Reverse Engineering .800 OPS Team
Putting Slugg in Slugging Percentage
Over the past two decades when you look at Major League Teams you find that there is a large correlation between teams having a high OPS and a teams total runs scored in a season.
When it comes to scoring runs OPS is a good indicator for overall team success when it comes to batting. So I wanted to look at what steps we can take to potentially start to reverse engineer this type of team. What metrics would we focus on to give us the best chance of reproducing this type of team? What attributes would we want to shape? I want to focus on pointing out a few metrics that we might focus on as a team and begin narrow our focus on what we value.
If we filter out teams that have had at least an .800 OPS then we get a better look at what it potentially takes when we subdivide this stat into OBP% and SLG%.
We can see that large majority of these teams fall into the .350 to .360 category but almost every team has an OBP of at least .330. This means that most of these teams hitters are reaching base at least 33% of the time, and almost exclusively they reach base more than that. So we are going to aim for at least a .330 OBP but it would make sense to set the bar even higher than this because that is on the low end when it comes to these teams.
Moving on to look at the requirements for SLG%.
We can see quickly that the majority of these teams have slugged at least .460 and almost everyone has slugged above .440 with obvious outliers in who have slugged close to .500 as a team. (Both came this past season Twins who slugged .494, and Astros who slugged .495)
So we have a tall order to fill. When breaking this down into its most essential parts we see that we have two thresholds to meet.
.460 Slugging Percentage
.350 On Base Percentage
Which bring us just over the .800 OPS mark. If we are at lower levels of competition you can slide these results in a different direction if this is too low for your team. Obviously it is important no matter what level you are at to examine past history of both your team and level of competition if possible. It is more important to set a goal and try to achieve that is too high rather than setting a goal that is easily attainable.
The main idea here is that we can take the onus off of focusing on the outcome (OPS) and break down this issue into a more systematic approach to achieving our goal.
Slugging %
Exit Speed
Really it doesn’t matter how you try to look at Exit Speed when it comes to Slugging % but you can see almost immediately that hitting the baseball harder will most likely results in a higher SLG%. Below we have just a few graphs to look at and think about what we can do to start planning out how we will go about implementing this into the team setting.
I’m not going to beat a dead horse but we all know that Exit Speed matters. Tracking a players Exit Speed both during practice, and during the game should be something that we strive up. I did this a Pocket Radar for years so it isn’t something that is out of reach for many people. Tracking and using Exit Speed data to help players understand what they are doing successfully and what they don’t do successfully is definitely something that can be done easily.
Don’t have a Trackman or the ability to track during the games using technology no worries. For two summers I tracked well hit baseballs in a really simple way using both a spray chart that I kept track of during each game, and a simple “Barrel Chart” which was obviously more subjective but it gave me important feedback when working with hitters. The chart is below that I used from several summers ago but I think something like this can still be useful for providing the coach with useful information.
For those who are lucky enough to have the ability to use in game data from some form of system then the next few tweets should give you a clearer picture on the continued added value of Exit Speed.
This tweet from DarenW is an old but a goody. Especially when you start to think of SLG% as a power statistic which it is. You get the impression that from Daren’s chart that most of the good things that hitters can do is hit the baseball hard.
Lastly I found this chart in the following Fangraphs article that focused on Exit Speed and SLG.
It is almost comical how important Exit Speed is when you start to view it through SLG. Alright as we continue to pick metrics that will bring us added value when trying to build a better slugging team.
Attack Angle
Below are some old tweets that I dug up from research from a few years ago. I know ISO isn’t exactly SLG percentage but the two metrics are both considered Power Metrics that have some cross over. It is interesting when you take Attack Angle and mash it up with some interesting stats what you get from it.
When you are looking to build hitters who can SLG tracking Attack Angle will have many benefits for hitters. As you can see from the graph below that Attack Angle does correlate with Slugging Percentage pretty well. I remade the chart from above below to give you a better idea what it looks like.
The main take away from most of these charts is that if we are going to build a team that has a high SLG% then we need to have players focus on their attack angle in a systematic way. If we direct players toward what we want from them in terms of Attack Angle then we will be in much better shape when it comes to building better hitters.
Focusing on Attack Angle makes it possible for us to focus on creating a process around training to train and maintain a positive Attack Angle. So we can see that there is something to tying in an increased Attack Angle with increasing a players ability to hit for a higher SLG%.
Lastly before moving off of Attack Angle I want to focus on the other advantage to having an increased Attack Angle. Probably the reason for the increased SLG% is the increase in Launch Angle as Attack Angle is increased. So by setting the focus on our Attack Angle we are hopefully increasing a few metrics that we really value and will add to what a player is already doing.
So it makes sense that we need to hit the baseball hard, and to start to increase our slugging percentage we need to swing upward in reference to Attack Angle. But the final metric that we will start to think about when increasing our Slugging Percentage is going to be…
Bat Speed
Again older research that I did begins to look at how we can see how Bat Speed effects Exit Velocity.
Finally I went back into the data and matched it to old Fangraphs data and came up with the following when it relates to Barrel Speed and SLG%.
So again we can see that potentially focusing on Bat Speed as our third and final metric brings us more clarity when it comes to how to (potentially)create and produce a higher SLG%.
So when we make start to examine metrics that we should be creating a process around there are obviously multiple that we can focus on. But focusing on these three to me makes a lot of sense.
Selecting metrics that we can focus on rather than being overwhelmed by all the different routes we could take, allows us as coaches to start to plan and develop ideas that will focus in our instruction on areas that we truly value. By adding clarity on what we want to produce as coaches allows us a more defined path toward success.
Obviously OPS has both OBP% and SLG% together, so I wanted to break down this post into just SLG, while covering OBP in a future post as I think potentially including both will begin to cloud the main idea here which is to select metrics you potentially value and focus on those.
