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Rick Lucks discusses Launch Angle and Barrels as predictive tools for fantasy owners as his series on making sabermetrics more accessible to the average fan continues.
We've previously looked at how exit velocity is only one piece of the fantasy analysis puzzle. Baseball broadcasts will commonly cite Launch Angle (LA) to complement their EV figures, but it is given in terms of degrees. LA is basically a fancy way of saying things that the fantasy community has used for years.
Am I evaluating a baseball player or trying to find the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle? Let's simplify things a bit to see how these numbers can actually benefit our analysis.
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What is a Barrel?
Here is the batted ball type produced by the various degree measurements:
| Batted Ball Type | Launch Angle |
| Ground ball | Less than 10 degrees |
| Line drive | 10-25 degrees |
| Fly ball | 25-50 degrees |
| Pop-up | More than 50 degrees |
Most batters want to live in the 10-50 degree range, as grounders rarely produce power while pop-ups rarely produce anything other than easy outs. Well-struck balls in this range of launch angles are the batted balls that fantasy managers are most interested in. A Statcast stat called "Barrels" filters out everything else, allowing us to evaluate who is hitting the most of these high-value batted balls.
A Barrel is defined as "a ball with a combination of exit velocity and launch angle that averages at least a .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage." It should be noted that the numbers above are only a minimum threshold. In this respect, the stat is like a Quality Start. It is possible to register a QS with an ERA of 4.50, but the actual average ERA of all MLB Quality Starts falls well below 4.50.
The range of EVs and LAs that combine to form Barrels is called the Barrel Zone. This means that higher EVs can compensate for less ideal LAs to produce the .500/1.500 minimum. Batted balls must have an EV of at least 98 mph and fall within the 10-50 degree LA range to be classified as Barrels. We care about fantasy production, not the intricacies of a mathematical relationship. You don't need to worry about the math.
With this in mind, Shohei Ohtani led baseball in Barrels in 2021 with 78. He was followed by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (75), Salvador Perez (74), and a tie between Aaron Judge and Fernando Tatis Jr. (70). This group passes the sniff test, as it includes the HR leader in each league and the most exciting player in the game. Still, we already knew this. What do Barrels add to the equation?
The Value of Barrels
They become more instructive when you stop looking at them as a counting stat and start examining them as a rate stat. By taking the number of Barrels and dividing by the total number of Batted Ball Events (BBE), we get a percentage that tells us how frequently a player's batted balls are Barrels.
Ohtani topped this list as well in 2021 with a 22.3% Brls/BBE figure, followed by Tatis Jr. (21.3%), Joey Gallo (18.5%), Bryce Harper (18.1%), and Tyler O'Neill (17.9%). Guys like Gallo and O'Neill didn't have the raw BBEs to crack the Barrels leaderboard, but the rate stat suggests that they could be intriguing values in the future.
This data helped identify sleepers in every year of its existence. Chris Carter had an 18.7% Brls/BBE in limited 2015 playing time. He led the NL in homers the next year with 41. Gary Sanchez ranked eighth in the league with a 15.8% Brls/BBE in 2016, foreshadowing his strong 2017. Gallo's 22.1% rate of Brls/BBE over 253 batted balls in 2017 suggested that his 41 HR were real, and he effectively repeated them the next season (40 HR). Likewise, Luke Voit's third-place finish in Brls/BBE in 2018 foreshadowed his .263/.378/.464 line with 21 HR in 510 PAs for the Yankees in 2019.
Conclusion
Viewing Barrels as a rate stat can be beneficial, but important considerations like strikeout rate still aren't captured by the metric. That said, few metrics have proven to have the predictive power that Brls/BBE has shown in recent years. There have been a few delayed reactions (O'Neill led baseball in Brls/BBE in 2018 but didn't break out until 2021), but in general, it's a stat you want to look at. Stay tuned to learn more about how advanced stats can help you become a better fantasy baseball manager.
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