Tuesday, June 04, 2024
Statcast Lab: Vertical Swing Angles
(Click to embiggen)
The above shows three different angles, all related to this HR by Adolis Garcia.
Let's start with the blue line on top. That is what we call the Vertical Bat Angle. We compare the position of the head of the bat to the position of the handle of the bat. If the head is above the handle, then it has a positive vertical angle. The head below the handle has a negative vertical angle. Naturally, when the head and handle are both parallel to the ground, then the vertical angle is zero. If you watch the video, you can see that the bat is parallel to the ground a little bit before contact and a little bit after contact.
The green line in the middle is the Vertical Attack Angle. Whereas the blue line measures bat position in 2D space, the green line measures bat velocity in 2D. In other words, the green line measures the direction of the bat. You can see that at the point of impact, the bat has its velocity moving in an upward direction.
Finally, the orange line is the Vertical Path Angle, the Swing Plane. Once the bat approaches the intercept point, the bat is essentially moving in a single plane. If you can imagine a (tilted by 30 degrees) sheet of paper, the bat is passing through that sheet of paper, and it does so from about 30 msec prior to the Intercept Point, and onwards beyond the intercept point.
I know that all this is not very obvious. The analogy I make is to consider a golf swing. The Vertical Path Angle, the Swing Plane, approaches closer to 90 degrees (maybe it's 70, I don't know, someone out there can tell us). The Vertical Attack Angle is similar to a baseball swing, eventually going to a small positive angle. And naturally the Vertical Golf Angle starts off at a huge positive angle on the backswing, down to a huge negative angle (approaching that 70 or 90 degree angle of that Swing Plane), and continuing back on a huge positive angle.
Anyway, I hope some of that made sense. We'll make it make more sense next time.
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