Thursday, July 27, 2023
Swing Splits, the two Luis
We will be able to slice and dice the swing data to tell some interesting stories. To give you some snapshot of the data, we can focus on Luis Arraez and Luis Robert. (Click to embiggen)
It looks overwhelming, but let's break it down. This has all the swing data we've tracked. For Arraez, it's 709 swings and for Robert, it's 852. So, add 20% to the counts for Arraez to make an apple-to-apple comparison.
The first thing to jump out is that the number of no-contact swings (whiffs) is very low for Arraez (42 or pro-rated as 50), while it's 267 for Robert.
The second thing that jumps out to me is that Arraez has a very low swing speed on balls hit into play (68 compared to 81 from Robert), but he squares it up much higher (94% to 82%). You can also see he chokes up on the bat and/or he has a shorter swing, with the bat head 31 inches from the rotational point, while Robert is at 33.5 (around league average). You can also see it in the attack direction, where Arraez is +7 degrees, meaning the bat slices the other way, while Robert is -4 degrees, meaning he comes around more.
You will see Arraez has a missing row: he has no swings where he is tied up, while Robert has 8.
Also compare each of their hit-into-play with their strike-fouls: all their own data looks very similar, except for the Squared Up part. That is to be expected, as there's a reason the ball went foul rather than into play.
All this data will have use for two distinct groups of folks. The first is the player themselves, so they can appreciate or understand their profile. While obviously every player knows themselves, they may not know the extent of their profile, nor how much their profile may change year to year, or even how it compares to other batters. So, as a scouting tool, this data will be tremendous.
The other group is for the fans who like to think in terms of the talent of the player, trying to forecast their performance. As we get more data in the years to come, we'll be able to compare year to year changes and see how that affects their performance.
The convergence of Scouting and Performance Analysis is well upon us.
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