RESEARCH: Quality of Batted Balls

Introduction

It is well established that for batters, the greater the exit velocity, the better. We’ve also published work here showing that a greater mean launch angle is also good, with no apparent upper limit, and that smaller launch angle variability is also correlated with better batted ball results. Today we’ll set out to create a metric to capture the overall quality of a hitter’s batted balls.

Methodology

This study will be backwards. We are going to use what we know about batted ball parameters to create a quality of batted ball score (QBaB), and then test that score for its usefulness in both capturing past outcomes and predicting future batted ball goodness.

The dataset will be all batted balls from the Statcast era, i.e....

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