Last week, I introduced Long Fly Ball Rate and how it could be useful to evaluate the power output of hitters. To summarize, Long Fly Balls are generally a good indicator of home runs, which makes sense since balls that are hit further have a better chance of clearing the fence. But perhaps more importantly, the leaders in Long Fly Ball Rate not only have better-expected stats, such as expected slugging but also generally get better results in terms of actual slugging. Compared to hitters whose home runs are mostly the result of pulled fly balls, their expected and actual sluggings tend to be much lower than those hitters who hit more Long Fly Balls. It’s not that pulling home runs is bad, it’s just that a hitter needs to be able to consistently do that to put up strong home run totals, and maybe aren’t the best indicator of solid contact.

Here in part two of the analysis, we’re going to take a look at some hitters who, based on Long Fly Balls, perhaps overperformed their power totals from a season ago and may be in for a power decline as well as some hitters who despite having a high rate of Long Fly Balls, didn’t hit as many home runs as would be expected. Before we jump into it, here is a link to the full leaderboard for your viewing pleasure.

Alright then, let’s get to it. Starting with the overperformers.

Long Fly Ball Rate: The Overperformers

To start off in identifying overperformers, I first looked for the hitters with at least 300 plate appearances that hit at least 15 home runs in 2019 but had a Long Fly Ball Rate that was less than the 21.5% league average. That returned me a list of 55 hitters, ranging from stars such as Alex Bregman, Ozzie Albies, and Manny Machado to others such as Orlando Arcia, Freddy Galvis, and Kevin Pillar, so there’s a good mix of hitters who were extremely solid a year ago, and some lesser hitters as well. I’m calling these 55 hitters “overperformers” just because they match these criteria, here’s a link to the full group of 55, but I want to note that I don’t necessarily believe that Max Kepler and Ketel Marte are “overperformers”, and it should be noted that their Long Fly Ball Rate is only just a touch below league average. With that cleared up, we can sort these hitters by the lowest Long Fly Ball Rates, and the top 10 looks like this:

Lowest Long Fly Ball Rates minimum 15 Home Runs

It doesn’t shock me to see Brett Gardner here; as I mentioned in Part 1, Gardner set career highs in nearly every power-related category in 2019, but it was based on a combination of him pulling the ball more than ever, playing in an extremely favorable home park, and a juiced baseball, not by him making more hard contact, and that shows up in his .372 xSLG.

Among the other fantasy-relevant names, Corey Seager‘s name popping up here definitely surprised me. 2019 was of course his first season post-Tommy John surgery, so it makes sense for some of his power to take a while to return to his pre-surgery levels. He got off to a slow start in 2019, and his .332 xwOBA and .464 xSLG are not anything too flashy, but the power did seem to come back later in the year; after a down month of July, he posted a .277 isolated power mark in August and September. He also didn’t pull many of his home runs, at a 42% pulled home run rate, and he’s not hitting many more home runs than his Long Fly Ball totals would suggest that he deserves. I wouldn’t be too particularly worried about Corey right now. If the power still isn’t there this season, then I would be concerned, but I still want to draft him basically anywhere I can right now. As for the rest of this group, you aren’t drafting Whit Merrifield and Adam Eaton for their power, so I wouldn’t be too worried about them showing up here. Jesse Winker will always be a player I’m interested in, but he’s also not someone who is expected to give super big power numbers—still, it doesn’t look great to see him here with nine fewer Long Fly Balls than total home runs. Part of that I’m sure is due to his home ballpark, but unlike Gardner, he doesn’t pull his home runs, with just a 12.5% pulled home run rate in 2019. That was the lowest among hitters with 300 plate appearances, so he isn’t even taking much advantage of some potential cheapies down the line. The slugging could take a bit of a hit, down from the .473 mark from a year ago, but he should continue to hit for a good batting average and get on base plenty enough to keep himself relevant, as long as he gets the playing time. Elsewhere, the rest of these hitters aren’t hitters that I would want to draft, save for deep leagues, where the pickings would already be slim.

Another way that we can evaluate these 55 hitters is to take a look at how their Long Fly Balls compare to their overall home run total. After all, Long Fly Balls are supposed to be a good indicator of home runs, as I showed in Part 1. If we take each hitter’s total home runs and subtract them from their Long Fly Balls, we should, theoretically, come up with a list of hitters who benefitted most in their home run count despite not hitting the amount of Long Fly Balls that their home run totals suggest they should have. Doing this exercise gives us quite a few more interesting names. Here are the top-ten biggest differences in total home runs to Long Fly Balls:

Total HR – Long Fly Balls

Again we see Gardner and Winker, but there are a lot more interesting names here than in the previous table. Kepler and Marte show up here as well, but I’m not sure they necessarily belong. Remember my disclaimer earlier in the section. Yes, they are technically considered “overperformers” just based on the criteria of this particular query. Their Long Fly Ball rates are just a touch below the 21.5% league average, but they also pull a lot of home runs, too. Kepler pulled 81% of his home runs last season, and Marte did so at a 78% clip. While those are both high numbers, Kepler is already a pretty extreme pull hitter, so he should continue to maintain that profile in the near future. Marte isn’t as much of an extreme pull hitter, but his overall power numbers are supported by xSLG at a .521 mark, which is down from his .592 actual one but his breakout season was more due to improvements elsewhere, and the extra home runs came along with it. Even if his home run totals drop off, he should still be an extremely solid hitter and not one that I would have much concern over.

