Understand GB/FB and HR/FB

In this piece, we’ll take a look at the baselines you need to know about when it comes to ground balls and fly balls. We will then explore the fly ball as it pertains to the big fly, i.e. the homer.

*Note: In All About the Home Run I broke down the big fly talking about historical tendencies as well as performances of sluggers in 2016. I also focused on which players hit the ball hardest, farthest or shortest in their home run exploits last season.

THE GROUND BALL

A ground ball is hit on about 45 percent of batted balls.

THE FLY BALL

A fly ball is hit on about 35 percent of batted balls.

GROUND BALL TO FLY BALL RATIO

1.29 was the league average in 2016.

HOME RUN TO FLY BALL RATIO

The HR/F ratio league average last season was 11 percent.

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GENERAL OVERVIEW

Point #1 – Players establish their own baselines in all the measures. Some batters always hit 55 percent of their batted balls into the ground while some players are at 42 percent. The same is true for fly balls as well. The league average is there as a guide, but you have to factor in the type of hitter the player is before rendering an ultimate decision as to what the number means.

Point #2 – With a large enough sample size most players will return to their established levels. The sample size needed isn’t a week, a month, or perhaps even half a season. That’s the main concern with making sweeping decisions on players in-season.

Points #3 – A player can shift his game a bit though conscious decisions as well as through experience (an example: It is widely understood that many players learn how to lift the ball as their careers go on meaning as they get older they hit the ball more frequently in the air). Note that I used the term “a bit.” Let’s take an example with the fly ball. If a player is a 35 percent fly ball man and all of a sudden he’s at 47 percent we have a decision to make. (A) Has he changed his approach? (B) Is he hurt causing his swing path to change? (C) Has the player lost some bat speed, due to age or injury or because of bad mechanics, which is causing him to drag the bat through the zone leading to more lazy fly balls? If there is a drastic shift with a player you should dig deeper to see if you can explain the shift.

Point #4 – While line drives turn into hits more than any type of batted ball it should also be mentioned that ground balls become hits more frequently than fly balls. In most cases that means guys that hit the ball on the ground are more likely to be solid batting average contributors then guys who hit a lot of balls skyward. Generally speaking of course. Flipside, the men that drive the ball into the air more effectively obviously hit more homers and often have larger RBI totals. ‘Generally.’ Here’s the break down of the frequency of hits on batted balls.

Line drives are hits about 70 percent of the time.
Ground balls are hits about 25 percent of the time.
Fly ball are hits about 20 percent of the time.

Let’s look at each of the three categories in a bit more depth.

• Note: We are using 502 plate appearances and the baseline for the discussion since that is the number of plate appearances needed to qualify for the batting title.

GROUND BALLS

Last season there were six men with a ground ball rate above 55 percent. Even with 500 at-bats or more it will be very difficult for this type of hitter to reach 20 homers. They just don’t hit the ball in the air enough.

61.0 – Howie Kendrick

58.9 – Eric Hosmer

58.1 – Yunel Escobar

56.5 – Christian Yelich

55.7- Ryan Braun

55.6 – Jonathan Villar

I know what I wrote above, and I know there are plenty of 20 homer guys on this list which makes my previous statement seem incorrect. It’s really not. Last year was actually an extreme outlier.

Braun led the group with 30 homers. Braun will need to hit way more balls in the air this season or his homer total is going way down.

Hosmer exceeded his HR/FB ratio last season by leaps and bounds. His 21.4 percent mark last season was his first over 15.1 percent. We’ll get to that below.

Yelich will also need a fly ball increase if he hopes to replicate, or grow his homer total of 21.

Pretty sure that Villar isn’t going to replicate his 19.6 HR/FB ratio either.

Ideally this approach, with such a high level of ground balls, is ideal for a speedy player, not someone hoping to hit the ball deep.

Here’s a listing of guys that simply do not enjoy hitting the ball in the air. These guys are dependent upon high HR/FB ratios for homers.

19.6 – Howie Kendrick

20.0 – Christian Yelich

20.7 – Cesar Hernandez

20.8 – Yunel Escobar

21.3 – Joe Mauer

22.8 – DJ LeMahieu

24.1 – Jonathan Villar

24.7 – Eric Hosmer, Denard Span

25.1 – Ryan Braun

25.3 – Wilson Ramos

25.8 – Adam Eaton

FLY BALLS

Here is a list of men who were extreme fly ball hitters. These guys better hit homers because their batting average is most likely to be hard to stomach.

48.7 – Todd Frazier, Chris Carter

47.7 – Brian Dozier

47.1 – Salvador Perez

46.8 – Evan Longoria

46.7 – Nolan Arenado, Adam Duvall

46.5 – Stephen Vogt

46.0 – Brandon Belt

45.8 – Kris Bryant

45.1 – David Ortiz, Mike Napoli

45.0 – Corey Dickerson

Some elite level talent that produced in batting average is here – Arenado, Bryant, Ortiz – but the majority of these guys were struggling to even be league average in batting average. Of the 13 men seven failed to reach the league average in batting average (.255).

ROUND BALL TO FLY BALL RATIO

A quick little diagram to explain things.

Some notable numbers...

3.10 – Howie Kendrick went full on rug burner mode last year.

2.82 – Christian Yelich is never going to grow beyond last year’s homer total (21) unless he lifts the ball more.

2.22 – Ryan Braun is a player to watch closely. Note that he’s posted his highest GB/FB ratio the last two seasons (1.60 in 2015). For his career his mark is 1.28. Last year he added an entire point. What’s up with that? Injury? Mechanics just off? Hard to think that after a decade of excellence driving the ball that he would just become Ben Revere. Makes no sense.

