Fly balls alone won’t turn Jose Reyes into a hitter like Aaron Judge. Judge simply hits the ball a lot harder than Reyes. In fact, Judge hits it harder than anyone. His fly balls end up over the wall about 40 percent of the time, Reyes’s only 7 percent. So players like Reyes need to find the right launch angle to match how hard they hit the ball.

Reyes, by many measures, is having an awful year. Of the 164 players who qualify for the batting title, only two have a lower batting average on balls hit in play than Reyes does. And the Cubs briefly demoted one of those two players, Kyle Schwarber, to the minor leagues to work on his hitting. So why has Reyes been so bad when he makes contact? Examining the angle at which the ball leaves his bat identifies weaknesses in his approach.

Reyes hits a relatively high percentage of his batted balls between 20 and 80 degrees, resulting in fly balls and pop ups. However, almost all of his base hits come on balls that he hits between 0 and 20 degrees.

The distribution of Reyes’s batted-ball launch angles resembles that of the Detroit slugger J.D. Martinez.

Martinez hits a similar percentage of his balls in play above and below 20 degrees. But many more of his batted balls in those ranges fall for hits. And a larger percentage of those hits are for extra-bases, because Martinez hits the ball much harder than Reyes does. Reyes’s average exit velocity puts him in the company of players like Denard Span and Alcides Escobar, while Martinez hits the ball as hard as elite sluggers like Paul Goldschmidt and Miguel Cabrera.

Oakland’s Yonder Alonso is a major success story in the popular narrative that players can benefit from raising their launch angle. He is a first-time All-Star who increased his average launch angle over the past few seasons to great effect.

As you can see from the chart, almost all of Alonso’s hits come on batted balls around the 20-degree angle. He also has a much tighter distribution of batted balls in play than Reyes, with the vast majority of them coming between 0 and 35 degrees.

If the fly ball revolution isn’t going to help players like Reyes, how can he be successful? A better model for light-hitting players might be Dee Gordon of the Marlins.

Compared to Reyes, Gordon has many fewer batted balls above 20 degrees, but more of his batted balls fall for hits. Gordon’s batting average on balls in play is .336, which is just about the league average, despite the lowest exit velocity of any qualified player. He makes up for his relative lack of punch by rarely hitting the ball in the air.

Some players with relatively high exit velocity succeed by hitting line drives instead of fly balls. For example, Colorado’s D.J. LeMahieu has about the same exit velocity as the Mets’ Michael Conforto, but hits many more line drives and ground balls than fly balls.

LeMahieu is even more aggressive about putting balls in play between 0 and 20 degrees, and has many more of them fall in for hits. LeMahieu’s batting average on those balls in play is well above the league average, and much better than Reyes’s.