Closer Look At Ryan Zimmerman
At the beginning of the season there much much hype about a career resurgence from Ryan Zimmerman. Many people including myself in the first month noticed a pretty big uptick in production, and many other stats which we thought would be the key to having a career year. Most notably was a large increase in Launch Angle in the first month. But Zimmerman never really bought into the thought that an increase in Launch Angle could help revitalize his career.
Read Here, Here, Here. In the end Zimmerman ended up with 36 Home Runs, up from a very common 15 in 2016. This got me thinking..what caused his change? Is there anything that he ended up doing that we can breakdown and possibly apply to our own hitters. The results are shocking, and lead me to many other questions.
Plate Discipline:
Literally Zimmerman had similar if not the same stats in terms of swinging at pitches both inside and outside of the strike zone. This is important to be because one of the first things I tried to look at was if he potentially narrowed in his focus to becoming more of a selective hitter. As you can see below all things look very similar from the past several seasons.
Key takeaways from his plate discipline stats are that over his career not much has changed for him in terms of some of the more important stats like swinging at pitches outside of the zone. (0-Swing) More importantly also swinging at pitches inside of the zone. (Z-Swing) Both have remained similar over the time of his career year.
Alright so he isn’t swinging at any different pitches, and he looks to have the same type of eye at the plate. Lets take a quick look at his breakdown of types of hits, where he is hitting the baseball, and potentially the quality of his contact.
Again most results are common to his career averages. Even such stats such as Flyball % went down. But one thing you will notice that is an outlier from years past is going to be his HR/FB ratio which ballooned from 13.2% in 2016 to 26.5% in 2017. So even though he didn’t actually hit more in terms of percentage of fly-balls from his career average, more of those fly balls resulted in Home Runs.
Which leads me to look at his Average Launch Angle. This is where it gets funny…his average Launch Angle for the 2017 season was just 8.5 degrees, down from 2016 when it was 9.0 degrees.
You will notice that significantly more hits came between roughly 0 degrees, and 15 degrees in the charts above. Again using Savant we can find out that his average Exit Velocity went down from 92.5 in 2016 to 91.4 in 2017.
So basically making this even more of an different situation. Most if not all of Zimmerman’s stats remained the same or similar as previous seasons. Using Baseball Savant’s Barrels Stat I did find that a significant jump in the amount of Barrels that Zimmerman Caught 49 in 2017 up from 23 in 2016.
Which lead me to look up what Zimmerman ultimately did when he hit the baseball hard. Which is what I consider to be the mark of a great hitter. When you hit the baseball hard where is it going?
In 2017 the Average Launch Angle for Baseballs hit over 95 MPH was 13.2 degrees, but in 2016 it was only 8.1 degrees. Interesting case study in my philosophy to find that players who hit the baseball hard into the air are the most successful players in this day and age. If you are wasting your barrels by putting the ball onto the ground then you are sadly not being the best hitter that you can be.
Zimmerman to conclude I think seemed to have a slightly better year in terms of home runs and power production, but honestly it seems as though he might have just ran into a few more baseballs and putting good swings on them. Also being healthy for a full season helps with just allowing him to have more opportunities to hit home runs.
Zimmerman’s interesting Case Study leads me to my next question of who is wasting the most hard hit baseballs in the MLB. Please follow on Twitter @Coachrodrigues2 for more or find us on Instagram at Baseball EDU.