The more intriguing names to me from this group are Bregman and Machado. Let’s start with Machado. His first season in San Diego is likely considered a disappointment, although he still hit 32 home runs. Our fears of how he would perform at home in Petco Park were realized with a dreadful .219/.297/.406 slash line at his home park, but he was more Machado-like on the road. The obvious answer is that his home park just really impacted his power output. It’s the most likely answer, but is that actually the case? It doesn’t appear so, not by Long Fly Balls anyway:

Manny Machado – Long Fly Balls Splits

In identical games played at home and on the road, and nearly identical plate appearances, Machado had the same exact number of Long Fly Balls with again, nearly identical fly ball totals, which leads to essentially the same Long Fly Ball rate. It doesn’t appear that his home struggles were caused entirely by the ballpark, at least not by this metric. It might require a deeper analysis, but I believe that the likely reason for Machado’s down 2019 season has more to do with him making less quality contact, with him setting new-or-close-to career lows in nearly every Statcast hitting metric. I hate to even say this and put all of the focus onto the juiced ball, but it certainly is possible that the juiced ball is the reason why Machado reached 30 home runs in 2019 in the first place. I would want to take a deeper look at this before I come to that conclusion, but by Long Fly Balls, it appears that Machado belongs in the overperformers group, at least his 2019 does. It’ll be interesting to see what he does in his second season in San Diego.

Next up: Bregman. If you recall in Part 1, I discussed Bregman for a bit before getting into the full details of Long Fly Balls. Bregman has sort of been the inspiration for my “obsession” with Long Fly Balls and slugging during this offseason because his Statcast metrics don’t exactly paint him to be the type of hitter that he was in 2019, so I find it very interesting to see him tied for second in the biggest difference between total home runs and Long Fly Balls. Only Gardner had a bigger difference in xSLG compared to actual slugging than Bregman did with the .121 difference in his .592 actual to his .471 expected. Not that .471 is bad, but .592 is a mark that was tied for the sixth-best in baseball in 2019, and .471 is more in line with what Brian Goodwin did last season. Still good, but no longer looks as great. For a refresher, here is the exact same table from Part 1, which shows a few of Bregman’s Statcast metrics:

Alex Bregman – Selected Statcast Metrics (min. 300 PA)

Again, these don’t exactly look the numbers of a hitter who finished as the runner-up for American League Most Valuable Player. So, how does a hitter put up numbers as Bregman did in 2019, despite regular Statcast metrics? Mostly a combination of pulling the ball, home ballpark, and a juiced baseball that benefits all hitters (I’ll leave you to speculate over buzzers and other contraptions). Not that this is a bad thing, because it’s not. If a hitter can repeat this, they should continue to shatter their Statcast metrics (it’s probably not a coincidence that Yuli Gurriel is also in this group). Let’s quantify this a little. We know that Bregman’s home park is a great one for hitters, which has been shown from the outstanding research done by fellow Pitcher List-er Dan Richards in his own two-part look into park factors, that I definitely recommend checking out. Dan’s work shows that Minute Maid Park is the second-most friendly park to right-handed hitters (which both Bregman and Gurriel are) so it makes sense for Astros righties to do better from pulling the ball to left field, which Bregman did plenty of in 2019:

Right Handed Pulled Fly Ball % Leaders

Looking just at the right-handed pulled fly ball leaders, Bregman clocks in at the third-highest rate (Gurriel is 14th), so Bregman clearly knows that he should be taking advantage of Minute Maid Park’s dimensions and pull the ball. Looking at not just right-handed hitters but now all hitters, Bregman is still towards the top, but dropping now to seventh in terms of pulled fly-ball rate. In terms of results on pulled fly balls, Bregman slugged 2.123 on those balls, but had an expected mark of just .943, the ninth-largest difference among all hitters. This shows me that Bregman isn’t exactly making the best contact, but is able to take advantage of an extreme offensive environment to put up elite results. If Bregman were to all of a sudden stop pulling fly balls at an extremely high rate, I would expect his power output to drop. I don’t foresee this happening anytime soon, and Bregman should still be a top producer, but it is something to keep in mind and this should explain the big differences between his actual results and his Statcast metrics. The same goes for Gurriel, who if you remember had just a 109 wRC+ in the first half of 2019 before exploding in the second half, and is ten years older than Bregman, and potentially more likely to see his results turn negative quicker than Bregman.

This is just looking at total home runs compared to Long Fly Balls, but if we factored in Pulled Home Run rate into the equation, we would also get some more interesting names. For instance, Jose Ramirez and Jeff McNeil both pulled 91% of their home runs and had below-average Long Fly Ball rates, so a decline in home runs could be in store in they don’t pull as many home runs in the future. Ditto for Didi Gregorious and Eduardo Escobar—two hitters who are on the wrong side of 30, and could see their performances decline. Generally, the hitters with the highest Pulled Home Run rates and low Long Fly Ball rates aren’t hitters with a ton of home runs, with totals in the low to mid-20s range. This makes sense as they aren’t hitting enough Long Fly Balls, which generate a good number of home runs, and they also generally don’t have an attractive average fly ball distance, which suppresses their home run per fly ball rate. Overall though, it looks like hitters who overperformed their Long Fly Ball rates need to be able to consistently pull fly balls or play in an environment that is more hitter-friendly to continue to put up strong home run totals.

Finally, we’re off to the underperformers.

Long Fly Ball Rate: The Underperformers

Generally speaking, there aren’t many names in this group that are lesser-known. I figure that there are two ways of looking for underperformers by Long Fly Ball rate. The first is to look at hitters who hit more Long Fly Balls than total home runs, not unlike what we did to find the Bregman group of overperformers, and the second is to factor in home run per fly ball rate. I find the results using the second method a bit more interesting, as hitters in that group all have above-average Long Fly Ball rates, but the home runs have yet to show up as much as expected, which makes them more exciting to me in terms of identifying potential breakout candidates. Let’s first start by looking at some hitters who hit more Long Fly Balls than total home runs, and who are already pretty decent at hitting home runs. Taking a look at the top-ten we get the following hitters: