader. Guys that are not hitting balls above 110 miles per hour with much frequency rely heavily on line drives for their homers. Let's expand on those two things a bit.

Angle Range Analysis

I looked at all home runs hit in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022 and looked at the details of their launch angle distribution. Here's the table:

Those numbers are all angles measured in degrees.

What you can see here is that the angle range that home runs are being hit at has narrowed in 2022. The minimum angle is the highest of all the years, and the maximum is the lowest. Now those two things could very well just be caused by the fact that we are only five weeks in and haven't seen nearly as many home runs, there will be plenty more opportunities for new minimums and maximums to be set this year.

The most important number here is the standard deviation. The standard deviation is a measure of how spread out a set of numbers is. The lower the standard deviation, the more narrow the range of data. This figure is derived from the whole dataset, not just the minimum and maximum - so it tells us a lot more.

We see that the standard deviation was much, much higher in 2019 and 2021 as compared to 2018 and 2022. That means there is less room for error here, hitters will want to be very close to that optimal angle (about 25-30 degrees) to have a chance at a homer.

Right now, there are 13 hitters that have hit 20 or more fly balls this year with an average angle of above 40 degrees. They are:

Yasmani Grandal, Mitch Garver, Eduardo Escobar, Alex Bregman, J.T. Realmuto, Hunter Dozier, Carlos Santana, Salvador Perez, Bobby Dalbec, Byron Buxton, Nolan Arenado, Adam Duvall, Yuli Gurriel

Launch angle isn't a very "sticky" statistic, meaning that these numbers are prone to randomness and can change in a hurry, but right now, that list of players is hitting their fly balls well above the optimal angle range.

Line Drive Performance

Here are the percentages of line drives that have gone for homers each of the last three [full] seasons:

2019: 2.59%
2021: 2.09%
2022: 1.31%

So we are on the other side of the angle range now, and another substantial difference in 2022. It's been much harder to get a line drive over the fence. Here are your 2022 line drive rate leaders thus far. These hitters can certainly be counted on for extra base hits and batting average (line drives are the best-batted ball types for that), but they will be seeing fewer homers than in past years if these rates keep going the way they are.

Conclusion

I realize there isn't a ton of actionable advice here. But I think we gave further evidence to the idea that it is much tougher to hit a home run this year. Therefore, we should be extra aggressive after the guys that reliably hit fly balls very, very hard. Conversely, you shouldn't be expecting many homers to come from the lighter-swinging line-drive guys, even previously reliable power sources like Trea Turner and Marcus Semien.

I would definitely be willing to pay a bit more than normal for a Rowdy Tellez (cheap) or Giancarlo Stanton (expensive) type player that won't be affected much by the changing circumstances. I also think there's much less use for a guy like, say Jorge Polanco - who won't steal many bases for you and probably won't be doing much in home runs this year.

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