Examining wOBA For Different Plate Locations
Some pitches are more forgiving than others when it comes to outcomes at the plate. If we start to examine wOBA for instance for different plate locations we start to find a telling story that can help us understand some of the base rates of hitting.
In just about anything each action or step that we take in a game in a small gamble in terms of the outcomes. Far too often decisions are made that can lead to a decrease in the chances of the players succeeding or the team succeeding. I want to examine different pitch types today and start to get a little bit of an idea of where the best outcomes happen for different pitches.
For the plots below I’ve filtered only balls that were hit into play, and tried to find out where the best outcomes happen for different pitch types. The data is taken from 2019. We are going to be using the wOBA Scale so it is nice to brush up on that if you haven’t. I’ve linked to Fangraphs article below which should help paint a more in depth understanding.
Short hand I’ve included the Table below which was taken from the link above:
If we are going to try to optimize our hitters to have successful outcomes we are going to focus on that .400 number. As strikeouts for the plots are removed which should move everything lower. But I want to focus today on Balls that are hit into play.
What we should see from the following is at least an understanding of where the best hit baseballs are contacted in the strike zone for different pitches. Hopefully we can start to refine players zones by understanding a little bit more about this topic.
This is just an overview and obviously we can get really granular if we wanted to by examining different matchup types, but for today’s post I want to focus on the most general examination that we could.
Sliders
Sliders are one of the most used pitches in baseball. While it provides pitches with a lot of swing and miss opportunities, it also creates situations for hitters that are less successful when we look at the wOBA on different zones. We see the heatmap below which gives us a general idea of where players are successful.
We can see that most of the success that hitters have is in the middle of the plate. With a tighter and more vertical zone appears to be the most successful. This plays out when we filter for zones that have success rates greater than .400 in terms of wOBA.
In general we can see that most of the success that we see is in the heart of the plate with a few points straying toward the right handed batters box. Overall we can see that the four squares almost right at the center being the most successful.
Curveballs
Curveballs again we can see that the reoccurring theme for them is that baseballs that are put into play in the center of the plate are most successful. With the most successful areas trending toward the bottom of the zone. Such makes sense are more pitches are thrown in those areas in terms of Curveballs.
Again when we filter we can see this play out. We can see that the most successful zones have shifted from the center of the plate, to an area slightly below the center. Which goes with the overall trend of curveballs being thrown slightly lower than fastballs.
4-Seam Fastballs
4 Seam Fastballs start to paint a slightly different story for hitters, as they are much more successful against 4-Seam Fastballs, and these pitches are thrown more often than other pitches.
For the most part though we see the trend continue that pitches over the heart of the plate are most successful, and that there is larger success area in terms of BIP ending in outcomes that are over .400 wOBA.
We can see from the plot below that we have a much larger area of success in terms of wOBA for 4-Seam Fastballs. This again I think has to do with the amount of fastballs that are thrown in the game still to this point. But I also think that hitters generally are going to be better again pitches that don’t break in some form or fashion.
In general we see that hitters have much more of an area to be successful in when attacking fastballs. Which again should help us to think about how hitters should attack pitches.
Fastballs with an increased area of success do allow us to swing at ‘worse’ pitches and still have success at higher rates. Fastballs with a larger window for success can show us were players can still have some success by swinging at less than optimal pitches. We can start to look at how different pitches can start to impact our understanding of ‘Good Swing Decisions’ vs. ‘Bad Swing Decisions’. Yes we can start to dig deeper but before we excavate any deeper I think that looking at general trends can get us thinking about swing decisions in a different and more complete way.
