RADIO
Nate Green examines hitters who saw their sweet-spot percentage (SwSp%) go up in 2019 and determines if they can continue to improve in 2020 to help their fantasy baseball value.
Sweet spot percentage (SwSp%) is not the best-known Statcast measurement. It doesn't care how hard you hit the ball, just at what trajectory. Well, it doesn't care about that either, it's just a statistic, it has no capacity to care about anything. But what it measures is the number of times a hitter's contact is between eight and 32 degrees in launch angle. Hit the ball 15 mph or 115 mph, if it's in that launch angle range, your SwSp% goes up.
Despite its limitation, the utility of this stat should be clear. The higher your sweet-spot percentage, the less often you kill worms with ground balls or send easy pop flies high into the sky. In a sense, it is a cousin of the better-known hard-hit percentage, which cares about exit velocity while ignoring launch angle. If two players have the same exit velocity, hard-hit percentage can tell you who is making the most of that exit velocity; similarly, if two players have the same launch angle, sweet-spot percentage can tell you who is making the most of that launch angle.
Today we will look at players whose sweet-spot percentages went up between 2018 and '19. Then later, those who saw their sweet-spot percentage go down.
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Cavan Biggio (2B, TOR)
Biggio isn't exactly a "riser" because he was a rookie in 2019, but did you know he had the highest sweet-spot percentage in 2019 among players with 200+ batted ball events (BBE)? At 44.2%, Craig's son beat out some guy named Mike Trout by one-tenth of a percent. Biggio's angle of 20.1 degrees ranked sixth, and it's good to see that it didn't come with a whole bunch of pop flies.
Biggio also had a decent 40.4% hard-hit rate. Unfortunately, the hard hits and sweet angles didn't come in the same plate appearance as much as you'd like, as his barrel rate was just 4.9%. His average exit velocity on balls in the air was 91.8 mph.
If Biggio can retain the same swing path and add oomph when he does connect, he should meet expectations this coming season.
Trey Mancini (1B, BAL)
No player improved more from 2018 to 2019 at finding the sweet spot than Mancini. (Among players with 200+ BBE both seasons. Thanks to Statcast and VLOOKUP for making this easy to find). Mancini jumped from 27.6% in 2018 to 36.4% in '19, a gain of nearly nine percent.
Mancini's improvement in finding the correct angle was all the more surprising because his average angle, at 7.8 degrees, was just below the cutoff for this stat. When he did go to the air, however, he blasted the ball at 95.8 mph on average. Despite the low overall angle (albeit itself higher than in 2018), Mancini improved his OPS by nearly 200 points.
Given his naturally low launch angle, one suspects the key for Mancini will be to continue getting the ball into the teens more often and the single digits less often.
Avisail Garcia (OF, MIL)
Second, after Mancini with an 8% jump, was Cody Bellinger, but not much needs to be said about him. Third was Avisail Garcia's 7.5% improvement. They were the only three players above a 6.4% gain.
Like Mancini, Garcia also keeps the ball somewhat low, with a 9.8 launch angle last season. Unlike Mancini, that was essentially unchanged from 2018 when Garcia averaged 9.6 degrees. His exit velocity and hard-hit percentage both down-ticked slightly, but he maintained a similar xwOBA on contact and his xSLG went up 38 points (thanks in part to a decrease in strikeouts). In part that was due to finding the sweet spot more often.
Like the last two risers, Garcia is on a new team this year. He will probably split time with Ryan Braun at the year's start, but the path to a full-time job is possible. Garcia will need his sweet spot percentage to hold or improve while his exit velocities to rebound and for the 36-year-old Braun to struggle.
Delino DeShields (OF, CLE)
After Garcia, the player at a 6.4% jump was DeShields. He has never hit at the major league level and will be in a fight for playing time in Cleveland, but the gain in sweet spot percentage was a start that coincided with a launch angle gain from 3.7 to 10.6 degrees. His exit velocity also improved but was still terrible at 82.9 mph.
DeShields is an example of how no one element of hitting on its own can save a player. Launch angle can't help if you're hitting the ball too softly.
The sweet spot range of eight to 32 degrees may not even be accurate for a player like DeShields, the classic light-hitting speedster. He has a worse than average chance at getting 32 degrees over someone's head and a better than average chance of between out a zero-degree grounder. This idea should work in the inverse as well, where a statuesque power hitter will want to err higher than lower. The same stat doesn't always mean the same thing for every hitter.
Yasmani Grandal (C, CHW)
Grandal's sweet spot percentage gain was more modest than others on this list, as he went from 33.2 to 37.7%. His launch angle was the same (14.0 degrees in 2018, 13.9 in '19), so as with Garcia, we have a case of a player looking the same at the top-level launch angle, but improving a level down (the SwSp%).
Grandal also hit the ball harder, so the sweet spot gains weren't the only thing driving his much improved 2019. But they helped. That's just one piece of many in the puzzle. Which segues nicely into a conclusion...
Conclusion
Launch angle gets all the attention, but don't ignore sweet spot percentage. Don't ignore any Statcast measurement, really. (To a point. As many TV broadcasts have shown us, it's possible to drill too deep. The "Tuesday night road games against a left-handed reliever" type of split.)
Its main utility is going to be in judging players with similar launch angles. You'll want to take the one who more regularly finds the correct angle, who gets to a 20-degree average by hitting the ball 10 or 30 degrees, not zero or 40.
Next in this series, we'll apply these concepts to players who fell in this statistic between 2018 and 2019.