2.15 – Wilson Ramos had a mere 20.4 line drive rate, league average stuff, with a fifth straight year at 54 percent or higher in the ground ball column.

2.06 – Ian Desmond moves to Colorado which should cure a lot of ails, but a 53 percent ground ball rate and a .350 BABIP suggest that his batting average could fall, even in Coors.

1.91 – Jean Segura hit 20 homers despite a 53 percent ground ball rate. That will be a difficult trick to pull off again.

 1.83 – Carlos Correa hit more grounders than he did as a rookie (1.67 mark in 2015). He needs to lift more to become the power hitter his swing suggests he could be.

1.63 – Buster Posey’s mark was a five-year high after sitting at 1.24 and 1.30 in 2014 and 2015.

1.61 – Paul Goldschmidt’s mark was a career worst. It was well above the 1.29 mark he owns for his career and was his first effort in six years above 1.37.

1.52 – Yasmany Tomas will not hit 31 homers against with that mark (he feasted off a 25.0 HF/FB ratio).

1.37 – Jose Abreu had a mark that was a three year low after seasons of 1.46 and 1.47.

1.30 – Xander Bogaerts shifted things last season. After posting a mark of 2.05 in 2015 he started to lift the ball more last season (his fly ball rate went up nine percentage points to 34.9 in ‘16).

1.05 – Gregory Polanco has morphed his game as his GB/FB has gone from 1.58 to 1.30 to last year’s 1.05 mark. He’s cut more than 10 percentage points off his ground ball rate.

0.96 – Jonathan Lucroy posted the lowest mark of his career last season, and it was in direct opposition to the career-high mark of 1.52 he posted in 2015. He hit more homers than ever before in ’16.

0.91 – Charlie Blackmon has seen the number drop season after season. Check it out: 1.61, 1.33, 1.12, 1.014 and 0.91 last season.

0.88 – Manny Machado nearly halved the mark of 1.58 he posted in 2014. He’s hitting more balls in the air than ever before, and his 37.3 percent ground ball rate last season was his first under 43.7 percent.

HOME RUN TO FLY BALL RATIO

Here is what has happened to the league average for homer to fly ball ratio the last three years.

2014: 9.5 percent

2015:11.4 percent

2016: 12.8 percent

Yes, the homer rate really went up last season. In fact, it was the highest the rate has been in the 21^st century.

A key point with this measure is that players set their own baseline. Guys that are eight percent year after year don’t suddenly turn into 17 percent guys just like a guy who is at 17 percent year after year shouldn’t dip to eight percent. Both of those things do happen though, guys surging and falling, but the truth is that the number almost always regresses to their personal norm, especially in the case of extreme stuff. Here are some 2016 numbers.

No one posted a mark of 30 percent last year.

When a player owns a mark of 25.0 percent there is a good chance of regression in the coming campaign. Here are the five men who posted a mark of 25.0 percent in 2016.

28.8 – Ryan Braun

26.6 – Khris Davis

26.2 – Nelson Cruz

25.0 – Chris Davis and Yasmany Tomas

Here are the career HR/FB ratio for those five men.

19.1 – Ryan Braun

22.3 – Khris Davis

19.6 – Nelson Cruz

24.0 – Chris Davis

20.7 – Yasmany Tomas

It is more likely than not that all will see a regression in their HR/FB ratio in 2017.

Some other numbers that stand out from last season.

Christian Yelich (23.6) nearly posted a mark that was higher than his combined efforts in 2014 (11.5) and 2015 (12.5).

Jake Lamb went from 7.2 to 21.2 percent. See more on that in his Player Profile.

Brad Miller posted marks of 9.9, 9.6 and 10.3 percent his first three seasons. Last year the mark exploded to 20.4 percent.

Jonathan Villar was a league average guy for three years. Last season the mark doubled to 19.6 percent. Big boy number. He’s not holding on to it.

Robinson Cano posted a 19.3 HR/FB mark last season, a four-year high and only the second time in his career the mark was over 17.5 percent.

Kris Bryant added three percent from his rookie season pushing his mark to 18.8 percent. He was one homer short of 40.

Brian Dozier has seen the mark grow every year: 6.3, 9.9, 11.3, 13.1 and 18.4 percent.

Rougned Odor went from 8.0 to 11.8 to 17.0 percent last season. Fair to question if he will hit 30 homers again.

Gregory Polanco practically tripled his mark going from 5.5 percent in 2015 to 14.4 percent last season. Teammate Starling Marte saw his mark fall from a career best 18.6 to 8.4 percent last year. Last season was his first effort under 12.2 percent. The number should rebound.

A rolling three-year average, meaning looking back at 2014-16, is a pretty good judge of what to expect in most cases in 2016.

The last three years three men have a mark of 24 percent: Giancarlo Stanton (26.1), Chris Davis (26.0) and Nelson Cruz (25.1).

Pedro Alvarez is fourth at 23.8 followed by Chris Carter. The only other sluggers over 21 percent the past three years are Khris Davis (21.7) and George Springer (21.4).

Ryan Howard can’t really hit, but he can still power the ball when he runs into it. His 19.8 percent HR/FB rate is better than J.D. Martinez (19.6) and Bryce Harper (19.5).

Yasmani Grandal is at 18.9 percent. That’s a tenth better than Mark Trumbo and two tenths better than Josh Donaldson.

Justin Upton owns a 17.1 percent mark. That’s a tenth better then Hanley Ramirez, who is a tenth better than Todd Frazier (16.9) who is two tenths better than Manny Machado (16.7).

Troy Tulowitzki has a 15.5 percent mark. He can still power the ball given a mark that is two tenths better than Yoenis Cespedes.