Attack Angle “Hills” and “Spreads”
I think that one thing that gets lost when you think about Attack Angle is that often times this metric is thought of as we want a particular number, and we want it to be consistent. So for example you might see someone say we want it to be 10 degrees upward. This is a very reasonable statement to make. Creating a goal for a player is definitely something that should be done when thinking of bat metrics.
But we also need to realize that over the course of a lot of different swings that this doesn’t play out perfectly like the example above. Most likely we want players who have a range of different outcomes when it comes to bat metrics.
Consider the plot below:
What we find is that a the player has a very large range of different Attack Angles spread between 0 and ~25. This plays out over and over again if you look at a team.
As you can see the team above has a very wide range of Attack Angles from a large range of players. Is this bad? I wouldn’t necessarily say so. I think that this is completely normal. Large ranges of Attack Angle are probably going to be pretty normal on the whole of hitters.
What we should be focused on when it comes to player Attack Angles is what I call the “hill”. I think focusing on where the “hill” in players Attack Angle densities should be something that we focus on.
Focusing on the highest density of Attack Angles will give us a better understanding of what a players swing is doing on a regular basis. Where we can see in the plot above that this players peak is right above 10 degrees.
Looking At “Spread” Of Attack Angles
From this first plot below this is how I visualize Attack Angle “Spread”
When thinking of how wide the “hill” is when thinking of Attack Angle we can start to see just how wide of a range the players swing can handle. Having a wide enough range is probably going to be important, but too wide of a range may also be detrimental. (Looking at this is kind of out of the scope of this article so I’m not going to go into that here)
We can see in the plot below that one player in green has a higher peak meaning that they are swinging at that attack angle more often the the player in red, but we can also see that the player in green’s “spread” of attack angles is smaller than the player in “red”. Which can start to guide how we might go about coaching these two players.
Considering player “Spreads” and their “hills” when it comes to Attack Angle is just giving you as the coach a more robust view of what is happening in a player swing. There is more that we can do when looking at Attack Angle than just focusing on a player average metric which is a good start but moving off of just that one metric should be something that we pride ourselves in thinking deeper about.
